SEO Case Study: Situational Appraisal
Swift Marine Yacht Management is a boat, yacht, and ship repair company with about 50 employees. They have an older website that had not been updated in years. Swift called us hoping to increase leads and traffic to the website. SEO and PPC were the best options for Swift seeing that they wanted to increase leads immediately.
What Happened?
Here at SEMLinq, we pride ourselves on being able to deliver results for our clients. That’s why we were thrilled when Swift Marine came to us with the goal of increasing their website traffic. Within just three months, we were able to increase their traffic by 300%. We accomplished this through a combination of targeted social media ads and search engine optimization. And the best part is that we were able to do it within their budget.
How did we do it?
Our first order of business was a comprehensive audit of Swift Marine’s Website.
There were quite a few SEO issues we found, but the largest problem that we came across was lack of content.
There were a few basic strategies that implemented to ensure that the content they did have was seen by the people who are most likely to be interested in it. First, we made absolutely sure that they were going after the right keywords, and the titles and descriptions of their pages were optimized.
Second, we got to work on placing almost 10,000 words of new content on their site. We discovered that Swift Marine had a great social media following so we were able to utilize it to promote their new content for some immediate traffic.
Finally, don’t forget about backlinks. We built dozens of high quality links from industry specific boating and boat repair forums and websites that linked back directly to Swift Marine.
What else did we do to boost SEO?
SEO is certainly an ever-changing sector of marketing. With the constant algorithm changes of search engines, it can be difficult to stay ahead of the curve. We focused on a few tried and true tactics to give Swift Marine’s SEO a huge boost.
We focused on long-tail keywords. These are phrases that are more specific than general keywords, and they tend to be less competitive. As a result, they can be an effective way to draw targeted traffic to your website.
We created content that is shareworthy and engaging. For example, we created a page for them titled, “how to repair gelcoat the right way.” Swift even gave us a helpful video to attach to the post and we got HUGE traffic results from doing this. we found huge volume for the long-tail keyword, “Marine Diesel Mechanic Miami, FL.” We built a page dedicated to this This not only helped to boost SEO rankings, but it also encouraged people to link back to the site.
We fixed keyword cannibalization issues. Swift Marine’s site had a lot of duplicate content because they had multiple locations such as Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, and Charleston. On these specific location pages, they were using the same exact content on each. This is obviously an SEO no-no so we made sure to make the content on each page very unique to the location, and we even linked other service pages back to the location pages to give those pages a boost!
How did Swift Marine Achieve these Results and How Can My Business Get the Same Results?
It depends on where your site is currently! There are so many factors that go into SEO such as the age of the site, the volume of keywords in their specific industry, the amount of pages and traffic a site already has, etc. Swift Marine was the perfect client because they had an older site already with some traffic, so Google was well aware of this established company and the new content we built ranked quickly because we used Social Media to give it a boost!
Everyone always asks us, what is the most important thing we can do to boost our SEO? The short answer is Backlinks. But to elaborate, you shouldn’t be building links until your content is up to par with your competitors, and you shouldn’t be doing content until your on-page is optimized, and you shouldn’t be doing on-page optimization until you’ve done the right keywords. There are levels to SEO and it takes some time but we can tell you with certainty that it is very powerful.
