Every website has a presence, but it’s only successful if it brings in the right traffic.
Traffic means people are interested in visiting your site and exploring what your service provides. The more traffic, the better known your business name becomes.
But the goal is to do more than spread your name. You want to bring in legitimate visitors who ultimately become sales. The only way to judge how well your site’s traffic versus sales ratio involves monitoring metrics.
That’s what we do here at Intergrowth®. The success of our business framework is seen in our client JS Dental Lab’s substantial growth.
This SEO case study shows dives into the results that one ecommerce company saw after working with us for one year (spoiler: we helped them grow their traffic by more than 500!).
Who Is JS Dental Lab?
Here’s a little background if you’ve never heard of JS Dental Lab. The online company provides high-quality, custom-made dental appliances like night guards through mail-order kits.
They began as a one-person business in 2014, when the founder, Hannah, found herself in need of a night guard but without the funds to cover the hefty cost. Instead, she learned how to create them, took business classes online, and started her first website storefront.
Now, JS Dental Lab has revolutionized the night guard industry. This shift is partly due to its focus on customer service but mostly because of its high-quality products. But without leads and traffic, there wouldn’t be such a significant e-commerce success story.
JS Dental Lab’s Goals
When JS Dental Lab’s representatives first approached us, they were seeing decent traffic. In fact, we began working together in July 2021, and they had 1,118 sessions at that time.
Not too bad for the early years, but they knew they could do better if they could just figure out the system. Our company specializes in that system, so they came to us.
Bringing in Non-Branded Traffic
The original primary goal was to improve non-branded traffic to the site and to do that you need content that brings value and builds trust. This includes traffic generated from sources besides the brand name or website. JS Dental Lab wanted more organic searches, referrals, social media traffic, and other non-branded visitors.
By “organic visitors,” we refer to people who arrive at a website through search engines. If a user queried “custom-made night guards” and clicked a page from the JS Dental website, that would be an organic search.
Organic traffic is valuable because it comes from users who have already demonstrated an interest in the product. So when they get to the website, they’re already more likely to buy.
Our Strategy
Google has three major ranking factors that drive website success: content, RankBrain, and links. That’s where we put 80% of our focus at the start of most campaigns.
Broken down, this means our primary strategies include:
- Content: Writing top-quality, informative resources about the topics that help you rank.
- RankBrain: Ensuring the content we write and the user’s search intent match. We create pages that are helpful to your customers, not just full of keywords and other SEO tricks.
- Links: We work with other websites to get them to link valuable pages to your site.
Before we can strategize our written content, we delve into the background and goals of the client to create a customized plan for implementation. This includes a four-step framework, explained here.
The Four Steps to a Successful Marketing Strategy
Building a marketing strategy should never be a cookie-cutter job. At Intergrowth, we break this down into a framework that establishes our client’s strengths and weaknesses and creates a strategy to match.
This is done through a four-part framework that involves analyzing competition, identifying goals, establishing a calendar, and strengthening the current foundation of the site.
Analyzing the Competition: What’s Out There?
Competition can be healthy, and learning what’s out there is beneficial. We analyze the competitive landscape to look for topic opportunities and target low-hanging areas.
To do this, we use content ranking to see which pieces of content on our competitor’s sites are getting the most valuable traffic and which pieces get backlinks.
Then, we analyze those pieces to look for the keywords that are ranking those articles. This helps us find topics that we’ll want to include in our content, using a team of professional writers who can create a more informative article or provide unique insight.
We scour the analysis for low-competition keywords that will help us land higher Google rankings and grab most of the traffic for those searches.
One of our goals is to increase the client’s site authority, making them the go-to for Google to send searchers to for certain topics. This is measured through the Ahrefs Domain Authority scale, which looks at the number of referring domains linking back to a site. Google perceives you as an authority if many sites link to you.
In the case of JS Dental Lab, the largest primary competitor had an estimated 54,700 organic visits per month. This competitor used pain-point-centric content, such as “mouthguard for TMJ,” to drive most of the traffic to their business.
We explained that they were publishing six 1,000-word articles monthly, making it feasible for us to outrank them with useful, in-depth content.
The second-largest primary competitor was seeing about 6,300 organic visits each month, with a spike in traffic of over 200% in one year. Most of this traffic came from the home page using branded terms, although they were publishing eight 1,000-word articles per month.
Using this data and that of the next highest competitors, our team put together a plan to analyze and audit for focus keywords, custom title tags, and meta descriptions.
Identifying Goals for Long-Term Ranking
The next stage of our work with JS Dental Lab and other clients involves using the analysis performed to establish a clear picture of how we can help.
Working with the client and realistic expectations, we set long-term ranking goals. How many backlinks will we aim for each month? By what date should an article be ranked, and what rank is our target?
The goals take us into the next step of the framework: putting together a content calendar.
Building the Goals Around a Calendar
A popular quote by Milton H. Erickson says, “A goal without a date is just a dream.” We take that seriously at Intergrowth, applying dates to each of our articles in a content calendar.
For JS Dental Lab, our article content focused on two categories: on-site blogs and content revamps.
Onsite blogs are published on the client’s site with the purpose of directing traffic there through Google searches. These are SEO-driven strategically to show up in search results as top-ranking articles.
Content revamps include articles already published on the site that aren’t performing at optimal levels. JS Dental Lab had a blog process in place, and those articles could draw in more traffic with a little tweaking.
Strengthening What’s Already There
Every website has a foundation in place. When this foundation is optimized for search engines, it’s easier to bring traffic in. Our process includes taking what you already have and preparing it for high levels of success through optimization.
Doing this involves defining the positioning for your site by choosing target keywords on your primary pages. The meta titles and target keyword indexes tell search engines what your site is about.
Next, we audit for technical SEO, a term that includes all back-end aspects of search engine optimization on your site. After a technical audit, we’ll adjust as necessary to optimize your XML sitemap and index or hide pages and install plugins to improve your site’s speed.
We may need to redesign the site to make it more responsive on mobile devices. We’ll check the site for duplicate content, ensure it has a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to enhance site security, and complete other relevant technical SEO tasks.
Once all of that is complete, we move into implementation using a keyword focus.
Keyword Focus
Identifying keywords to target is only the beginning. We take this process and break it into microscopic parts in a Top Vs. Middle Vs. Bottom of the funnel breakdown that incorporates everything.
Choosing focus keywords — search phrases we put all of our efforts into optimizing — is crucial. While we know we won’t rank for everything, our aim here is to nab the top 10 Google search results for as many of these focus keywords as possible.
Working with JS Dental Lab’s knowledge of their product and brand, we chose to use these terms as our top priorities:
- Night guard
- JS Dental Lab
- Dental night guard
- Custom night guard
- Mouth guards for jaw pain
- Custom-fitted night guards
- Custom teeth guards
- Over-the-counter dental mouth guards
- High-quality custom night guards
However, JS Dental Lab’s competitors had high-ranking spots for many of these keywords. Competing with them was going to require a strong backlink profile.
Targeting Lower-Volume Keywords
While we worked on that, we turned our attention to bottom-of-the-funnel keyword goals. These were keywords that aren’t ranked as high. By targeting related lower-volume keywords, we could rank our client higher on the search engine results.
This serves two purposes for a client with low site authority. It brings in more organic traffic, and it builds the site’s authority naturally. The increase in domain authority, in turn, helps us rank higher when we target the more competitive keywords that build long-term authority.
Partnering with JS Dental Lab’s team, we zeroed in on high-volume keywords that would be a long-term goal. We used the Root Domain Benchmark tool built by our company that helps us understand how feasible a keyword’s ranking is. This tool uses data from Ahrefs that tells us how many links we’d need to build for a given page to rank in Google’s Top 10 for a certain keyword.
As we built in-depth content for search intent, including backlinks, for lower-volume keywords, we planted the seeds for future high-volume keywords to begin ranking.
Results
The hard work paid off in dividends with JS Dental Lab. Remember that original July 2021 starting traffic of 1,118 sessions? After one year with Intergrowth on the case, this number jumped 535% to 7,100 sessions in July 2022. Fast forward to September of the same year, and traffic was at 8,929, an increase of 696% from the previous year.
But what about the organic traffic goal? Out of the massive spike in traffic, 111% was organically driven to JS Dental Lab’s website from our optimized content. Overall organic growth was 157% in one year.
How did our keyword-metric focus fare? In July 2021, JS Dental Lab had 478 total keywords ranking, with 17 in the top three of Google’s searches. Thirty-eight were in the top 4-10 range. In July 2022, 4,945 total keywords ranked as connected with JS Dental Lab, and 119 of these were in the top three slots. The 4-10 range encompassed 494 of our keywords.
Every business’s goal is to convert visitors into buyers, and JS Dental Lab’s organic transactions went up with Intergrowth. In July 2021, the conversion rate was 5.1%. This number increased to 8.5% over the next year.
Overall, that led to a 340% boost in sales through organic conversions through a strategized keyword-focused content marketing strategy.
Conclusion
JS Dental Lab’s decision to invest in content marketing resulted in a substantial ROI and a change in the company’s brand awareness. Now, they’re viewed as an industry leader, and it took less than one year for this dramatic turnaround to take place.
Are you ready to make this happen with your product or service? Contact us today to see how Intergrowth can help you take your business to the next level.
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