The Intergrowth® Client Experience: What It Looks Like to Work with Us

“What does it look like to work with your team?”

We get that question a lot.

Sometimes early in the sales process. Other times after a new client has signed on to work with us.

Either way, we realized that it was time to peel back the curtain with a much more informative answer.

Today, we’re sharing the entire picture of what it looks like to work with Intergrowth® to grow your business through content marketing, link building, and SEO consulting.

The Intergrowth® Process Follows a five-step framework:

1. Growth Consultation
2. Discovery
3. Strategy Planning
4. Implementation
5. Consultation and Performance Analysis

We start by diving into the typical sales process, where we help you find the right solution for your business. We delve into the first two months of a new client relationship to build your growth strategy.

We then discuss the process and timeline for our content creation, link building, and ongoing reporting analysis. We wrap it up with an overview of the metrics you can expect from each service tier.

Intergrowth’s Growth Consultation

We don’t conduct any cold sales outreach. All of our current clients come to us through one of the following methods:

1. Reaching out after consuming content that our team created
2. Referrals from current/past clients and others who have seen the quality of our work
3. Agency partnerships — we often partner with other marketing agencies to help them with SEO/content marketing

When you reach out to us, we start by validating whether we’re the right partner to help you grow.

What Do Our Consultation Calls Look Like?

We hold an initial consultation call to ask about your:

• Growth goals
• Marketing budget
• Current marketing team
• And more.

If you’re looking to 2x your site traffic in the next 12 months on a $1,500/month marketing budget, we won’t be the right partner for you. Rather than waste your time talking about how we can help you grow, we can share our best do-it-yourself resources and try to connect you to someone else in our network who might be better able to help you.

Once we have a sense that we’re the right team to help you grow, we schedule a Growth Planning call to build the right customized solution for your business.

What Do Our Growth Planning Calls Look Like?

Growth Planning Strategies give us time to analyze your business and present our findings in the form of:

• Showing you how large the market opportunity is for you to invest in SEO
• Outlining how you stack up against your largest competitors today
• Uncovering the initiatives we recommend focusing on first
• Mapping out pricing for working together

Some businesses will benefit from a smaller SEO foundation and more link building. Others will benefit from more monthly content. We use our Growth Planning call to define how much you should be investing in content marketing and SEO.

Some prospects need time to think through our services to see if they can justify the budget; others give the verbal on that consultation call. Either way, once we’ve discussed the tier that makes the most sense, we set up a follow-up call to customize the service to drive results for your unique business scenario.

Once we’ve built out the right solution, we solidify monthly pricing, the timing of kicking off services, and sign an agreement to get services up and running.

The First Two Months of a New Client Relationship

After you sign on with us, we kick off a dozen initiatives behind the scenes to prepare for the first month of service:

1. We start identifying various content themes that might make sense to target for your site
2. We start building your real-time reporting dashboard
3. We start building your Growth Hub
4. And more

From your perspective, we reach out to schedule our Discovery Call the day we sign the agreement.

Discovery: Weeks 1-2 of a New Client Relationship

We hold our Discovery Call as early as possible into the new relationship. We use this time (typically one hour) to collect all of the information we need to know about you to start growing your business.

We ask about everything from how you position yourself as being unique from your competitors to the best metrics to monitor to give you a straightforward way to assess growth over time.

We also pitch a wide range of content topics that we uncovered from our pre-call research on that call. Our goal is to get feedback on different directions we can take with our content strategy.

With most clients, we uncover enough great opportunities to get the first month of content topics approved on the call.

We then kick off four concurrent initiatives in the Strategy Planning and Implementation phases:

1. Competitive Landscape Analysis
2. Content Strategy
3. Month one of content creation
4. Month one of link building

Weeks 2-4: Competitive Landscape Analysis

During the Discovery Call, we gather info about your direct competitors. We expand this by uncovering your indirect competitors (companies that outrank you for the search themes that are most important for you to rank in search engines for).

We then rate these competitors in terms of their threat to your online business. We pick the top 2-3 competitors and do a deep dive analysis of their online presence.

We look at their backlink profile, traffic growth over time, top-performing pages on their site, frequency and depth of content publishing, and more. We then broaden the focus to identify the top-performing articles across all of your competitors’ sites that we uncovered to see which themes would be valuable for us to write for you.

Once this is complete, we compile a walkthrough video summarizing key findings and elaborating on how your entire team can leverage this analysis in future strategic decisions and send it off to you.

Weeks 2-4: Three-Month Content Strategy

At the same time, we develop our content strategy report. We base our content strategy on tactics that work for our clients time and again.

Our content strategies involve the following elements:

• Understanding what kinds of content resonate with the competition’s audiences and looking at search volume trends to prioritize writing about those topics for your site
• Analyzing what topics are popular in your industry or niche as a whole
• Determining what types of content will establish you as an authority in your industry (as understood by search engines)

This strategy moves you ahead in rankings in three ways:

1. You start outranking your competitors for education-centric topics your customers search for every day.
2. As you start ranking for more and more of these topics, we funnel some of that site authority that you build onto more valuable pages on your site, such as product and service pages.
3. Each topic your site ranks for helps you rank higher for every other topic we’ve written about together.

We dive deeper into that methodology here: how blogging drives sales

The report also includes our plan for the first three months of content creation. After finalizing that content plan with you, we move on to the next step: content creation.

Weeks 5-8: Month One of Content Creation

After we get approval on our first month of content topics, our team starts writing.

Our team treats writing as a collaborative process.

1. Our Head of Content, Jinny, takes the overarching topic and identifies the topic angle, target keywords, and more.
2. The primary writer puts together a content brief, or outline. The outline provides the skeleton of what the final article will look like. It also includes research for us to reference while writing.
3. One of the editors reviews the outline, leaving questions for the writer to consider, thoughts on areas that we overlooked in the outline, and more.
4. The writer takes this feedback and builds out the full-length article.
5. The editor reviews the article. They start by ensuring that the article makes a clear argument, backs up data points with sources, and explains the topic clearly. The editor then takes the article through a smelling, grammar, and plagiarism check. The next step is to run a readability analysis to ensure that the article avoids complex terminology when simpler terms are available and is easily skimmable to keep readers engaged. The editor then takes the article through our entire search optimization process.
6. A second editor goes through a higher-level review to ensure that the article explains the topic clearly and is easily digestible.
7. Our team publishes the article on your website and adds the live URL to the client’s Growth Hub.
8. We take the newly-published article through our social promotion process to encourage hundreds of people in the client’s industry to share the article on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.

Some clients get very involved in this content creation process, taking the time to share feedback on the overarching topic angle, outline, and final draft of the article before publishing. Other clients prefer to stay hands-off.

Either way, we keep you informed of the status of all content via your Growth Hub. They can log in to our proprietary software to check the status of all articles at any time.

You can learn more about the Intergrowth® content approval process here.

Weeks 5-8: Month One of Link Building

As we start to publish articles, we begin building relationships with publisher sites in the client’s industry.

We identify a handful of pages on your site each month that will see the most significant ranking benefit via link acquisition. We start promoting those articles to these publisher sites.

Weeks 5-8: SEO Foundation Strategy

After looking outward at the competition, we review our discovery notes and build the SEO foundation that will maximize qualified traffic and conversions.

Identifying the most valuable pages to focus on

We’re firm believers in the Pareto rule — 20% of your efforts will drive 80% of your results. We see this principle hold true with nearly every client site. Time and time again, 80+% of a client’s traffic, sales, and keyword rankings are held by a small handful of pages on their site.

If we’re working with a client that has a 100-page site, sure, we could optimize every page of that site. However, optimizing 100 pages for SEO is a time-intensive process.

Our approach is to cut the cost of an SEO foundation by 80% and only focus on the pages with the most ROI potential for you.

The result is that we get 80% of the results at a fraction of the cost.

This first phase of the SEO foundation focuses on identifying which pages will drive 80% of results. We look at historic site traffic, current keyword rankings, top lead-generating pages, pages with the highest conversion rates, and more. After all of this analysis, we identify a small handful of pages to focus our SEO foundation on.

Defining the right search positioning for your site

The next step is to define the right positioning to maximize traffic and conversions. Here, we weigh unique value propositions, brand positioning, current keyword rankings, and new keyword opportunities to find the right mix of short and long-term ranking goals that will help the business to grow consistently.

We take each page through our Primary Page Purpose Analysis to ensure that we understand how a target customer would utilize the page and identify 1-2 keyword themes to optimize each page around.

We elaborate on the keyword research methodology that drives results for our clients here.

Once we’ve identified the target keyword(s) for each page, we build out title tags and meta descriptions designed to maximize rankings and click-through rates for each page.

We build this into a full report that we send to you for final approval before implementing this strategy on the site.

Fine-tuning the site for UX and rankings

During our Implementation phase of the SEO foundation, we take time to put your site through a full technical SEO audit. Put another way, we fine-tune the site to improve user experience and search ranking potential.

• We identify and fix the most critical SEO errors hurting your ranking potential, such as broken internal and external links, incorrect canonical tags, broken backlinks, and more.
• We ensure that search engines like Google can easily navigate the site by optimizing your sitemap, customizing your robots.txt file, customizing meta robots settings to hide irrelevant pages from search engines, and incorporating relevant schema markup.
• We enhance user experience and optimize for conversions by boosting site speed and adding alternate text to images.

Months Three and Beyond of a Client Relationship

Monthly: Strategy Planning + Implementation

We repeat the link building and content creation process of our content marketing services every month.

Monthly: Consultation + Performance Analysis

We take time every month to analyze our results and take an outward look at changes in the competitive landscape. With most clients, we set an hour every month to walk through our findings in a dedicated consultation call.

Our goals within each consultation call are to identify:

1. Which elements are working best that we should double down on?
2. Which elements aren’t working as well as we expected to see if we should pivot on those initiatives?
3. What opportunities do we see based on industry changes and initiatives that are driving results for your competitors?

Weekly: Search Rankings and Site Health Monitoring

We take time every week for SEO Monitoring.

We run weekly SEO audit reports to identify new site health issues that need to be fixed. We also monitor keyword ranking changes for the keywords that we’ve agreed will be the best themes for us to target. We share all of this with you in a weekly email report.

Have additional questions about working with us? Here are the most common questions clients ask before partnering with us.

Business Growth Over Time

Content Marketing is a long-term investment. With most clients, growth is gradual for the first three months. Businesses start growing faster in months 4-6. Months seven and beyond are when we see businesses grow exponentially.

Here’s a snapshot of a few client stories (and how long it took to achieve that growth):

• One of our Starter Growth clients in e-commerce marketing has seen organic traffic grow 256.7% over the past six months.
• Streamline grew 284.4% in 9 months from our Starter Growth service (they were acquired shortly after).
• This billion-dollar SaaS client grew leads by 60% through our work together.
• Now grew their organic traffic by 942.7% in a year from our Rapid Growth service.
• Physicians Thrive saw leads grow 790% and organic traffic grow 2,758% in under 3 years from a year of Rapid Growth and 1.5 years of Enterprise Growth
• Gigly grew from 0 to 10,000 organic sessions/month in under a year from our Enterprise Growth service.

If you need to grow your business by 20% by next month, we can’t help you.

If you want to 3x your business in the next year, we’re the team for you.

Ready to set up a time to get to know each other? Fill out our form and we’ll get started with seeing if we’re the right partner to help you grow.

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