SEO Success Stories

This article was written by Megan Dalke-Mitchel.

SEO is a constant cycle of learning and relearning, and you need the right resources to learn from. I’ve been in digital marketing, specifically SEO, for over four years now.   

The SERP landscape has changed drastically over the years and become more and more competitive. With the SERP landscape evolving and competition rising, the more strategic and targeted your SEO strategy needs to be.   

What better way to hone your SEO strategy than to learn from SEO success stories out in the field? I have two exemplary stories from our team at NP Digital that showcase the potential of search engine optimization.  

In the financial niche, we witnessed a remarkable 561% YoY increase in organic search traffic within just nine months. 

Meanwhile, in the e-commerce industry, discover how technical SEO and content synergy propelled a client to new heights. 

The thing is, every client is different with different goals. So it’s important not only to show the results we got but how the NP Digital team figured out what we needed out of each campaign. On top of that, I have some great insights on how to start building your own SEO success stories.   

So, what does this all look like? Let’s jump into some successful SEO campaigns from NP Digital. 

SEO Success in the Financial Niche

With this in mind, let’s shine a light on the absolutely stellar work of the SEOs and digital marketing mavens here at NP Digital.  

This NP Digital client is in the financial niche – one of the most competitive areas online – which demonstrates how powerful SEO can be.  

Our SEO team curated an SEO campaign for them, and just nine months into the partnership, organic search traffic increased by 561% year-over-year (YoY), 161% greater than the established goal. 

Client Needs

To find such success, the NP Digital team wanted to help the client show their target audience that their financial goals were attainable. The team made this possible by providing the knowledge and tools users need to choose the best financial product.

The client provides various products—everything from student loan refinance loans to small and medium business (SMB) loans.

The General SEO Strategy

The SEO team pinpointed new content they could leverage while refreshing older content to be more competitive in the SERPs.  

Their core strategy started with:  

• In depth-research for gaps in content.  
• A digital PR outreach campaign  
• Implementing SEO best practices.  

These efforts helped them better understand user intent and competitiveness. They were also able to report any holes affecting content and organic search visibility.  

Google paid search data played the role of determining the content production roadmap and influenced keyword selection.  

Since the partner was lacking in the organic visibility department, paid search was the guiding light. NPD credits the increase in new visitors to the site to their paid search strategy.  

The team streamlined its strategy to increase relevance for high-ranking, uber-competitive transactional keywords. They did this by building greater content depth via less competitive informational queries.  

The SEO and content strategists for this client started by creating six content hubs, yielding over 3 million supporting keyword derivatives and search demand estimates of more than 92 million per month tied to them.  

Each week, the NP Digital team helped their client launch new content clusters for each hub totaling 800-plus pieces of content. Included in these hubs were in-depth guides, tools like calculators, and answers to users’ frequently asked questions.  

This expanded the keyword universe and developed the critical E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) indicators that score big points with Google and potential customers. E-E-A-T is part of Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines and an important component of its algorithm.  

Looking at the digital PR efforts, NPD capitalized on existing contacts with financial and investment journalists and influencers. Current and ongoing news developments about COVID’s impact on small businesses and several Federal Reserve interest rate hikes offered a gateway for digital PR and content placement opportunities.  

Increasing search demand for loans that aid small businesses helped the team focus on content creation. They distributed over 500 pieces of high-quality material to national media outlets. All described the client’s unique approach to lending, features, and value proposition. 

Successful SEO in Action: The Wins

Now, all this is just talk at this point. I am sure you are asking, “Megan, where is the data!”

Here it is.

Rankings: The team took their client from having almost no non-branded search visibility to becoming a top performer in their niche, reaching:

1. A 1,164% increase in position 1-3 rankings on Google

2. A 516% increase in organic search traffic

3. A 1,012% increase YoY for first-page Google rankings

4. A 469% increase in striking distance keywords (positions 11-50)

Conversions: The client’s primary conversion metric is the number of completed select offers.

1. A 260% increase YoY

New Users: The team analyzed new users coming specifically from the organic channel.

1. A 340% increase YoY

Referring domains: The domains have an average authority score of over 40.

1. A 218% increase YoY of referring domains pointing to the parent brand

2. A 37% increase YoY for domain authority

Again, nine months into the partnership and organic search traffic increased by 561% YoY, 161% greater than the established goal. By the one-year mark of the partnership, the client’s increase in organic search share surpassed all but one of the ten tracked competitors.

Even in such a competitive SEO realm, this strategy won—and won big for this client.

SEO Success in the E-commerce Industry

Let’s move on to our client in the e-commerce industry. I have been working with them going on two years now, and we are starting to really see organic success. As you know, SEO is the long game – and we were playing to win.  

This account is an international SEO account as we focus heavily on three regions: the United States, United Kingdom, and France.  

The success you will see here will have insights from a global perspective, or just callouts of SEO success for a specific region. 

The Strategy: Technical SEO & Content Synergy 

Our strategy for this account required us to revive the health of the site from a technical SEO perspective, retarget keywords to prevent cannibalization, improve product category pages with bottom-of-page copy, and implement general SEO best practices.

Technical SEO Success

So, let’s start with the overall technical site health.

This client has thousands and thousands of products, with an equally large number of images. And we know too many images can slow down your site, increasing bounce rates and potentially hurting the bottom line.

Sure enough! Their site was one of the slowest when compared to their competitors.

We worked on technical SEO fundamentals such as compressing image files, lazy loading off-screen images, removing unused code, and other technical SEO best practices to help the site load quicker.

The result of just the technical optimizations?  

We immediately saw a spike from the technical SEO efforts.

Our team compared October 19^th, 2022 (when the technical optimizations rolled out) through January 16^th, 2023, against the same period in 2021. We saw:

1. A 4% lift in visibility globally

2. A 1% increase in new users globally, across all channels

3. A 4% increase in new sessions globally

Why? Because Google can more easily crawl the site now since its technical health has improved.

Now before you come and tell me that it is all a spike in traffic due to the holiday season — that is where you would be wrong. We can pinpoint the day optimizations rolled out to the spike in traffic.

We checked back in at the end of February to let the post-holiday shift wear off, and we looked at bounce rate performance from these technical optimizations.

Again, we started with October 19^th 2022 and went through to February 28^th, 2023. When comparing YoY, global bounce rates improved by 17% across all channels – organic search specifically saw a 12% improvement.

SEO Content Success

Our content strategy relied heavily on creating valuable bottom-of-page copy for product category and sub-category pages.

Bottom-of-page copy included a descriptive H1 and H2, informative content on what the page was about with strategic keyword targeting, internal links to relevant pages, and if applicable FAQs.

We analyzed one product category page and one sub-category page on the United States subfolder against YoY metrics to see how organic performance improved once bottom-of-page copy was implemented. The date range analyzed was Q1 2023 vs Q1 2022.

The product category page saw:

• A 379% increase in clicks Q1 2023 vs Q1 2022
• A 164% increase in impressions Q1 2023 vs Q1 2022
• A 97% increase of revenue Q1 2023 vs Q1 2022
• A 100% increase for transactions Q1 2023 vs Q1 2022

The product sub-category page saw:

• An 82% increase in clicks Q1 2023 vs Q1 2022
• A 388% increase in impressions Q1 2023 vs Q1 2022
• A 3,322.43% increase in revenue Q1 2023 vs Q1 2022
• An 800% increase for transactions Q1 2023 vs Q1 2022

Now, am I saying if you optimize bottom-of-page copy with these strategies, that every page will see a 3000%-plus improvement in revenue or 379% increase in clicks? No – but bottom-of-page copy works for e-commerce product category pages as it helps Google understand those pages better and rank them accordingly.

Our content optimizations, looking a year and a half into the campaign, have helped this client improve their total keyword rankings from 235,237 to 261,791. That is an 11% improvement from March of 2022 to May of 2023.

How to Create Your Own SEO Success Story

Successful SEO supports your brand’s strategy by getting you in front of your target audience.

To get the results you are seeking, you need to create a rock-solid strategy.

Some fundamentals to keep in mind:

1. Don’t guess what your audience wants. That is often the downfall of most companies – they think they know their target audience. But, sometimes, they are dead wrong.

2. Capitalize on social listening. Listen to your audience via social media metrics like engagement, reach, or leads. Even run some surveys or conduct some polls to truly see what your audience wants within your niche.

3. Be sure that you create content people are searching for. You can create content all day long, but if it does not align with your target audience and their search intent – that’s time, effort, and money down the drain.

4. Leverage digital PR strategies. Get your quality content linked – this will raise your brand authority and awareness helping you establish yourself or your brand as a leader in the industry.

5. Amplify your content by sharing it on social media. The more eyes on your content from your target audience, the more brand awareness you are building.

These efforts will all bubble up and impact your SEO. Google will see people interacting with your site, your content, and see it as valuable because users think it’s valuable.

At the end of the day, Google wants to serve users. So, make sure your SEO strategy aligns with helping the user find exactly what they need.

Conclusion

These captivating SEO success stories serve as a testament to the power of strategic optimization. From the financial niche to the e-commerce industry, the results our dedicated SEO professionals earned highlight the tangible impact that effective strategies can have on organic search visibility, traffic, and conversions.  

By focusing on understanding target audiences, creating valuable content, leveraging digital PR, and aligning with user intent, you can pave the way for your own SEO triumphs.  

Remember, the algorithm is always changing. Strategies that worked 2 years ago don’t work today. Make sure you are always looking at the data and adapting to whatever comes your way for a truly successful SEO campaign.  

As an added note, the stories I’ve shared are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEO success stories here at NP Digital. Looking for more? Here are some great examples: 
 

• Ascent: See how our multichannel marketing campaign drove leads, awareness, and built out new marketing assets for this client. 
• CNN Brasil: Our team’s work increased the search audience for this client by 91% in 2022 – hitting our goal of 1 billion pageviews, over a full month ahead of schedule.
• Homeway: Through clever SEO tactics, we were able to triple this client’s traffic. 

Now that you know some of the key elements of a winning SEO strategy, you can create your own SEO success stories!