I got off the phone with a client yesterday with a biiiig smile on my face.
They had good news to share.
âYour hard work is paying offâ.
And much more than expected. Theyâd literally had 14 new prospect calls last Tuesday đ
Business revenues in Q1 2024 were +50% compared to the year beforeâand SEO was the driving force.
Iâve been working with this client since November.
And in just 6 months, SEO is driving serious revenue results.
So, reflection time.
In this weekâs newsletter, Iâm gonna dive into the details behind how I set up and executed this strategy and the lessons Iâve learned so far.
Background:
- Industry: Financial Services (e.g. accounting services)
- Timeframe: 6 months
- Existing non-brand traffic: 0
- Current non-brand traffic: ~2,000/mo
- Leads: +30 meetings book per month
- Revenue results: +50% revenue
1. We started with a brand new website. Hereâs what we did first.
This was the first completely new site Iâd worked on in a looooong time.
We started with customer, company, and keyword research, but then spent the first 4 weeks checking off everything on my new site checklist:
I was particularly concerned about fixing three areas:
- Good quality bottom-of-funnel pages
The overarching mechanism behind SEO is to send organic traffic to Service Pages. Either directly by ranking them in Google, or indirectly via a related blog post.
But those service pages are where people actually convert, so if they are poorly conversion-optimized youâll always have a bottleneck.
So, step one with this client was to completely overhaul the site design.
We got a fresh template implemented with social proof, a compelling offer, clear copy, and an easy-to-navigate site architecture.
- A blog post template that makes content pop
If youâre a long-term follower, youâll know Iâm a big believer in design and UI in general.
I donât want to spend endless hours perfecting content quality if the blog template (the contentâs âwrapperâ) puts the reader off before they even start reading.
So we created a new blog template in month one, too. Most of my thoughts on this topic can be found in my SEO blog template checklist here.
- A strong domain authority foundation
As a pre-SEO website, the Ahrefs domain rating was an extremely low 0.3.
Usually, if Iâm working with clients theyâve got at least 30 or higher, so I worry first about content and then about backlinks to fuel the fire.
But we had just 0.3. I knew itâd be hard and slower to rank with such low authority.
I know people like to see movement quickly or they worryâand thatâs completely fair enoughâso, I didnât want the results to be slow.
So, I paid particular attention to links from day one.
Result: Weâre now at DR 25 and Iâm feeling WAY more comfortable with that.
To get here I did two things:
- Pulled in a few favors from site owners to get some quality niche-edit links
- Looked around for free links from directories like Crunchbase
We also:
- Redirected a couple of aged domains the owner had purchased previously.
- Have started two digital PR campaigns (but only very recentlyâso the results are still TBC) with a partner
2. Audience Research & Keyword Strategy
Preparation:
Month one also covered two bases that helped us start producing content in month two:
- Thorough company, product, and audience analysis
- In-depth keyword research
Those of you who purchased my Scale Package have access to a key part of my âresearchâ processâthe internal guide questionnaire:
All my new clients fill out answers to things like:
- List your products/services in priority order here according to what you sell most or want to sell more.
- What was the last prospect/company that you had a really easy time closing? What was the problem that person was trying to solve?
They all help me, as the strategist, understand:
- What they sell
- Who they sell to
- How they sell it
- The business goals
This is an essential step that allows me to build a strategy that will drive the right outcomes.
Keyword strategy:
Because this was a new website, it also meant there was no topical authority.
With some sites, I focus 100% on bottom-of-funnel contentâit has the best conversion potential.
But on a brand new site?
I deployed a three-pronged strategy:
- The first content cluster
Most SEOs will recommend you build all your content in topic clusters (groups of semantically related content that have internal links to each other).
Iâd recommend this as well. But I often leave top-of-funnel content (e.g. âWhat is X?â) out of each cluster.
Whatever you choose to do, always, always ask yourself âWould MY target audience search for this?â and if itâs a noâdonât write it.
It may be top of funnel for someone, but if your audience wouldnât search for it then itâs not even in your funnel.
Now, back to: the first cluster.
I treat the first cluster as special.
The topic should be all around your core business service. The one you want prioritize selling more.
For this first cluster, then create a topical map and content that covers the topic entirely. All the nuances.
The goal is to build awareness and presence for the business area you want to be most known forâso whatever question someone has, they will always find you.
With other clusters, I focus 90% of new content on middle and bottom-of-funnel topics that show a real intent to purchase. This is most efficient for performance.
But that first cluster? I treat it like a big brand effort.
- Avalanche SEO Content
Avalanche SEO is essentially the technique of starting with low-volume, low-competition keywords that your site can win, and, as you gain traffic and authority, slowly building up to higher-volume, higher-competition keywords.
This is what I did with this client.
We had DR 0.3 and no traffic. So the first blog post wasnât â20,000 monthly visitorsâ it was:
- Several high-intent keywords we wanted to give more time to rank
- Several low-volume, low-competition keywords we could immediately rank in the top 10 for
As the site grows, weâll be taking on more competitive opportunities in a snowball-like fashion.
- Rank Your Service Pages
Itâs best practice to target a term like âsales softwareâ with a listicle like âTop 10 Sales Software in 2024â.
However, if the term âsales softwareâ wasnât very competitive, itâs possible to win it with a Service Page that focuses 100% onâŠyouâŠand still rank #1.
With this client, Iâm following a variation of this approach and a few other techniques to rank them #1 for key bottom-of-funnel terms.
3. Quality Content Production
As month two came around, we had:
- A strong site, UI design, and foundation in place
- A keyword plan for the next 6+ months
- Steadily growing backlink profile
Now, it was time to start writing content.
I work with a handful of carefully vetted freelancers. The kind who really âget itâ.
Together, we produce 4 articles a month and ~4 landing/service pages.
Thatâs a relatively small amount of content. But it paid off massively because we were hyper-targeted and increased quality a lot.
My monthly workflow with writers looks like this:
- I create in-depth content briefs. Theyâre fully researched, 2000+ word articles, all baked with SEO best practices to ensure they rank. The priority is always: how valuable can we make this to the reader? The founder I work directly with is a niche expert, so weâll often ask him for expert input.
- The writer does their magic. They write using guidelines of âsimple languageâ and âactionable, useful contentâ.
- I edit the content and place it live. I love editing content. If you take time over it you can really level up an article. I also spend a lot of time improving âdesignââfor example, lists get put in accordion boxes within the WordPress blog template.
This org chart comes from my book on Producing Content at Scale. When the content volumes are low, an individual can cover multiple roles successfully.
Itâs so key when growing your site to consistently publish good content. Youâre giving Google the signals, and you want them to be the right ones.
Alongside this blog content, Iâm always hunting down and publishing new Service Pages (for example, sets of keywords like âfinance X service in X locationâ which are super low volume but nobody else is targeting them).
Key Results
- +20 articles
- +15 service pages
- 0 to 2,000 organic visitors/month
- From DR 0.3 to DR 25
Where Next?
The plan continues:
- More content around new service areas
- Building partnerships with others to earn backlinks
- Focused links on key service areas
The most key part of the success so far: working with a client who is available when we need him, also wanting to drive the success, but equally lets us do our job.
Itâs been a joy to work on đ„°