Case Studies
Case Study: Executive Professionals
When James visited an inner-city office in late 2015, based on a referral from a sub-contractor, he had no idea the long-term, fruitful partnership which would ensue.
Unfortunately, the family-owned executive professional company had just had one of the worst SEO experiences James had ever heard of. Having taken 6 months of fees, their previous provider had done nothing (absolutely nothing, not a thing). To his credit, he owned up to it, offering a website build to compensate. Unfortunately, that too fell over and the company was left with extremely poor SEO rankings and a completely dysfunctional website, having spent considerable amounts of money.
That week, they signed up with TheOnlineCo.’s Google Ads and SEO services, with the campaign kicking off on Boxing Day 2015. Leads began flowing that very first week. It quickly proved to be quite an expensive campaign though, as the company found themselves competing with multi-million-dollar corporations with exponentially larger marketing budgets.
The team got to work, finding ways to maximise the client’s marketing clout, while minimising media spend. Up against nationally recognised competitors paying $20 – $30 000/month on Facebook Ads alone as well as a $7M one-off brand sponsorship deal, our client’s humble monthly marketing budget of $200K/year needed to be well-managed, so it could stand up against the big boys.
As well as undergoing competitor research, we took a good hard look at our client’s points of difference and realised there were some strong, key points which needed to be marketed. We outlined the three target markets our client was speaking to and wrote three persona stories, enabling us to create perfectly personalised campaigns for each of these target markets. We reviewed their branding, gave website feedback and helped our client nail down their voice and clarity statement. With no stone left unturned, we were ready to start marketing our clients so they could stand out from the noise of a heavily marketed industry, with big names and big brands shouting loudest.
SEO + Website Development
Because of everything that had happened on the website, the website and SEO setup were a mess. A lot of spam was coming through, in the guise of being a lead. We blocked several countries from being able to access the site. This greatly reduced the amount of email spam they were receiving from form fills on the site. We also added a reCAPTCHA to stop most bots being able to fill in forms.
There was a lot of old and stale content on the website. The team began researching which keywords would work best and then optimising the entire website’s content for those keywords. Old content was cleaned up, rewritten and optimised, while local pages were built, targeting the different geographic areas they work in.
By restructuring the website and creating multiple quality backlinks, authority continued to increase.
Eventually the team rebuilt the entire website, ensuring the best possible setup for SEO purposes as well as making it a great, easy to use experience for site visitors.
Having said all this, the data paints the picture for us!
Clicks rose from 107 for the same 3-month period in 2021 to 330 in 2022 for a specific keyword. The CTR (Click Through Rate) rose from 3.8% to 12%.
Another related term rose from 14 clicks last year to 70 this year, CTR rose from 1.2% to 7.7% and average position rose from 9 to 5.6.
A different keyword saw clicks rise from 4 in 2021 to 31 in 2022. Impressions increased from 1730 to 3259.
This scenario is repeated throughout their top 50 ranking/converting keywords.
As with any campaign, the traffic goes up and down but now that everything has been cleaned up, traffic is consistently increasing, and they are at the top of the heap in search results for specific keywords.
From 2021 to 2022
for a specific keyword
208%
increase in clicks over 3 months
107 to 330
8.2%
increase in click through rate
3.8% to 12%
Chat Bot
In a world where we want instant answers, chat bots are a fantastic way to provide personalised, immediate information to leads. We built a chat bot for these clients, which ran on Facebook. The questions were personalised and chatty, gathering information on what it is that the lead was needing.
The chatbot received a lot of responses and the team built it in such a way that it also filtered out a large number of leads who may have landed in the wrong spot. Due to the nature of our client’s work, the chatbot had to be built strategically, to ensure people looking for pro bono services weren’t disguised as leads. The campaign saw fantastic results right out of the gates, but due to a Facebook algorithm change, they dropped a little. During the 3-month chatbot campaign, it brought in 213 conversations ($21.65 per conversation) which turned into 22 leads, which cost $209.57 each.
A converted lead is worth $150,000 to our client, so the figures really do add up!
And just to compare, while Facebook leads were costing $60-$80, the chatbot was bringing in leads for as little as $8-$10.
Google Ads
Back in December 2015, the Google Ads campaign kicked off with a conversion cost of $764.12 and a conversion rate of 6.67%. Google Ads faced the same issue as the Chat Bot – how to decrease the spend, while increasing marketing impact? After two years of continued optimisations, in 2017 we had the cost/conversion down to $106 and conversion rate was 24.40%.
To add context, we’ve looked at the costs/conversions results for this campaign from the past month and compared them to the same 30-day period 5 years ago.
| 2017 | 2022 | |
|---|---|---|
| Avg. cost per click | $96.48 | $17.79 |
| Avg. cost per conversion | $428.1 | $111.89 |
| Avg. click through rate | 2.4% | 6.57% |
If we look at the conversion rate of the more generic campaigns that have been running for years, the conversion rate has increased from 22.55% to 23.13%, while the Regional NSW campaign has gone from 22.55% to 27.78%.
Google Ads
Click Through Rate
4.17%
increase in clicks over 3 months
2017 to 2022
The long-term nature of this partnership has enabled us to build something very solid. This client’s marketing now stands up with the big dogs, refusing to be drowned out by their huge budgets and big-name brand deals. Digital marketing changes all the time and we’ve been able to work with this client through the years, optimising their campaign and making changes to ensure they are always coming out on top. Our team knows this campaign through and through, which means there are no nasty surprises and it’s a genuine thrill for us whenever this client has a win. When our clients hang around for the long haul, we are able to give them our absolute best work.
