How I achieved a 5400x increase in overall search traffic for a high-end metal shop in Brooklyn in 6 months.

www.Serett.com

Being the #1 Metal Shop in NYC today, it's hard to believe there was a time when Serett's dominance in the NYC Market was far from guaranteed and even in jeopardy. Serett's marketing efforts suffered from an outdated wordpress theme, google penalties and a complex navigation system that was difficult to use and often buried great content.
‍
Serett came to me to for help with overcoming these unique challenges. They wanted to have a website that, in addition to being penalty free and updated, also matched their high-end brand look and feel. The should also generate more organic leads from popular search engines . The result was a mobile friendly website and an extensive content marketing strategy that established Serett as the premier go to custom metal fabrication shop in Brooklyn, NY.

Marketing Campaign Results Highlights:

5400x Increase in Search Engine Traffic

$5.2M Yearly Revenue

6+ Month Engagement

42% Decrease in Bounce Rate

1400/mo Avg Google Leads

82,422 Google Leads To Date

The Challenge

‍When I was contacted by Josh, Owner of Serett, he was frustrated. His found that his website in his own words was "Ugly" and did not match the high end luxury brand image that they were trying to cultivate. They had a complicated navigation system, reminiscent of the 2007 Adobe Flash days, that was a turn off for clients and was losing them bids. Even worse, earlier that year Google released its notorious algorithm change nicknamed "Mobilegeddon". This update dealt harsh penalties to outdated websites that did not comply with modern mobile web design standards. These google penalties negatively impacted there search engine marketing efforts.

Goals & Objectives

The Process

As soon as Serett booked a Road Mapping Session we got the ball rolling.  I performed a Technical Site Audit which confirmed my initial suspicions about the websites performance. The website was unresponsive, meaning it did not adjust to the content to look best on all screen sizes. I also uncovered several other technical issues. The URL structure was unsemantic and inconsistent . All the Meta Data for the pages were duplicates due to the wordpress theme structure. Improper use of heading tags, the images were not optimized, the list goes on.
‍
My Conclusion was that it would be quicker to build a new site in Squarespace than to fix the broken wordpress theme, which was custom coded so they couldn't update it without the developer. After the technical Audit comes Keyword Research.

My keyword research formula is as follows:
High Popularity + Low Competitiveness + Extreme Relevance = Success.

It is important to find keywords that have a high number of searches per month, but also are not being competed for by bigger fish and most importantly highly relevant to the type of traffic we want to gain. These words tend to be long tail keywords or even phrases. So instead of ranking for a general term such as "Metal Fabrication" which gets over 3,000 hits a month but is saturated by 100s of websites competing with one another. . A good example of long tail keywords would be "Custom Metal Fabrication in Brooklyn, NY" which only gets 300 hits a month but only has 4 websites that compete for it making it much easier to land on the first page of google.

The final part of research to be conducted, before development, is the Competitive Analysis. Armed with my newfound keyword research It is easy to identify your competition. When it comes to out ranking the competition I have a certain philosophy, "we don't need to have the best marketing campaign possible we just need a campaign 10% percent better than your competitions last one". If they post 5 articles a month you post 6.

By studying the competition I'm able to identify which factors contribute the most to their success and incorporate those tactics into your campaign, but improved. What I've also discovered is that the average metal fabricator's website tends to be outdated as well and likely suffering from the same set of penalties. By simply having a mobile compliant modern website, we have a huge advantage over outdated websites when ranking for our desired keywords.

When I sat down with Josh to talk he was impressed with my knowledge of the metal fabrication industry despite the fact that I just learned what metal fabrication was just a couple days before. I made the recommendations that we rebuild the website on a different platform that way we can secure a more reliable server.

Squarespace was the perfect Content Management System (CMS) for Serett. A huge benefit with using  Squarespace is that they meet mobile compliance standards out of the box, making them excellent starting points for search engine marketing campaigns.

In order to navigate their extensive portfolio we would group together each project and place them in similar categories using a grid. That way users could preview what project they were about to see, thus lowering the bounce rate on unrelated pages.

We came up with a content creation strategy that focused on doing in depth featured case studies for incoming projects and writing keyword focused articles to establish Serett as a thought leader and expert in their industry.

The Solution

www.Serett.com

The New Serett Website Homepage
New Navigation System
New Project Pages
Article Creation

Results

Removed the google penalty by replacing the old website with a mobile friendly website.

3800% Increase in overall Search Traffic from 15 per month to 597 per month.

409% Increase in Direct Traffic from 200 to 818 Per Month.

Decreased Bounce Rate from by 42%, from 82% to 40%, Site wide while increasing time spent per page. 30 seconds - 3 minutes on average.

Ranked on top 20 results for over 100 desired keywords.