SEO for promoting a niche IT in the US

Case study of promoting a niche IT company in the USA market

Initial data:

Topic: Online Marketplace Development (Ruby on Rails, React.js, etc.)

Site Age: 4 years

Backlinks to getting started: there were many low-quality rental links

Internal website optimization: from scratch

Introduction: the budget for the purchase of external links was quite limited, and when choosing a strategy and evaluating the terms of promotion, we started from the budget. The niche is narrow but competitive. The budget, in this case, plays an important role.

Project Objectives:

We agreed with the client that the main task is to sell the company’s services, i.e. as the KPI, they chose to receive applications through the contact form.

Immediately, we set up analytics, set goals, labeled buttons, and all blocks of the contact form call so that we could analyze all our actions and simply consider their effectiveness. During the development of the site, and adding new blocks, we also marked them out to track conversions.

At the beginning of the website’s promotion, there were 10 requests through contact forms, and most of them were not targeted.

The work consisted of several stages.

The first stage – immersion in the client’s business

We asked the customer in detail about who is Buyer Persona (ICP), i.e. who is the target audience for the customer and which of the customer’s previous customers have the longest cooperation period. Based on these answers and further study of customer customers, we jointly compiled ICP (ideal customer profile)

The second stage – research of competitors, marketing espionage

Based on ICP and the customer’s main expertise, we assembled the target organic keyword list and found the best competitors who have been growing traffic lately, increasing their visibility in the search by target keywords.

We conducted a discovery phase, during which we studied:

• competitors’ link strategy and the placement of the most effective link donors,
• competitors’ content strategy – what topics of texts, what structure of texts, presence of media content, presence of marketing elements in an article that catch the target audience, how interesting the content is, bounce rates and other parameters
• the internal structure of the site and linking – transfer of internal weight between sections of the site
• Clutch competitor reviews and competitor cases to find out who their customers are
• competitors’ social activity to understand how they pump their content marketing articles.

As a result, we compiled a summary table of competitors with all the data, and based on it we developed our website promotion strategy, content strategy and thought out a marketing funnel by which we will lead the leads according to the agreed KPI.

The third and fourth and fifth stages we carried out simultaneously.

The third stage – Internal website optimization. The fourth stage – Backlink website development. Fifth Stage – Content Marketing.

Let us dwell in more detail on these stages.

The third stage – Internal website optimization

We want to remind that the site was optimized from scratch. We carried out such tasks:

Technical audit of the site.

Website audit services that we conducted revealed a number of technical errors, which were subsequently fixed:

• Duplicates Titles, Descriptions, H1;

• Duplicates of the home page and some internal pages;

• Set up indexing via robots.txt, sitemap.xml;

• Found and removed 404, as well as a cyclical 301 redirect;

• Removed extra rel = canonical;

• Speed ​​up website loading for mobile and desktop devices;

• Optimized the site for viewing from mobile devices according to the requirements of Google mobile-friendly test;

• A number of other technical internal errors were also identified and eliminated.

Meta tag optimization.

Clustered the collected semantics and metadata was written for each cluster. 

Improving the site structure for the semantic core.

We also used the experience of successful competitors to change the format of the Blog, the format of blog articles, and linking the site.

Partially redesigned the site design to increase the behavioral factor and soon there will be a complete change in the design of the Home page. We are waiting for this to give an even greater increase in conversions from the site.

The fourth stage – Link website development

Initially, the site had a lot of low-quality rental links. We removed the worst of them right away, and the rest gradually. The disavow links tool was also used for removal.

Instead, we used crowd-marketing free links on thematic forums, blogs, and directories.

We also used outreach to post free quality articles on thematic donors for free (Guest Post), for a backlink to the customer’s website.

And they used the classic outreach to post feature articles with backlinks to the customer’s website on a paid basis (Sponsored Post)

Once again, the budget for the Sponsored Post was very limited and we carefully selected donors on the principle of maximum transfer of weight and trust to the customer’s website at the lowest price. For each paid placement, they traded with webmasters and “bargained” for their discount.

Fifth Stage – Content Marketing

Content marketing began with the communication of the sales team about the pains of potential customers. We’ve conducted interviews with Sales and PM, who directly contact customers.

Then they identified the most traffic-generating articles and the most powerful competitors and developed a content plan. We registered the topics of the articles, the volume of the articles, and when writing them we used the marketing approach – in the text of the article we described the pain of the client and how to solve them. This approach enhances reader engagement. And the use of lead magnets in articles gave a good conversion rate through the call of the contact form.

We also analyzed all indicators of engagement, clickability, scrolling depth to improve articles.

We pumped all the articles through the social networks where our potential customers live (we made a start from ICP). It turns out that we gave useful content just in those groups and social networks where our target audience is located, so the conversions from such an additional amplification of articles were significant

An important nuance.

All texts and metadata must be read and edited by a proofreader. This approach allowed us to give material that inspires confidence among potential customers and conversions from the site – leads are very targeted.

Promotion Result

Thanks to the right topics for content marketing and building a link profile in the USA, the site is well ranked in the target solvent countries and the site has targeted traffic (there is practically no Indian traffic).

As a result of the work, a stream of leads went to the site. If we compare the indicators at the beginning of the year and at the time of writing the case, then the number of calls through the contact form was 10 and it was 39 – this figure increased by 290%.

We have analyzed how much time a visitor needs to make a decision to make a conversion – contact via the contact form.

Analytics show that 87.18% of leads leave applications on the day they visit the site, i.e. immediately without leaving the site. The rest send applications within 30 days – apparently, they look at competitors and still return to the customer’s website.

Success factors

We started the promotion by immersing ourselves in the client’s business and we clearly understood which clients the client wants to attract.

Active customer assistance – timely provision of the necessary information.

Competent choice of promotion strategy based on a rigorous study of competitors during the discovery phase.

The right content marketing – we chose topics that reveal the pains of the target audience and used a marketing approach when writing them, so they catch on, as well as promoting content on social networks.

Well-coordinated systemic work on link building.

P.S. We look forward to further growth of the project and in the near future we plan to update this case.