Just a quarter of the way through the ‘live’ content marketing case study that Birmingham SEO Agency, Essential Marketer has set itself, and the traffic to their site has more than doubled bringing in results that have more than met their original expectations in a very short timescale.
15 days ago Essential Marketer began a ‘live’ case study to write 200 quality 1,000 word articles over the course of 50 working days using its new content marketing planning tool to schedule 200 articles, each one based around one of their target keywords and sector themes; just a quarter of the way through and the results are already speaking volumes and justify the need for quality content.
Essential Marketer, Managing Director, Steve Feeney said: “The whole idea behind the case study was not only to prove that our new content marketing tool works by using it on ourselves in a ‘live’ test before rolling it out to clients, but also to demonstrate its effectiveness by joining the strands of SEO and social media through effective content marketing.
“We are thrilled with the results so far. From day one of the campaign alone our traffic had increased significantly and this has continued to be the case with increases across the board. Visits are up by 85%, page views are up by 51%, social media referrals have increased by 84%, organic search visits are up by 22% and new client enquiries have increased too.”
One of the biggest successes of the case study so far has been the above average increase across all the social media platforms that Essential Marketer uses, with the largest increase through Twitter with over 60% increases in referral traffic. The other interesting outcome is the direct correlation between the best times of day to publish new content on the Essential Marketer site and the best times to publish through social media; in fact the team is continuously monitoring this very important factor.
Adds Steve: “We’ve learned a lot as we’ve gone along. Before we embarked on the case study, if I’d have asked a member of the team to write a quality 1,000 word article, they would have found this difficult. Now, they are producing them daily and often breaking through the 1,000 word glass ceiling and producing even more words than that – it’s great to use ourselves as an example to our clients, who may be struggling writing their own content, to let them know that literally anyone can and should do it.
”As well as this, we’ve also learned that many of our potential clients are engaging with our case study through mobile platforms – having seen a huge increase in mobile traffic since we launched the campaign.”
As always within the SEO and digital marketing community, industry changes are never far away; with update 4 of Penguin 2.0 launched in the last week. There’s been much talk surrounding this, but Essential Marketer remains firm on its stance that Google wants the best websites to be returned when people perform a search. They want the top, most authoritative websites to be at the top of Google Page 1 that answer the searcher’s questions and the greatest way to achieve this is through quality, relevant, up to date content that has a sound strategy behind it.
“We always recommend to clients to build websites that their customers will like that actually offer true value to a potential customer of theirs. If a client’s strategy is in line with this, then Google will love their site and will want to show that site at the top of the rankings. If companies start from this premise, then they can’t go far wrong.” Concludes Steve.
