Manufacturing Case Study

Six months to a 775% increase in traffic!

Client

Transportation Equipment Manufacturer

Plan

When I started working with this client they had a custom built website, a grouping of product pages with little or no description, and a few random category pages. They were successful in their market, but not doing as well online for B2C searches.

We needed to audit their website code to be sure Google was parsing it correctly, organize their products in a user friendly and logical way, build industry relevant links, and start producing relevant content.

Execution

Their website was custom built in Ruby on Rails and lacked some meta data code and schema markup that are helpful for getting Google to parse and categorize a web page correctly. I worked directly with their developer to implement these changes to the code and understand their custom content management system. From their I was able to make the necessary changes to page elements, optimizing title tags, meta descriptions, and schema markup – all referred to as Technical SEO.

Once the technical SEO changes were made, I started digging into product specific changes. Many products had little or no product description on the page which is a major issue if you want a search engine to understand what a product is about and present it to a potential customer in the search results. I worked closely with the team to get accurate product details, descriptions, and product photos added to each page, drawing out the major differentiators and positioning the product description to not only help SEO, but also to help sell the product.

While working through the products and categories one by one, I also started work on the blog / news section of their website. Historically this part of their site contained short snippets of news relevant to their industry. Important information, but not something that would come up in Google’s search results. I started creating content that targeted potential customers of their products and the issues they would have prior to searching for the products. This allowed them to capture traffic before they knew the solution to their problem, so they were already on the site when they realized it. This allowed them to position themselves for an easy sale.

In addition to capturing upstream traffic, this reinforces the topical authority of the website, showing Google that you are an expert resource for the product and boosting your main product page in the search results. This is a large part of modern SEO.

Many industry specific backlinks were acquired to the site through out this time as well. These were often directed toward the newly created blog content that was created to serve as a “link magnet” by providing interesting tips or facts about the industry. A strategy that positioned them as leader to customers and peers.

Results

All of these changes were made in about 6 months time resulting in a 775% increase in traffic.

Update: Since my time with this client they have continued with my suggested content creation road map and are now at a traffic increase of 2,283%!