Content Marketing Case Study: 325% More Traffic (450% More Revenue)

In June 2016, we started an SEO-focused content marketing campaign with our client in the education industry. In this seasonal niche, we helped grow their year-on-year organic traffic by 325% after 6 months, and increase their year-on-year revenue by 450%. This content marketing case study outlines the approach we took to achieve the results.

Our client’s website was fairly new, and the aim of our strategy was to improve its organic search performance. We agreed that publishing evergreen content that would continue to increase the site’s organic traffic long after it had been published, was the best approach.

Our aim was to position the company as an industry leader by providing genuinely useful information that would gain people’s trust, so that they would buy our client’s information products.

Some Background Information

Our client’s business operates in a very seasonal niche, which means that month-on-month reporting doesn’t provide an accurate picture of the site’s organic traffic growth. In order for a fair comparison to be made, we looked at year-on-year organic growth, six months after we started working on the site. The following graph shows the seasonal nature of the industry:

As you can see from the chart, our principal search term peaks four times per year, in January, November, April, and September. Out with these months, search traffic is relatively low.

Stage 1: The Content SEO Audit

Before we started working on the site, we carried out an SEO content audit using Screaming Frog and SEMRush. We presented our findings and created a list of recommendations for improving the site’s technical performance. We looked at the site’s on-page SEO, including its architecture, structure and internal linking. We also analysed the site’s existing content and identified opportunities for improvement.

Stage 2: The Content Strategy

Once we’d identified opportunities to improve the website’s organic traffic, we started analysing our client’s target market. This involved looking at the industry as a whole and our client’s main competitors. We used this information to identify content opportunities that would help strengthen their position in the marketplace. We carried out thorough keyword research using our five-step approach and created a content calendar that targetted our primary keywords.

Stage 3: Content Planning

With our strategy in place, we developed content templates for each of the types of posts that we planned to publish on the site. These templates helped ensure that each post was written using on-page SEO best practices, and that they were consistent in their style and tone of voice.

Stage 4: Content Writing and Management

Once we had our strategy, calendar, and templates in place, we wrote and published the content on the site at an initial rate of 2 posts per week. As the site started to gain more visitors, we increased our content production to 4 posts per week. We managed the client’s CMS and ensured that every post was optimized for maximum exposure in Google.

Because we were publishing very specific, niche content, all of our posts ranked on the first page of Google a few days after publication.

We also managed our client’s social media accounts and actively promoted each piece of new content that we published on the website. Each month, we reported on our social media efforts and used this data to adjust our posting times and the type of content that we shared, depending on whether our keywords were ‘in season’ or not. The improvements we saw in the website’s social media traffic were considerable, which indirectly, helped improve our organic traffic as well.

The Results

Although we were tracking the website’s organic performance monthly and saw some significant traffic spikes, we have to acknowledge that these were due to our search terms being in season. In order to provide a fair comparison of our efforts, we also tracked our year-on-year improvements. Over six months, we increased the website’s organic traffic by 325.31%, which equated to a 450% increase in our client’s revenue.

June 2016 – 474 organic visitors (Before)