If you’ve been skeptical about business blogging and how effective it can be for propelling your business to the top of Google’s search rankings, we have a story that will make you a believer.
In March of 2014, Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery of Utah selected Be Locally SEO to provide internet marketing services for their three practice locations in the Salt Lake City metro area. Their goal was to grow the practice by increasing their online visibility and Google ranking — a task that posed several significant challenges.
Less than four years later, the results Be Locally SEO has achieved have us pinching ourselves to make sure we’re not dreaming. The takeaway from this case study is profound: An aggressive business blogging strategy, when framed within SEO best practices, can be a highly effective way to boost your business to the No. 1 position in Google’s search results.
Although some industries lend themselves to quick and easy search engine ranking success, others pose seemingly insurmountable challenges.
Real estate, mortgage lending, information technology, travel and health care are just a few of the industries that challenge even the best SEO specialists. These fields are saturated in every local market and the competition is overwhelming for industry-specific keywords and phrases.
In this case, the northern Utah oral surgery market was packed with competitors, many of whom had been investing substantially in digital marketing for more than a decade.
The second challenge we encountered in working with Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery of Utah was how to engage site visitors once we got them to the website.
Attention spans grow ever-shorter and site visitors move on to the next competitor within seconds if a web page loads too slowly, if searchers can’t immediately find what they want or if the content fails to engage them.
With these challenges in mind, the Be Locally SEO team set about the daunting task of designing a comprehensive internet marketing strategy that would maximize this client’s budget while helping them achieve their goal of growing their practice in the local market.
Be Locally SEO set forth three primary objectives that would assist Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery of Utah in achieving their goals and used them as the basis for the client’s SEO strategy.
Those objectives were to increase:
From the beginning, Be Locally SEO and the client understood that achieving these goals would require a “long-game” approach because, in a highly competitive industry, an intensive, sustained effort is necessary for improving search engine results.
The cornerstone of the SEO strategy for this client was content creation, specifically in the form of on-site business blogging.
Be Locally SEO performed extensive keyword research and analysis, to identify niche keywords and phrases, including long-tail and local key phrases, that would provide the best opportunity for improving search rankings. Using these targeted keywords, we began creating fresh and engaging content for the practice’s blog.
We also set out to improve the client’s website, specifically conversions. To accomplish this goal, our team added more prominent call-to-action elements and used the business blogging content to help drive site visitors toward calling or completing a contact form.
As we love to say, SEO is not a “set it and forget it” endeavor. This was especially true for the Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery of Utah internet marketing effort.
The Be Locally SEO team regularly revisited the targeted keywords and phrases that guided this client’s content creation and blogging, tweaking and revising our efforts based on what was working well — and what wasn’t working as well.
In addition to general keyword identification tailored to the client’s niche service offerings, we leveraged Google’s local search platform to improve exposure in their target geographical market.
Based on our research, we continued to add new content to the site, with an average of two blog posts per week based the most current keyword and geo targets.
To achieve the client’s goals, Be Locally SEO recognized the need for consistently building momentum over time, increasing traction with business blogging and SEO strategies designed to be sustainable.
Be Locally SEO worked closely with the client to establish the right voice and authority for content creation, focusing on core services provided by the practice. Professionally written content targeted the primary concerns of qualified prospects (patients), with the intent of providing information to engage site visitors and compelling them to take the desired actions of click-to-call or complete a contact form.
After the first six months, the Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery of Utah website saw an increase in visibility and began attracting and engaging more unique visitors and improving page rankings for targeted search terms. The traffic climbed steadily until January of 2017, when it began a sharp increase.
In fact, website traffic grew from a respectable 4000 monthly pageviews in January of 2017 to a mind-boggling 40,000 in January of 2018.
Readers came from all over the globe. In fact, the state with the greatest number of readers was not Utah, it was California. But this is not a problem. Having content with a broad appeal is helpful. Although most of these readers will never become customers, they are helping build the strength of the website by taking the time to read.
Today, based on a strong foundation of SEO principles and an ongoing, aggressive content creation effort, multiple pages now rank highly for high-volume, competitive keywords, including the coveted “Oral Surgeon South Jordan.”
The most important aspect of these results is that Be Locally SEO’s work actually allowed this client to rank on this and other important keywords with business blogging. In fact, three blog posts rank higher than the site’s home page, with the top post having attracted more than 20,0000 unique page views. Time-on-page stats are equally mind-blowing, with visitors averaging between four and six minutes.
The client’s website has a marked increase in the search engine share of referring visits, with a consistently increasing percentage of visitors reaching the site through local and hyper-local searches.
In the 12 months from January, 2017 to January, 2018, the client’s site saw
As you can see from the Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery of Utah example, business blogging is a highly effective means for accomplishing a variety of goals — even in a saturated or highly competitive market.
The Be Locally SEO team can put similar strategies to work help you achieve your business goals too. Contact us today to learn how we can help you:
As an industry leader in SEO, website design and development, content marketing and social marketing, Be Locally SEO focuses on exceeding our clients’ goals and expectations. Let us show you how we can achieve seemingly impossible results for you with business blogging and other online marketing strategies.