There’s nothing like creating a quality product or service that’s in high-demand in niche market. But how do you get the search engines to take notice and create a roadmap for your ideal audience? You need an SEO case study that outlines the roadmap towards success.
The Product
Xtreme Heaters already conquered their mission to create the safest, most reliable and most efficient bilge heaters available. Their unique product protects boat engines and critical components from freeze damage so you can stay out on the water longer. The heaters can be used as part of a boat winterization strategy, or to extend the boating season for enthusiastic water lovers. It’s a safe, fully automatic product that their audience raves over.
The Problem
Despite having a rock solid product and glowing testimonials, Xtreme Heaters wasn’t showing up on Google for any keywords except their own brand name. The only traffic trickling in was from people who already knew about their site or occasional mention on social media. They needed more visibility for keywords related to the products they sell and their target audience.
In addition to struggling with traffic and visibility, Xtreme Heaters are also seasonal items. The uneven, seasonal demand for heaters added an additional challenge to the online traffic problem. They needed a scalable way to draw more year-round traffic and conversions to increase sales and get out of their seasonal slumps.
The SEO Process
SEO is a long-game that requires patience, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start seeing results relatively quickly. Digital Nomad Designs stepped in to help Xtreme Heaters find their way to the top of the search engine rankings. We got started by developing a customized strategy that included the following deliverables we’re sharing in the SEO case study:
Content Rich Landing Page
Digital Nomad Designs recommended one content-rich landing page per week with a clean and optimized design to attract more traffic and leads. Fresh content packed with value can dramatically improve your SEO efforts. Our team carefully geared each landing page towards a specific keyword to attract the Xtreme Heaters target audience.
Backlinks
Keyword optimization and a fantastic, streamlined design only goes so far. SEO requires a robust backlink building campaign to increase traffic and exposure. Backlinks can offer a form of buying confidence and help build a presence for a product online. They also serve as crucial clues for search engines. The more roadmaps, or backlinks, to your site the better it will rank.
Building up backlinks is no easy feat and requires finding high-quality sites willing to link back to a product. The Digital Nomad Designs team came up with a strategy and ambitious goal for placing at least 70 do-follow backlinks per week on relevant, high-quality sites.
Search Engine Submissions
Google may be king, but there are still thousands of other search engines that can help increase traffic to your site. In addition to major players like Bing and Yahoo, there are also niche sites that can help target audiences find their way to your products and services. With this in mind, Digital Nomad Designs performed regular search engine submissions to increase brand exposure.
Aggressive Goal Setting
Goal setting is part of any sound SEO strategy and helps set intention and accountability. The team worked with Xtreme Heaters to set aggressive goal-setting each month based on metrics we studied in Google Analytics and the Google Search Engine Console.
Performance Tracking
An SEO case study is only worthwhile if you’re going to track and prove the results for your clients. After all, you won’t know if you’re on the right track or hitting your goals without the help of SEO performance tracking. The Digital Nomad Team used Google Analytics and the Google Search Console to track success and make adjustments along the way.
The SEO Management Plan Results
With an ambitious but practical plan in place, the Digital Nomad Designs team got started on the SEO Management service. It didn’t take long for Xtreme Marine Engine Compartment Heater to start seeing scaleable results from the SEO efforts. Here’s what happened next.
Traffic Increase
After just one month into a SEO Management service plan with Digital Nomad Designs, the traffic acquisition from Google went from a monthly average of 48.7% (Jan 2019 to Sep 30 2019) to 63.1% in just October 2019.
SEO Case Study: Before working with Digital Nomad Designs
SEO Case Study: Traffic increase after working with Digital Nomad Designs
Streamlined Sales and Higher Conversions
Internationally, heaters are bought all year round, but they are generally seasonal items. However, when you compare October 2018 to after working on the SEO management plan in 2019, you still see an increase in traffic.
SEO Case Study: Despite being a seasonal product, Xtreme Heaters still saw consistent traffic spikes from one year to the next.
Xtreme Heaters sales also improved relatively quickly. For the busiest part of the sales season, we achieved 591 goal completions with an impressive conversion rate of 9.26%. Compare this to the average conversion rate of 2.5% to 4.5%.
Backlinks
When Xtreme Heaters started their SEO Management plan, they had less than 100 backlinks in place. It was still pretty impressive for a niche product in a very specific, seasonal industry. However, the Digital Nomad Designs team wanted to set an aggressive goal to supercharge our SEO efforts and secured over 3,000 do-follow backlinks.
SEO Case Study: 100 to 3,000 backlinks in three months
Anyone can rank for low-quality keywords with “No Follow” links that don’t do much to attract your ideal target audience. “No follow” means search engines don’t pay attention to the link, thus diminishing your SEO efforts. The real goal is to focus on quality keywords that speak to the search intent of your audience. Digital Nomad Designs determined which keywords were likely to attract our core audience and convert. Check out the results:
- Lithium Battery Heater – #1 on Google
- Boat Engine Heater – #6 on Google
- Bilge Heater – #6 on Google
- Marine Engine Heater – #6 on Google
- Boat Motor Heater – #4 on Google
Not only did the keyword “Lithium Battery Heater” make it to #1 in Google, but we also ranked four other valuable keywords on the first page.
Final Thoughts
Developing a worthy product that your audience wants is just the first step in the online sales process. Although SEO and more traffic doesn’t happen overnight, it’s also not as opaque and mysterious as it seems. You just need a solid partnership with a team that gets it and is willing to put in the work to bring your traffic roadmap to life. Want to talk to the team at Digital Nomad Designs about your product and SEO goals? Book a free call here for questions or to discuss this SEO case study.
