In the episode, Tim Hanson shared the details behind an extremely impressive growth story.
For one of his former clients, a premium child daycare, Tim helped them grow from barely ranking to earning £13.5 million in revenue via SEO.
That's what we call high-value search marketing. 🚀
“The traffic graph doesn’t mean shit if there’s no money coming in.”—Tim Hanson, Founder at fivethreeoh
We covered these key points:
⚡ The story behind the growth of child daycare to £13m.
⚡ One quick website optimization that ranked the site top 10 (for tons of keywords) in just three weeks.
⚡ Why letting your SEO writers breathe and write content they enjoy writing benefits rankings.
⚡ Why you should just hit publish on content, even when it's 80% complete.
⚡ Why "money" keywords are important and how you can rank #1 for them.
⚡ Three ways to get in front of your target persona, even when there's zero search volume for products like yours.
⚡ The benefits of topic authority for winning trust and enabling your buyer.
Listen above, or read below
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The Case Study
Read this onlineThe business: A child daycare in London in the high-end market
Starting point:
- Close to zero organic traffic
- 11-12 physical locations in London
Goals:
- Initial goal: get more SEO traffic but from a precisely defined target audience. (The business focused on the high-end childcare market.)
- Later goals: open more locations, and train the internal team in SEO so they could maintain (and improve on) the achieved results.
Project time: 2 years
Outcomes:
- Website ranks for over 100 bottom-of-the-funnel keywords in positions 1-3
- 17 locations, 3 more to open by the end of the year, at least 10 planned for next year
- Did I mention the £13 million revenue from organic?
Three Key Tactics Used to Earn £13 Million in Revenue
In the podcast episode, Tim emphasized three key factors that helped achieve these incredible results:
- Low-hanging-fruit: website optimizations that led to quick wins
- Publishing at 80%: Getting the content on the website as quickly as possible
- Strong foundations: Bottom-of-the-funnel keywords
Let’s break each of these tactics down:
Tactic 1: Small website optimizations
The first big win on this project came from a URL structure change.
Tim describes how the nursery location URLs didn’t contain the word nursery in them, like in the example.
Example: companyname.com/soho
Just by looking at the URL, Google (or anyone else, for that matter) couldn’t tell what the page was about.
With the help of the client’s internal team, Tim created a page that was a collection of all of their locations in one place.
Example: companyname.com/our-nurseries
Individual location pages then branched off of the collection page, effectively including both the location name and the word nurseries in the URL.
Example: companyname.com/our-nurseries/soho
This small change led to the client’s nursery location pages ranking in the top 10 search results within 3 weeks.
If you are looking for small changes that will bring you big gains, try improving these three areas in your old content:
- URL structures (don't forget to redirect)
- Keyword optimizations in headings (check Google Search Console. Is the highest impression key term in the H1 title?)
- Interlinking (link your articles together where it makes sense. Internal links can be more powerful than backlinks!)
“In some instances, we changed one H2 and two weeks later we’ve gone from position 5 to 3, which is enormous. It’s like, double the clicks in most instances.” - Tim Hanson, Episode 9, 11:24
Tactic 2: Publish at 80%
As a perfectionist, this is one of my favorite tips.
Tim recommends that we don’t wait around until long-form content is at 100% before putting it up on the website.
His priority is to get the URL up as the content is going through the last round of editing so that it is on Google as fast as it could possibly be.
“Publish it at 80%. […] Because no one’s gonna find it. You don’t have to promote it just yet until you are happy with it. But send your URL to Google, and whilst you’re doing those last changes, you’re at least shortening the time period on that side of things. Publish just a little bit earlier than you think you were going to.” - Tim Hanson, Episode 9, 14:00
Tactic 3: Bottom of funnel foundations (Money keywords)
A crucial tactic in Tim’s content strategy for his child daycare client is one that can contribute to the success of any other business: targeting money keywords.
Tim lists some examples of money keywords:
- X vs Y (X - your product/service, Y - your competitor’s product/service)
- How is X different from Y
- Top Y alternatives
- How to use X
- X reviews
- Y reviews
- X pricing
- X sign up
- Top X case studies
- Top Z software and tools (Z - a use case for your product)
The crucial recommendation here is that you shouldn’t wait to gain more traffic and/or visibility to go after these keywords.
As I mention in this guide to SaaS SEO strategy, your bottom-of-funnel keywords are an important part of your conversion hub.
So, go after them right from the start.
“Let’s say you spend 3 or 4 months initially. You should be hitting all of those bottom of the funnel keywords as best as you possibly can, knowing that over time they will rank.” - Tim Hanson, Episode 9, 5:45
What if the money keyword has zero search volume?
When it comes to BOFU keywords, it doesn’t matter if your SEO tool is showing zero search volume for them.
Even if it is one or two people who are searching using these highly commercial keywords, those are the exact people who are willing to buy from you (or at least willing to talk to you about your offer).
“Wouldn’t you rather be in front of, like, 5 people and 4 of them are gonna buy than a thousand people and one of them might buy?” - Tim Hanson, Episode 9, 4:35
What if there are no good money keywords for your business?
What if you’re a marketer with a product, service, or technology that most users aren’t even aware of? How do you find good BOFU keywords then?
I’ve answered that question in this article here.
Why not target high-volume keywords first?
For most SEO clients (and some SEO professionals as well), it’s natural to want to scoop up as much organic traffic as possible.
But the flaw behind this instinct is that most high-volume keywords don’t have commercial intent behind them.
People searching with these keywords are not ready to part with their money yet. They may never be.
“The traffic graph doesn’t mean shit if there’s no money coming in.” - Tim Hanson, Episode 9, 04:07
The main drive behind Tim’s BOFU-keywords-first strategy is to start at the narrowest point of the funnel and work his way backward, casting the net wider and wider.
“What is the point of ranking for the really big terms for people to know your name if you don’t have a page to send them to sell?” - Tim Hanson, Episode 9, 6:11
When planning out your content, think about the customer journey. When you target high-volume keywords, can you create a path for the user to move from the top or middle of the funnel to your bottom of the funnel pages?
Final advice for early-stage startup marketers
Tim cannot overstate the importance of building topical authority as fast as possible.
Creating 20 to 30 pieces of content on one topic (including product and service pages) should be a priority for marketers in early-stage startups.
Benefits of this are multifold:
- More useful content keeps users on your website and moving down the funnel (nurtures the user)
- Increases trust with the people already ready to buy from you
- Gives great sales enablement content
- More content to repurpose for other channels (such as social media)
For more highly-actionable SEO and content advice, listen to the entire Tim Hanson episode here.
