Case Study: 40% of Sales from SEO

Author: Guest Post / Source: Duct Tape Marketing < All Articles  Search engine optimization (SEO) is changing fast. It used to be t

Author: Guest Post / Source: Duct Tape Marketing

< All Articles



Search engine optimization (SEO) is changing fast. It used to be that you could use keyword stuffing and other such techniques to boost your rankings. No longer. Google and other search engines are committed to rewarding quality content that clearly and precisely answers a browser’s question. So our SaaS company SendOwl decided to focus our SEO efforts on creating quality SEO-focused content. And it worked! Six months on our signups from SEO are at 40%.

Quick and dirty traction test

There are lots of different ways you can grow your business and it’s important to find out what works for you. Although we suspected SEO might work well for us, we weren’t going to invest 6 months of our time in an SEO strategy unless we had proof that it would work.

So, first off we ‘tested’ SEO by creating three SEO-focused blog posts and by improving internal links for other blog posts with SEO value. Immediately, we saw movement in our general rankings as well as for those two blog posts. One of those posts targeting the term jumped from ranking 25 > 6.

So, we felt we had enough reason to begin a sustained effort to boost our SEO.

Keyword research

We then chose 20 keywords that had at least 500 searches per month and were directly relevant to our business using Google Keyword Planner. Some of these were highly competitive; others less so.

SendOwl makes it easy for you to sell digital products direct to your audience from your blog, social media or anywhere you can paste a link. So our keywords included such terms as digital delivery, sell downloads and PDF stamping (if you sell eBooks then PDF stamping makes the process more secure).

Even with the science of data, there’s still some art involved. We knew there wasn’t any point choosing terms with 10,000 searches per month if they weren’t directly relevant to our business. Some of our search terms are actually quite low volume (around 500 searches per month) but highly targeted.

What gets measured gets managed

After doing keyword research, we looked around for a service that would allow us to easily monitor our progress in terms of our individual rankings for keywords and our overall ranking as well. We decided Positionly (now Unamo) offered the best user experience.

However, rankings can be a bit of a vanity metric by themselves, so we also collect data every month on the number of sign-ups to our free trial from SEO (by setting goals in Google Analytics ). This way we could keep track of how well our SEO activities were translating into sales.