Marketing SEO: Doubling a Digital Marketing Agency’s Traffic
Strong marketing is a necessity for any business, even ones that sell marketing services.
While that may seem redundant, there are plenty of respected, expert digital marketing agencies that need help with their own marketing.
After all, nearly 100% of their time is spent improving brand awareness and online visibility for other companies.
At some point, the question has to arise: Who’s promoting our business?
For digital marketing providers, visibility on search engines like Google is a must.
That’s because digital marketing services are B2B (business-to-business), meaning they must appeal to decision-makers at other companies.
57% of B2B marketers report that SEO generates more leads than any other marketing channel due to its effectiveness and ROI (return on investment).
Therefore, SEO is the #1 way for digital marketing companies to advertise their services to prospects.
Without visibility on search engines like Google, it becomes extremely difficult for new digital marketing companies to find an audience.
That’s exactly what happened to the client in this case study.
They ran an ace digital marketing agency filled with experts who did amazing work, but their poor performance on Google wasn’t generating much business through their website.
This is the story of how we more than doubled their organic traffic in just 6 months through our link-building expertise – so stay tuned to learn how we did it!
The Client: A Digital Marketing Agency Serving Small Businesses
Our client runs a relatively new digital marketing agency that specializes in web design for small businesses.
Despite the agency’s youth, they managed to rack up an impressive base of clients within a relatively short time.
Yet, besides referrals from existing clients, they weren’t generating much business through other channels.
In fact, they were seeing next-to-no traffic from their website, even though it was well-designed and regularly published high-quality content.
After all, the client runs a digital marketing agency that heavily focuses on designing websites, so it practically goes without saying that their own website is immaculate. Their agency also offers SEO services, so they already know how to do things like keyword research, technical SEO, and content creation.
Why, then, were they having trouble ranking their own site on Google?
There are two reasons why, both of which were out of the client’s control:
- Their domain was on the newer side. Google prefers older, more established domains due to their perceived superior trustworthiness to brand-new domains. For this reason, it’s quite difficult to achieve high rankings for newer domains.
- They lacked in-house link-building expertise. Next, their backlink profile was seriously lacking. The agency didn’t have an in-house team of link-builders, nor did they have an existing infrastructure (news outlets, media sites, industry blogs, etc.) to build links. Backlinks act as endorsements of your content’s quality, so it’s important to generate lots of backlinks from high-quality, relevant websites.
The client’s team was well aware of these issues, which is why they decided to outsource their link-building to an experienced agency like ours.
After reading through some of our case studies and testimonials, the client got in touch for a free SEO consultation.
We quickly realized the problem (thanks to the client’s existing knowledge of SEO), and signed the client up for a HOTH X campaign.
Getting started on HOTH X
HOTH X is our managed SEO service where we assign each client a dedicated campaign manager. The manager then devises a comprehensive SEO strategy designed to achieve the client’s unique goals.
To do so, the manager uses a combination of all our SEO products to get the job done.
Unlike our standalone offerings (which yield outstanding results when used properly), HOTH X can include link-building, content creation, technical SEO, and everything in between.
In this client’s situation, the real area where they needed our help was link-building. In fact, they had devised an in-house content strategy that our team of link-builders would work alongside.
It worked like this: their team would publish blogs, and our team would build backlinks pointing at them to give the content a boost in the rankings.
However, before we got started on the meat and potatoes of the strategy, we had an SEO audit to knock out first.
The SEO Audit: Looking for Easy-Win Opportunities
The first phase of any HOTH X campaign is to conduct an SEO audit, which is where we take an in-depth look at the client’s current performance on search engines.
This is when we identify and fix any major technical issues like duplicate content, orphan pages, and indexing errors.
Since our client ran a digital marketing agency, their site didn’t have many technical issues at all.
That made the audit easy on us, so we moved on to the next phase: looking for easy-win opportunities.
An easy-win opportunity is any relevant keyword that the website already ranks for, just not at the top of page one.
Positions 4 – 30 represent the easy-win range for us, and the client had quite a few opportunities to target. Since they were handling the content side of things, they freshened up the easy-win pages with:
- Better keyword optimization
- High-resolution images
- Short paragraphs and keyword-rich subheadings
On our side, we built valuable backlinks for the easy-win pages to give them additional ranking power.
Easy-win opportunities are great because they already appear in Google’s index, meaning it won’t take very long for your optimizations to take effect. Easy-win keywords are our secret weapon for generating a quick ROI for our clients.
The Strategy: Building Backlinks for a New Service Every 3 Months
For the majority of the campaign, we focused on building backlinks for one of the client’s services each quarter.
That meant every 3 months, we would shift our focus and start building links for a different service page.
The goal here was to build as much authority for the client’s service pages as possible to improve their search rankings across the board.
Link outreach was our preferred technique this time around, as we already knew dozens of websites in the digital marketing space that accept guest posts.
Here are two examples:
DR stands for Domain Rating, and it represents the ‘ranking strength’ of a domain. As you can see, these two links we built for the client (among many others) have extremely high DR scores of 87 and 93 (100 is the highest).
That means they’re extremely valuable backlinks to have pointing at your site, and they no doubt contributed to the amazing results we generated for our client.
The Results: Major Growth in Traffic, Authority, and Keywords
In less than 6 months, we had more than doubled the client’s organic traffic, which was a huge win.
Just look at these massive spikes in traffic once our strategy started yielding results:
As the chart shows, they rose from total stagnancy to seeing all sorts of giant traffic spikes, a trend that’s only set to continue.
We also built tons of valuable backlinks for the client, boosting their authority and credibility on search engines:
Does your digital marketing agency need help with SEO or link-building?
With HOTH X, you get to team up with one of the most experienced, reputable link-building agencies in existence. We’ll leverage our massive link network (one of the biggest online) to build top-tier links for your website, so don’t wait to get in touch for a consultation!
