Search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t a scary acronym. In fact, it’s essential to maximizing the value of organic search.
Capacity Interactive worked with Atlantic Acting School to maximize the value of organic search traffic to their website by conducting an SEO audit and implementing a strategic SEO tagging strategy.
The SEO audit helped us identify opportunities for improvement given the current site’s content, design, and technical setup to help search engines crawl and index the website (this is how Google categorizes your website and ranks organic results). We looked at metrics such as search volume, how the organic listings rank, click-through-rates (CTR), and traffic driven from organic search.
By recommending tag guidelines as well as broader strategy for content marketing, the relevancy of organic search improved significantly over time.
For instance, when looking at a five-month period compared to the same time frame the previous year, the bounce rate from visitors who entered the site through organic search declined nearly 10%. The number of average pages visited on the site increased 16%.
The SEO audit also revealed a key opportunity to improve performance for non-branded searches. For all organic search impressions, the average position of a search term that contained the word “Atlantic” was 3.9. The average position for searches where “Atlantic” was not included was 14.5. Branded searches had a CTR of 14.9%, whereas non-branded searches had a CTR of 1.8%.
Non-branded terms in this arena are highly competitive. Given the $2 max bid in Google Grant accounts, you must improve visibility for non-branded terms by improving your quality score. This happened inherently for Atlantic Acting School as our SEO recommendations increased domain authority (how well a domain is likely to rank in Google’s results).
With this strong foundation, we were able to zero in on acquiring users from non-branded searches (e.g. “acting school”, “acting classes”, “drama school”) and introduce potential new constituents to Atlantic Acting School. This, in turn, drove new traffic to the website and grew the organization’s remarketing pools.
When comparing results from the Grant account versus the same five month time period last year, clicks from non-branded terms increased 126% overall.
SEO and SEM are interconnected and should be ongoing, strategic efforts that are refined over time. Remember:
Great SEO with Optimized Landing Pages Fuels Paid Ads And Results In Better Click-through-rates, Quality Scores, and Lower Bounce Rates.
Photo courtesy of Atlantic Acting School