Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Portfolio

LSM Case Study - Nossi College of Art


Product: College Art Degrees

Campaign: Search Engine Optimization, Paid Search Marketing

Timeframe: February 2008 to June 2010

URL: www.nossi.edu

Overview:

Nossi College of Art and Design approached Local Search Masters in February of 2008 for help in organic and paid search marketing. Nossi's president was spending heavily on leads purchased from 3rd party lead vendor Datamark and lead quality was slipping. Nossi wanted to target students using online search from the Nashville and surrounding local markets at first and then broaden to a regional presence.

Marketing Tactics:

Local Search Masters concentrated on organic search leads by targeting the basic keywords Nossi legitimately should have been ranking on like "Nossi college of art" and "art school Nashville" to name just a few. Local Search Masters started with a large pool of keywords and refined it down to the most profitable list and then created unique individual pages for each major degree offering at Nossi that highlighted a subset of the refined keyword list. Other SEO tactics used included link building on sites used by Nossi's competitors, weekly on-site copy and meta data changes and regular blogging.

There were clear competitive advantages to Nossi's programs over it's Nashville competition in it's pricing and curriculum. Those advantages were highlighted on the home page and baked into the calls to action on the contact pages. They were also used in Nossi's ad copy for it's small but growing pay per click budget. Nossi has an excellent admissions staff and closure rates were much higher for students who spoke with the staff versus a student who spend a lot of time on the site learning more about the degree program. Therefore strong and focused calls to action were included all though the site that encouraged students to call now.

Silo tactics were used, to funnel prospective students to information geared to answering their specific questions. Originally there was only one page that explained what each degree offered, the page was meant to be all things to all inquiring visitors. Local Search Masters split this page up into areas focused on particular degrees so a student looking for graphic design saw information, media and enrollment options germane to graphic design and not commercial illustration or one of the other degrees available.

Results:

Organic traffic increased from organic search in the first 12 months by 28.8 percent (figure 1). After the first 12 months Nossi doubled the SEO spending and targeted areas outside Nashville including the state of Tennessee and Kentucky. This along with further advancements in 2010 has allowed Nossi to stop buying leads altogether. The Nossi website is now the most profitable lead source complimenting considerable spends on TV, radio, print, billboard and yellow pages marketing. Traffic continues to climb in 2010 (figure 2) and Nossi is now getting a strong response from the southern United States. In 2010 Nossi doubled it's pay per click budget and increased SEO spending by 50 percent. With design and marketing help from Local Search Masters Nossi is about to launch a new website that will modernize it's look online and continue to improve online conversion rates.

Figure 1:Nossi Non-Paid Traffic 1 Year

Figure 2: Nossi Search Engine Traffic 2010



LSM Case Study - Sunbelt Midwest Business Brokers


Product: Business Brokerage Services

Campaign: Search Engine Optimization, Paid Search Marketing

Timeframe: December 2009 to June 2010

URL: www.sunbeltmidwest.com

Overview:

Sunbelt Midwest provides business brokerage services from it's office in Minneapolis for the state of Minnesota. As part of the Sunbelt franchise Sunbelt Midwest targeted business owners who wanted to sell their businesses and matched them with buyers. The owner Chris Jones had tried SEO in the past but was having trouble ranking over one particular competitor for their market and was looking for a solution. The site was specifically having trouble with seller keywords as those were much more profitable than buyer keywords. There was an added challenge in that Sunbelt Midwest was using a custom built content management system that limited their ability to perform all aspects of onsite SEO.

Marketing Tactics:

Initially Sunbelt was ranking well for branded searches and for some buyer keywords. Therefore the LSM SEO team focused on the more profitable seller keywords like "sell a business Minneapolis", "sell a business Minnesota", "business broker Minnesota" and "business broker Minneapolis". Our first challenge was the onsite SEO limitations. The site had been programmed in two sets of title tags one of which was blank. Further the code to content ratio was poor, meaning that Google saw a lot of code and very little copy when crawling the site. Therefore there was a limited number of onsite SEO levers to pull to better rank the site so off site link building needed to be used to make up the difference.

The LSM SEO team used Raven SEO tools to get a list of the top 50 links Sunbelt Midwest's main competitor had built and used that list as a starting point in the off-site SEO effort. After building that list we targeted partner websites and vendor sites with high page ranks to boost Sunbelt over their competitor. Along with general link building LSM used blogs and press releases from the Sunbelt management team to post comments on articles written on business brokerage news sites. These postings increased referral traffic and helped to boost Sunbelt Midwest's creditability online.

Results:

Sunbelt now ranks number one on Google for every buyer, seller and branded keyword Sunbelt and the LSM team wanted to target. As with all our clients we measure results in dollars earned when possible not on search positions. Fortunately Sunbelt Midwest uses a CRM that tracks leads in a way that allows us to see what business the Internet marketing is generating. As of the time of this writing Sunbelt Midwest has received more than double the number of leads from search they did in the same period last year and business generated from those leads is substantial. The Sunbelt team has asked us to build them a new site and work has begun on a new Wordpress site that will help expand their online marketing footprint. With help from the owner of Sunbelt Midwest LSM is currently in talks with Sunbelt corporate to work with their entire franchise.


Follow this link for more examples of website re/design, search engine optimization and pay-per-click management.