SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It's the process of enhancing your website to rank higher on search engine results pages. This increases organic traffic to your site, essential for growth.
Search engines prioritize quality, relevant content. This means your website's content should be informative and cater to users' needs. Proper keyword usage, like 'small business SEO' and 'SEO for startups,' is crucial.
Core components of SEO include on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. On-page SEO involves optimizing content and HTML elements. Off-page refers to building backlinks from other websites. Technical SEO focuses on site speed and mobile optimization.
Key SEO components:
- On-page: Content optimization and HTML adjustments
- Off-page: Building quality backlinks
- Technical: Improving website speed and mobile compatibility
Regular updates and continuous optimization are vital. This ensures alignment with search engine algorithms, which often change. Implementing effective SEO growth strategies can lead to sustainable online success.
The Consultants at 360Alchemist had the pleasure of working with a C-suite executive at RightAway Insurance and here is how we helped them. When we first met Jahan Green and agreed to work with her she was growing a small insurance agency. Most agency principals when first licensed, want to write any business that comes across their desk. While some of these principals know this strategy isn't sustainable it is widely adopted because it keeps the lights on and the bill collectors at bay. RightAway Insurance was no exception. Their agents did a lot of boots-on-the-ground marketing while ignoring their digital presence. Since its inception in 2016 RightAway insurance leaned on it's relationships with car dealerships. The company's founder quickly rose through the ranks, starting as a car salesperson and soon becoming one of the youngest managers at the Darcars automotive group. Naturally he had a lot of friends in the car industry who would refer business to him once he started his insurance agency. When we consulted with him we examined the lifetime value of each customer referred by the car dealership. The results were shocking. The average customer who bought insurance at the dealership kept their car insurance policy for only three to four months. We also pointed out that this customer was about three times as likely to file a claim during the short period they kept the policy active. This customer profile also tended to call for service a lot more than other insurance clients.
After examining the revenue this client generated versus the customer acquisition cost (mostly referral fees paid to salesmen), we concluded this wasn't the right customer to target for his insurance agency's five-year goal. We didn't cut the dealerships out immediately but we began building the agency's online presence while gradually scaling back its reliance on referrals from car dealerships. We rebranded the agency as a home and commercial insurance agency by redesigning its Google My Business profile, Yelp profile and website to target specific keywords. When a business understands who it's ideal client is and markets exclusively to that client avatar it can lower it's customer acquisition cost significantly. Over the next two years, we worked with this insurance agency to pivot from high-maintenance, low-profit car insurance policies to low-maintenance, higher-profit home and commercial insurance policies. Using SEO we targeted the keywords home insurance and boosted his organic traffic to over 3,000 a month from the near zero website visits it started with. AEO or answer engine optimization is the next step in this journey. LLMs, or Large Language Models, use data scraped from web searches to provide answers on platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Anthropic's Claude. Having a great SEO strategy helps your company get discovered easier and recomended or cited by these programs.
Beyond Marketing working on Compensation plan and staffing
RightAway Insurance also faced challenges staffing and retaining insurance agents. After revamping their online presence, we discussed with them the need to hire more agents. They started receiving one hundred and fifty qualified home insurance leads per week. Their current staff cannot handle the lead volume, and since sales is a high-turnover industry, hiring, training and retaining agents are key to growth and scale. We discussed their current compensation plan which incentivized written premiums for commissions and bonuses and revised it to encourage Google reviews and bundled policies over policy count. After reviewing their numbers, we determined that customers with multiple policies stayed two to three times longer than those with only one. The friction involved with moving several policies in the high churn insurance market kept these clients loyal. Taking this novel approach to customer acquisition helped them earn more revenue per client even while selling fewer policies. The renewal commission allowed them to offer higher salaries to incoming agents which made recruiting one hundred times easier. Incentivizing Google reviews helped ignite our digital marketing efforts by marrying an aggressive SEO approach with an increased brand presence for a stellar reputation.
How we took a struggling E-Commerce store from low sales to six figures of annual income.
When we started working with Remsleep Mattress and Bedding store they were a struggling E commerce brand trying to sell everything. They relied on Facebook ads to drive traffic to their website but increased competition more than doubled their customer acquisition cost year over year. We realized they had to shift from a pay per click customer acquisition strategy to an SEO and AEO marketing strategy. Our first task was adjusting their product URL structure to create a more direct route to their main website. By doing this and revising their sitemap we helped increase their overall domain authority by ten points. We worked with the founder of this E-commerce brand to revise on page content highlighting important, high-intent keywords.
After making these changes we had to resubmit pages to Google Search console to be recrawled and indexed. We also helped the founder completely revamp their website. The products were well sourced but lacked a uniform feel. Different background colors clashed with the overall appeal of offering luxury items at an affordable cost. Some products had dark backgrounds and when juxtaposed with other products, they felt cheap and disjointed. We scaled their inventory down from its beginning to concentrating on Mattresses, Bedding and Home goods. We helped them build their education section using a well-thought-out approach based on common keywords people search when deciding which mattress to buy. Because Mattresses had higher margins than most products sold on the website we decided they should be the flagship product to drive eventual cross-selling opportunities for other items. To establish a higher level of trust we also developed a mattress quiz that we embedded as the central lead magnet for the revamped website. After improving the user experience of the website and building out the education section Remsleep mattress and bedding experienced a large jump in organic traffic to their site. Orders started to come in shortly after with high intent buyers who converted at a higher rate than the clients who previously came in from Facebook ads.
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