Using SEO to Replace PPC Traffic – A Case Study

The Holy Grail of search engine marketing is to appear in position 1 of the natural search results for all of your targeted phrases. Unfortunately, as discovered by many who have tried, the ‘Holy Grail’ is seldom discovered, and often misunderstood.

Basic Introduction to Adwords

Google is a profit making organisation, loved and loathed in equal quantities by search engine marketers. Their quest for profit has given birth to arguably the biggest innovation in marketing ever (yes, I refer to marketing as a whole, not just online), Google Adwords.

Adwords, to briefly summarise, is an advertising system in which businesses can list their products and services, by way of a text based advertisement at the top (and sides) of the Google search engine results. Advertisers “bid” on these positions, and their ads are ordered by (primarily) bid value. This process is known as PPC (Pay per click) or CPC (Cost per click).

Adwords is an (almost) instant ticket to targeted online traffic and can deliver a brand new website thousands of visitors in a day, from a standing start. No other marketing medium could offer that guaranteed return. Adwords is perfect as a short term advertising measure, or to to compliment other digital marketing activities.

Unfortunately some businesses find themselves over-investing in PPC and dedicating their full advertising budget to the medium without:

Correctly structuring the account, ads and keyword focus

Monitoring ad performance

Measuring results and ROI (through Analytics)

Continually testing and adapting

This can lead to a dependance on Adwords, we have monitored sites (albeit in severe cases) that reply on PPC for 75% or more of their overall website traffic.

It would only take a shortfall in cashflow to wipe out 75% of the visitors to a site. If visitors are crucial to revenues and profitability (i.e. a solely eCommerce site) the sudden drop in numbers could leave the business floundering.

SEO (search engine optimisation) is the process of optimising your site for the long term, and it is advisable to try (where possible) to build a steady stream of natural search visitors. These visitors are not billed on a cost per click basis, and as such, the possibilities have no budgetary limits.

The Case Study

This case study does not delve into too much detail, but presents the case of a client who relied on PPC to deliver 35% of it’s overall visitor numbers.

The Brief

“Try to bring our Adwords spend down by half, while maintaining traffic numbers and sales”

The client was in the fortunate position to be reaping the rewards of PPC traffic. As a seasonal eCommerce website they could prove (via Analytics) that their spend on PPC was resulting in sales, the profits of which were more than enough to cover the click spend.

They quickly realised however that if this “paid for” traffic could be replaced with natural (free) visitors they would be in a much better financial position.

In July 2009 (within their busiest period – Summer) they invested in almost 20,000 PPC clicks in a relatively competitive market. This large spend on PPC led to them investigating the other digital marketing options.

Once their busy Summer period was behind them, the client approached us for a consultative review. They wanted to act fast, and in December 2009 awarded us the task of recommending and executing a renewed digital marketing plan in order that activity could be completed before the busy Summer 2010.

What we did

Research and Foundations

In the opening weeks of the project we undertook a review of their current standing online, namely undertaking:

A review, and performance report on their current Adwords spend

An analysis and retune of their analytics account

A new, in-depth keyword research programme utilising ROI data from Adwords

A web site analysis, to identify areas where the site could be improved in structure, for search engines

A competitor analysis, to determine how their competitors were structuring their online content

Link analysis, discovering where the site was mentioned online and what, in the way of link building, was required.

Action

This initial research work gave us a list of the keywords with the highest conversion and click through rates from Adwords. As we knew these converted well already it made sense to make these phrases the primary target for our search engine optimisation campaign. With these target phrases in mind we set about work, key tasks included:

A full overhaul of the title elements throughout the site (including the full product name within the product titles)

The addition of a good amount of keyword rich homepage content

The inclusion of text based links to product categories (they were drop-downs previously)

The addition of a keyword rich, in-depth “overview page” for each category

The addition of keyword rich series of “Popular searches” text links from the homepage

The inclusion of products breadcrumbs

Image optimisation

Adwords account tidy up “culling” underperforming keywords and ads

An intensive, varied, external link building campaign

A refining of the eCommerce sales process for conversion rate optimisation

Google Analytics “eCommerce” tracking integration for improved ROI tracking

The Results

I guess we wouldn’t have this included in the blog if there wasn’t a happy ending, so here it is:

The site has slashed PPC spend by 75%

Overall site visitor numbers are up 10%

Natural search visitors are up 75% on the same period last year

The business is on target to exceed expectations in sales revenue and are now experiencing a similar conversion rate to the same period last year, while improving average transaction value by almost 50%