Agency Blog & SEO Strategy

Company: August Jackson

My Role: Marketing Manager

CHALLENGE

August Jackson’s website was a beautiful catalogue of their services, work and team. However, their blog was often an after-thought. They knew their competitors were sharing thoughtful articles regularly and they wanted to not only compete, but steal the spotlight. They wanted a content strategy that would strategically attract their target audience and also showcase AJ’s unique voice, differentiators and point of view.

APPROACH

I began my planning with an analysis of our competitors, a study of industry “hot”/important topics, the development of buyer personas (What’s important to them? What do they want to learn/read about?), and many interviews with the AJ team (to identify subject matter experts).

From my research, I developed a message map for the August Jackson blog, identifying key themes and messages that we wanted to prioritize, based on audience interest. I then utilized Google Keyword Planner and SEM Rush to research keywords and key phrases that A) were highly relevant and B) had a sizable search volume and C) had Low/Moderate Competition (meaning that we had a good chance of ranking).

I designed a comprehensive blog strategy, complete with content segmentation for each of our target audiences, all organized into a detailed editorial calendar.

Blog Writing, Design & Publishing Process

In order for any good strategy to be successful, the execution process must be air-tight.

• I launched a Blog Committee, comprised of two creatives and two graphic designers to help with writing and creating custom blog graphics.

• In addition to the editorial calendar, I created a content production calendar with key deadlines, including scheduled interviews, draft deadlines, and posting deadlines.

• I also formalized the approval process, to ensure leadership had sightline into the content we were creating and sharing.

Blog Writing Workshops

While our Blog Committee (including myself) would often ghost-write blog posts for the executive team, many of our staff wanted to write their own posts. Therefore, I conducted quarterly blog post writing workshops, coaching them on best practices and explaining the importance of SEO. All blog posts were edited to ensure SEO best practices were being followed, and so I felt it was important for our team to understand the concepts (especially if their work was later edited for strategy purposes).

Backlink Building

While choosing the right topics and writing for SEO is important to blog strategy, the process of building website backlinks is vital in order to improve your rankings on Google. I created an outreach strategy to build backlinks to our site, identifying online publications that we could pitch to or directories we could list on. I also used SEM Rush to identify backlinks our competitors had achieved. We integrated this research into our target list of sites that we planned to reach out to/get listed on.

Extending Content Reach

Beyond our SEO, I also worked to extend the reach of our content in a number of ways:

• Social media strategy: With a supporting employee advocacy program, we integrated our blog content into the agency social media strategy.

• Client newsletter email: On a quarterly basis, we would send a compilation of our highlighted blog posts to our clients.

• Monthly subscriber email: To subscribers of our blog, we would send a monthly email, promoting our new content.

• Prospect email campaigns: We would frequently use thought leadership to engage prospects in conversation through LinkedIn outreach and email campaigns.

Refining/Improving

Utilizing SEM Rush, I continually monitored the rankings of our blog posts. In order to iteratively improve rankings, I would utilize a number of tactics:

• Increase the length of certain blog posts that were doing well

• Increase inter-linking amongst blog posts

• Ensure all images are optimized with meta-tags

• Adjust keyword targeting based on new data

• After any updates were made, “republish” older blog posts so that they would be re-crawled by Google

RESULTS

YOY (2018 vs. 2019) Web Traffic Growth

Website traffic: 8% increase

Blog traffic: 145% increase

Organic search traffic: 17% increase

Direct Traffic: 20% increase

Referral traffic: 15% increase

Social traffic: 22% increase

Email traffic: 47% increase

Bounce rate: 9% decrease

Average session duration: 10% increase (to 2:23 minutes)

Notable Organic Search Data

Data reflects EOY Keyword Rankings, impressions & clicks

“8 Tips to Craft an Award Ceremony That Engages Your Whole Audience” - Drove 19,372 impressions and 370 clicks from organic search

Keyword Rankings:

• Award ceremony: Position 9

• Award show ideas: Position 16

• Award ceremony examples: Position 27

“How to Plan Sales Kickoff Content That Gets Results” - Drove 7,961 impressions and 67 clicks from organic search

Keyword Rankings:

• Sales Kickoff Training: Position 27 (with 32-point increase over last 6 months)

“4 Strategies to Unite & Ignite Your Salesforce at Your Sales Kickoff” - Drove 4,386 impressions and 47 clicks from organic search

Keyword Rankings:

• Sales kickoff activities: Position 9

• Ignite your sales team: Position 17

• Sales kickoff agenda: Position 21 (with a 13-point increase over last 3 months)

“National Sales Meeting Survey Best Practices” - Drove 2,698 impressions and 35 clicks from organic search

Keyword Rankings:

• Sales Meeting Best Practices: Position 34

• Sales Meeting Survey: Position 23 (with a 6-point increase over last 3 months)

“2020 New Trends in Organizational Culture” - Drive 1,422 impressions and 21 clicks from organic search

Keyword Rankings:

• New Trends in Organizational Change: Position 29

• Corporate Culture Trends: Position 44