In this case study, our client was a locally owned document shredd ing company. Starting from a point where they had virtually no online presence at all, we developed a Search Engine Optimization strategy and established an influx of traffic to drive revenue. As a quick point of reference, here’s some past data from July of 2015..

And here is a more current look from December 2021.

While it wouldn’t be fair to make a direct comparison between these data sets, we can clearly see that we’ve made improvements from the starting point across every area in the long term. Let’s look at some of the practices we use to achieve those improvements. One clear goal for SEO is to improve our client’s ranking in online searches. Here’s a sample of that improvement trend over a three month period.

Referring domains and referring pages indicate the number of other online sources that link back to our client’s website. We work to build up this base of backlinks to drive traffic and improve ranking. Note how the trends correspond with one another. In addition to driving traffic from other sources, we also want to increase the amount of traffic our client receives from online searches. We can drive this organic traffic by increasing the number of organic keywords relevant to our client. This means showing up in more searches and more visits from users.

The immediate goal for these strategies is to increase visibility for our client online and locally. We can see that occurring here:

But the key to conversion is not to simply be seen. We want to be seen by interested prospective clients. To know if we’re being effective in that area, we need to go a little deeper. Once we’ve laid a solid groundwork with backlinks and keywords, we can begin to assess the effectiveness of our work. This comparison of events shows how many times visitors from organic searches interacted on the website with our client’s phone number, fo rms, or email address. In other words, we can see how many visitors converted into prospective business for our client.

Here’s another sample of engagement based on location.

An effective SEO strategy begins with getting the client in front of prospects through relevant organic traffic and backlinks. It doesn’t end there, however. As with our client in this study, we always want to ensure that our efforts result in the right kind of engagement to drive conversion.