SEO zero to hero in 2 blog posts (Internet Marketing Case Study)

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how strategic Inbound Marketing is better than tactical SEO in terms of driving not just traffic to your site, but also leads and sales. (You know, the actual business results that you care about).

When I wrote that, as it happens, I was in the middle of an experiment to see just how much content, the lifeblood of Inbound Marketing, can influence your search rankings.

Here’s the full story.

A couple of months ago, I was doing some competitive research. I noticed that one of our competitors was getting an absolute firehose of traffic from the search keyword ‘google.ca’.

“What would it take for our site to rank on the first page of search engine results, using only Content Marketing to get us there?”

So I did some more research and found that there were a lot of searches for that term – over 670,000 a month in Canada, to be precise – and there was a lot of competition for paid ads for that keyword (97/100). And of course, it was a relevant keyword for our industry.

It was a good candidate for SEO for our site, but it was also a challenge.

What would it take for our site ­– which at the time did not rank in the first 100 results for the term ‘google.ca’ – to rank on the first page of results, using only Content Marketing to get us there?

Setting up the SEO experiment

So I made a plan and set some rules for the experiment:

• I would write two blog posts, one about the high-level differences between doing SEO for Google Canada and Google USA and the second about specific tactics for targeting your SEO for Google Canada
• I would write the content of the blog posts without specifically thinking about SEO or about optimizing the text for search ranking (although I knew that if I was writing about Google.ca, the term was going to come up fairly often)
• I would use SEO best-practices to optimize the posts’ headline, title and description
• I would not encourage third-party sites to link to the articles, (although if they did without me asking, that was fine) – I would only create links between the blog posts and other pages on our site. So, no traditional SEO link-building tactics at all
• I would share the articles using social media

I figured these rules would provide good control conditions to be able to measure the impact of the content itself without other SEO activities skewing the results.

The Internet marketing results

Here’s what happened.

I posted the first article on October 3. Within hours, it was ranking 49^th on Google.ca.

On October 11^th, I published the second article with a link back to the first. Within hours, the articles were ranking 14^th and 15^th respectively. Which is good, but still not on the first page (Google shows 10 organic search results per page).

Also, on the plus side, our competitor was knocked down to 49^th place as our ranking improved.

One week later, our ranking sagged to 24^th. In my next blog posts – spaced a week apart and on other topics – I linked to both articles (in relevant ways) again. After that, our ranking jumped to 10^th (first page) and then 8^th. For users in Toronto, our ranking was second – right after Google.ca itself.

Our traffic increased massively once we hit the first page of results.

We got ZERO leads from all that traffic.

Internet Marketing lessons learned

I learned (or confirmed) a bunch of things from this experiment:

1. Content marketing is a massively powerful tool. With minimal effort – about 2 hours – we were able to generate major traffic and get page one ranking for a high-traffic, high-competition search term. And in very little time.
2. Consistent effort is key.  Having a site that Google already knows has high quality content – if I do say so myself – that’s updated regularly was key in how fast we zoomed up the search engine results. If we hadn’t been blogging already for 3 years, I have no doubt that getting to page one would have taken much longer.
3. Links within your site’s content are more important than I would have ever guessed. It seems like between 2 and 4 links, with relevant anchor text, to your other site content is the sweet spot to help push your rankings over the top.
4. Choosing relevant, high-traffic keywords for SEO isn’t enough to generate real Internet marketing results. Remember, even with all the SEO success we had with this experiment, we didn’t generate a single lead. If you have a choice between keywords that show ‘high intention’ –the searcher is very much in the middle of looking for products or services like yours – and high volume, choose high intention every time.