Search Marketing Performance Case study for a food safety testing lab based in Southern Africa.
Period of Contract: 4 years.
Consulting Services: SEO and Paid Search
Started with an unoptimised site with no hierarchal structure or conversion tracking. Created a better site structure. Created new focussed content pages and built a new Google Ads account.
Industry: The company provides food safety testing, certification and training in Southern Africa, with various laboratories across the region.
The industry is fairly competitive, but also conservative in it’s marketing approach. This brand was the first to gain more traction through digital marketing and set the standard for others to follow.
GOAL: Create a presence and demand for a new brand (brand overhaul of existing larger company sub-division), grow interest in local laboratories across Southern Africa utilising local Search.
KEY CHALLENGE:
The key challenge was to onboard and convince C-suite execs to the power of digital marketing. The company had only focussed on more traditional marketing methods prior to our consulting. There was also a “parent-website” that we needed to split into it’s 4 service areas. We got involved shortly after they had built the new entities.
Through our consulting we identified both technical and on-page areas for improvement.
We optimised the site for their four primary service areas: Testing, Inspection, Certification and Training. The latter had to be strategically planned so as not to overlap and cannibalise other group sites that offer similar (training) services.
Another big challenge was that the client didn’t want us to edit the existing content too much, so we had to find other ways to optimise core pages through supporting copy.
OUR FOCUS:
- Website Structure. We streamlined the website structure for better conversion flow as well as optimization. This included UX changes to pages, menus and CTAs.
- SEO Foundation & Retainer. Correct allocation for their four target audiences was key without cannibalising our own, or larger Group pages. SEO was a split between solid technical foundations, correct key-phrase allocation and on-page content.This was all supported through a content strategy created against our highest yielding key-phrases. (Target phrases that brought in both traffic and leads)
- Paid Search Campaign. We created a Paid Search (Google Ads) campaign that could uplift key-phrases while in the early SEO stages, and later on adjusted to high-converting, exact-match phrases . The balance greatly assisted in raising traffic and awareness, but also directly increasing our ROI through qualified leads. We consistently outperformed industry benchmarks.
- Display Media Campaign. We occasionally supported their larger channel mix through targeted Display Media campaigns and Performance Max campaigns.
Data period: 12 Months
SUCCESS METRICS (SEO)
- Overall traffic increased by +233% (384% by *year 4 )
- Organic traffic increased by +195% YoY ( 311% by year 4 )
- Goal Conversions (leads) improved +147% YoY ( 170% by year 4 )
- Bounce rate remained consistent (1%)
- Keyword ranking went from zero first page non-brand ranking to achieving 10x #1 positions on Google for non-brand terms, and 28 Page 1 non-brand rankings of 72 tracked keywords.
SUCCESS METRICS (Paid Search: Google Ads)
- Clicks improved by +214% YoY ( 160% by *year 4 )
- Leads improved by +222% YoY ( 382% by year 4 )
- CR remained consistent YoY (2.4%) ( 235% by year 4 )
- CPA dropped -30% YoY (-53% by year 4 )
- *The budget remained consistent during this time. Results purely from account & LP optimisation.
*Year 4 was only 3 months
(The chart below shows the aggregate performance across the 4 full years. Figures removed for privacy.)
