Conversions are Not the Goal: Revenue is the Goal
The Objective
Goal 1: Increase actual revenue from Paid Search efforts by at least 50% year over
year
Goal 2: Increase top-of-funnel organic traffic by at least 50% year over year
Goal 3: Increase organic leads by at least 30% year over year
The Challenge
- Paid Search: Freedom Solar came to Apogee Results having had some success already. Their paid search efforts by their agency had produced 1,802% return on ad spend (ROAS). This is a really good return, but Freedom Solar was not satisfied with really good- they wanted to get even better results, and so they decided to
work with Apogee Results. Our goal was to build off past success and make a significant improvement in these numbers. - SEO: Similarly, to Paid Search, Freedom Solar had seen some success on a YoY basis for traffic growth. However, leads were flat, and traffic to location pages were down. Location pages are incredibly important to Freedom Solar because they yield roughly twice the conversion rate as other pages people land on organically.
Paid Search Strategy
Target
Improve ROAS over 1,800%.
Strategy
To accomplish this goal, the Apogee team restructured and rebuild the account to have as much granularity as possible, including the use of single keyword ad groups (SKAGS), this allows for significant optimizations over time. Because the team was able to see the entire funnel, and see which keywords were not only driving leads, but actual customers as well, they were able to significantly increase actual sales by focusing more on keywords that drove sales.
Here are some of the many strategies the Apogee team employed:
-A revamp of keywords to utilize only search terms that were previous converting well
-The increased use of exact match and broad match modifier keyword forms
-Significant and ongoing negative keywords to exclude undesirable searches
-Constant A/B testing of ad copy
-Utilization of audience targeting
-Optimization of ad schedule to target peak times
-Adjusting bids up for higher converting zip codes
-Expanded ad extensions
-The use of manual bidding
%
Paid Search Revenue Increase
Organic Traffic Increase
Organic Leads Increase
Amazing Result
SEO Strategy
Target
Ensuring Google Rankings were as good as possible, an improved GMB profile, and of course increased conversions.
Strategy
The SEO team went to work by first auditing the website and working to fix technical issues that make it harder for Google to understand the site. On the technical side, we found the following issues and helped remediate them:
-Clean up robots meta directives blocking roughly 100 indexable pages
-Clean up over 20 internally linked 3XX errors
-Clean up multiple internally linked 4XX errors
-Create schema markup for relevant pages (particularly local pages)
Next, the Apogee team focused on improving local SEO with citation building, citation fixing, implementing local schema markup, improving the GMB profiles, and restructuring the content on the location pages. This process was ongoing
and took many months to complete.
While working on local SEO long term, Apogee also helped Freedom Solar optimize their current high-value pages and also create new, SEO-optimized pages.
Results:
Goal 1: Increase actual revenue from Paid Search efforts by at least 50% year over year
Due to the strategies mentioned above and a revenue focus, we were able to significantly increase revenue, despite less conversions:
As you can see to the left, conversions reduced by almost half, but revenue increased by almost double, with a similar amount spent. The goal is not conversions. The goal is revenue!
When done correctly, Paid Search can yield excellent results; however, you need to make sure the team you have working on the account is manually and relentlessly optimizing the account. It could be the difference in hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Goal 2: Increase Organic Traffic by at least 50 % year over year (due to a migration in December of 2018, YoY data is not available until January of 2020, 10 months into our work)
Traffic nearly doubled for the organic channel. This was a great result, especially considering a significant lull in late March and April due to Covid 19
Goal 3: Increase Organic Leads by over 30% YoY:
Freedom Solars two most important conversions are a Free Consultation Form Request and their Solar Calculator:
Combined Freedom Solar saw an increase of 32.6% for their two main goals year over year (362 vs 273).
SEO is not one activity. Freedom Solar is a fantastic example of the fact that working on all of aspects of SEO together in one unified strategy yields the best results.
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