About the project:
THE NEED
ALS Construction, a custom home builder and family business in the Hilton Head Island, SC area, had secured Hazel Digital Media to redesign their outdated website. Jason Hazel of HDM connected me with Brent Swofford, ALS’s marketing manager. The new site needed cleaner copy that utilized SEO best practices. And both Jason and I strongly recommended a blog to help drive organic traffic.
THE APPROACH
Website
After an audit of the copy transferred over from the old site, I identified and implemented four objectives to improve discoverability and readability on the About and Services (renamed Why ALS?) pages.
- Reorganize large blocks of text under headers.
- Incorporate target keywords in headers and body text.
- Move location keywords (e.g. Hilton Head Island) closer to the top of the page.
- Make the text more concise and convert the body text into bulleted lists where appropriate.
Blog
After interviewing Brent, I developed four articles that established the four categories we would focus on over the next six months: cost, process, lifestyle, and the environment. In partnership with HDM, we launched with four articles published weekly, with new content published twice monthly thereafter.
Each article was keyword-researched, content-researched, contained at least one image (stock photography) and was organized under headers according to SEO best practices. We incorporated a CTA (call-to-action) button at the end of each post that links to the site’s contact form.
THE RESULTS
From the April 1, 2019 baseline to September 30, 2019, the ALS Construction website saw net user growth of 80%. As HDM ran a paid Google CPC (cost-per-click) ad campaign concurrently with our blogging strategy, organic search accounted for 21% of users.
This is a classic case of marrying both quantity and quality; though PPC brought in far more users, both the average session duration time and contact form visit rate for organic users was far higher.
Contact Form Visits: Paid vs. Organic
- Google (CPC): 2.53%
- Google (organic): 27.48%
- Bing: 30.16%
- Yahoo: 11.11%
Overall, 67% of contact form visits came from organic search and about 21% came from the CPC campaign. Rather than revealing that one strategy is superior to the other, I interpret these data to mean utilizing both – if your budget supports it – is best for creating as many sales opportunities as possible. Promoting content (blog posts) via a strong social media presence is also recommended.
Link to site:
