How We Increased a Client’s Leads by 384% in Six Months by Focusing on One Topic Cluster [Case Study]

Content marketing is an essential part of any SEO strategy. Without it, how are you going to attract customers looking for answers to their questions, and who are potentially in the market for your products or services?

At Tao Digital Marketing, we've recently generated some great results for one of our clients operating in the business financial space, The Insolvency Experts, mainly by focusing on just one “cluster topic” that was a huge money maker for them.

When looking at six month comparison stats (August 2021-January 2022 to February-July 2022), we've achieved the following:

• Leads: 95 to 460 (384%)

• Clicks: 4,503 to 23,013 (411%)

• Impressions: 856,683 to 2,033,355 (137%)

• Average position: 33.4 to 23.6 (increased almost 10 spots)

This was mostly achieved by absolutely hammering one topic area: company liquidation. In this case study, we’re going to explain how we did this step by step, so that hopefully you can generate similar results for your own business!

Objectives

If you really break it down, the objective of all SEO consultancy work is essentially the same: increase the number of leads for a business. This was our ultimate goal.

It’s not just as simple as that, though. We all know you can’t get to number one on Google overnight. So, like other SEO geeks out there, we tracked our successes through additional factors such as clicks, impressions, and average position, to show our efforts were worthwhile.

In January this year (2022) our goals for the next six months were as follows:

• Leads: Just over double from 95 to 200 (110%)

• Clicks: 4,503 to 13,500 (around 200%)

• Impressions: 856,683 to 1,700,000 (around 100%)

• Average position: 33.4 to 25 (around eight spots)

Insolvency Experts’ audience is primarily directors of UK businesses that are going insolvent, closely followed by business owners looking for financial advice. The majority of Insolvency Expert’s cash flow comes from formal insolvency processes, such as liquidation, administration, and CVAs (Company Voluntary Agreements), so it was really important for us to push these areas.

Our strategy

1. Research “company liquidation” search volume and related queries

We first picked this client up in November 2020. Initially, our focus was on the basics: updating all the top level pages (such as service pages and guides) to make sure they fit the intention of the user and clearly explained the services that Insolvency Experts offer.

Researching what works well at present

One of the pages that our content team updated was their company liquidation guide. After updating, the page started to perform very well in the SERP, and ranked at position #4 for “company liquidation”. Clearly, this sort of content was working, and we wanted to hit it even more.

After pulling some research together, one of our strategists proposed the idea of a “Company Liquidation Content Hub”, as the company liquidation guide was ranking for a lot of long tail questions:

After cross referencing with the monthly search volume for these questions, she added some of these as H3s within the guide to see how they would perform. They resulted in so much more traffic that she decided they warranted their own individual guides, hence the idea for the hub. This would mean we weren’t putting all of our eggs into one basket, and that we could also internally link all of them together for users wanting to read more.

Users that are further down the marketing funnel don’t want to scroll down a huge guide to find the answer to their specific question, and we were certain that this would positively affect bounce rate. We therefore made sure that nine times out of 10, the H1 contained the question that was being answered.

In order to further target those at the bottom of the marketing funnel who want to speak to someone quickly, we placed regular “Contact Us” CTAs throughout the content so that they don’t have to scroll right to the bottom of the page to get in touch with Insolvency Experts.

Undertaking a competitor analysis

We also conducted a competitor analysis on this topic, focusing on three key players in the industry that were all ranking well for the phrase “company liquidation”. We found that the key competitors had the following:

Competitor A - 38 indexed articles on liquidation

Competitor B - 23 indexed articles on liquidation

Competitor C - 47 indexed articles on liquidation

Insolvency Experts only had six indexed articles on liquidation at the time, so it was clear we needed to be on their level - this was an obvious content gap.

Pitching the content hub to the client

We suggested this idea to the client alongside a forecasting spreadsheet created by our founder, in order to justify the resource that was needed to push the client as high as possible in the rankings for company liquidation.

This spreadsheet broke down a huge list of keywords alongside monthly search volume, average click through rate for positions 1-10 on the SERP, domain authority of competitors who are currently ranking for these keywords, and average conversion rate on the site at the moment.

This unique formula would then allow us to explain to the client that for X amount of work, we predict we can get you to position X in X timeframe, and this would result in approximately X annual revenue. After pitching this to the client alongside infographics and current performance statistics, they told us they loved our ideas and agreed to let us go ahead.

2. Plan the content after client approval

After the client gave us the go-ahead, the next step was to plan all of this work based on search volume, and therefore priority order.

It’s easy to get lost in all the data within SEO, so it was incredibly important for us to have a solid plan and timeline for these changes. Topics were going to range from How to Liquidate a Company with No Money through to Administration vs Liquidation.

How we communicate planned works to our clients

In order to orchestrate clear communication between ourselves and our clients, we create a Traffic Light Report, which is a live Google Sheets document detailing all work to be undertaken for the current and next quarter. This is split into sections for technical SEO, content, and digital PR/link building (the three pillars of SEO).

This includes justification for each change we make, as well as a link to any live changes or documents. It also details when this will be done and if the action is with us or the client. The tasks are coloured in green for live changes, yellow for action needed, orange for in progress, red for anything on hold and clear for not started.

Here’s an example of what the content section of Insolvency Expert’s traffic light report looks like for their current quarter (July-September 2022):

Scheduling the tasks

We then scheduled these topics for our various content writers to work on using our project management software, ClickUp. Within each task we placed a link to a skeleton document consisting of H1s, H2s, and H3s, as well as a title, meta description and keywords to include.

3. Write the content while implementing technical SEO

By this time it was around April 2022, and it was time for us to fully attack the content portion of our task list. Since then, we’ve written 18 pieces of content around company liquidation, and still have quite a few left to go before we consider this area of focus complete.

As part of our uploads, our technical SEO adds FAQ schema, which has helped Insolvency Experts showing up for several featured snippets (more details in results section).

Analyzing as we go along

Once we covered the big topics in the first couple of months of writing, we started to use Low Fruits to find smaller queries which are estimated at around 10 or fewer monthly searches. We’ve had a lot of success targeting lower search volume phrases, as these users seem to be more focused and lower down the sales funnel, so are more likely to be better engaged and convert better. A lot of the time they are pleased that you have answered their very niche question!

The below is a screenshot from a keyword analysis. We trawled through hundreds of keywords to pull out the ones relevant to the client.

We then used Low Fruit’s Keyword Extraction and SERP Analysis tool to give us further details on a select few key terms.

These terms are shown as having a search volume of either 10, less than 10 or 0. Of course, we know that this is still hugely important to cover, and targeting these will bring in a very niche reader who is much more likely to convert due to the nature of the long-tail queries.

Finalizing the hub

Our plan is to finalize the hub this fall, and ensure that everything is internally linked. There will also be a menu change to make the addition of the hub very clear. See screenshots below for the current hub vs. how it will be presented once all content is ready (screenshot taken from their staging site in Kinsta, our hosting platform where we make design changes so that the client can approve them before they go live).

Current ‘hub’ in the menu:

How the hub will look once all content is complete:

As part of our content process within ClickUp, we have a recurring task to check a new URL in Google Search Console two weeks after upload. This allows us to see if we have the “Google Spike of Acceptance”, which is a sharp incline of impressions/traffic indicating that the content will do well, before it falls then slowly rises again.

If we don’t see this spike, we carry out multiple checks, including: Is it an orphan page? Are there any technical errors? Is it indexed? If it is not indexed, we push the URL through Index Me Now.

If the issue is just that the piece isn’t getting picked up, we will take another look at the content to see if there is something else we can do to improve it, e.g. tweak the H1 or expand the content.

4. Build links to the relevant pages and homepage

Once we’d uploaded the content, it was time to build links to the priority pages and homepage in order to build the domain authority.

We wanted to really hone in on generating links for our company liquidation page. The page has 36 backlinks, many of which were built through link building efforts. This was largely done by working with business site publications and creating natural anchor text that would help with certain keyword rankings.

As well as building links specifically to the company liquidation page, we also built links to the main URL in order to boost overall domain authority. This was done through answering queries through platforms such as HARO and Response Source, as well as working with the client to create relevant, time-specific thought leadership pieces. Here’s an example of a HARO request we responded to, the topic being “Recession-proofing tips for small businesses”:

Although the site’s domain authority tends to fluctuate between 30-33 depending on links lost and general algorithm updates, the links to specific pages have still resulted in an increase in rankings, detailed further below.

Results compared to objectives

Although we knew that our strategy was going to work well based on our experience with our other clients, we were very pleasantly surprised by the huge positive effect our work has made, which enabled us to smash the targets we set!

Leads

Goal: Increase from 95 to 200 (110%)

Result: Increased from 95 to 460 (384%)

As a result of creating incredibly useful, lengthy content and placing regular CTAs throughout the content, we managed to almost quadruple the amount of leads coming through to the client in the space of just six months.

In the six months before our liquidation project began, our Leads Dashboard within WhatConverts shows that Insolvency Experts had five liquidation leads via phone call and 10 leads via their contact form on a liquidation-focused page.

In the six-month period since we’ve been working on the content hub, they have had 38 liquidation leads via phone call and 52 leads via contact form on a liquidation-focused page.

Result: 660% increase in phone call leads and 420% increase in contact form leads.

Previous six months:

Current:

Clicks

Goal: Increase from 4,503 to 13,500 (around 200%)

Result: Increased from 4,503 to 23,013 (411%)

By creating highly relevant content that matched the user’s search intent, we managed to almost quadruple the clicks over the space of six months, doubling our original 200% goal.

The site has received 29,400 clicks overall across the past 12 months. Below, you can see the huge spike in clicks and impressions from January onwards when we really started to focus on the liquidation content.

Impressions

Goal: Increase from 856,683 to 1,700,000 (around 100%)

Result: Increased from 856,683 to 2,033,355 (137%)

Again, by creating highly relevant blogs, Google started to understand the relevancy of our content, so the number of impressions hugely increased. Along with the 137% increase above, over the past 12 months (August 2021-August 2022) the site has received 485,000 impressions for the query ‘liquidation’ alone.

The main company liquidation guide that we updated had a total of 732K impressions over the past 12 months, too, with a huge spike from February onwards, when we updated the guide.

Average position

Goal: Increase from 33.4 to 25 (around 8 spots)

Result: Increased from 33.4 to 23.6 (increased 10 spots)

This increase is due to the relevancy of our content and the amount of keywords each piece ranked for. As mentioned, the main company liquidation guide has worked incredibly well, ranking for 181 keywords, 67 of which are page one (37%). It now has the number one spot for the term “company liquidation”. See below for an example of queries the page is showing up for.

The page also shows up for six featured snippets as a result of us implementing FAQ schema.

335 clicks and 93,663 impressions have come from the FAQ rich results alone.

In the six months before we updated the guide, it pulled in around 650 clicks and 227K impressions. In the six months following, it brought in around 1,180 clicks and 382K impressions. We’ve practically doubled clicks on one single guide.

As mentioned, this particular piece of content has 36 backlinks, and actually ranks ABOVE the official UK government company liquidation guide, which has a domain authority of 93 (about 60 higher than ours). Clearly, we’re meeting the searcher’s intent and giving them what they are looking for.

In the six month period before we started work on liquidation, Insolvency Experts had an average click through rate of 0.5%. Over a six month period of us working with them, this more than doubled to 1.2%.

Another success worth noting is that 3 out of 6 of our latest articles have an average page view duration of between 9 and 10 minutes! The other half are averaging around 5 to 6 minutes, which is still very good. Clearly, users are wanting in-depth information on this topic.

The “What happens to a director of a company in liquidation?” guide, which went live in May, is now the fifth most clicked page on the site. when filtered on GSC by the term “liquidation”.

Overall, we’re extremely pleased with the results we generated, and so are Insolvency Experts — the company liquidation department is now inundated with queries and they are rushed off their feet!

Top 4 Things to Know About GA4 — Whiteboard Friday

In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Dana brings you some details on the exciting new world of Google Analytics 4. Watch and learn how to talk about it when clients and coworkers are intimidated by the move.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi, my name is Dana DiTomaso. I'm President at Kick Point. And I am here today at MozCon 2022 to bring you some details on the exciting world of Google Analytics 4, which I know all of you are like, "Ugh, I don't want to learn about analytics," which is totally fair. I also did not want to learn about analytics.

And then I kind of learned about it whether I liked it or not. And you should, too, unfortunately. 

So I think the biggest thing about the move from Universal Analytics to GA4 is that people are like they log in and everything looks different. "I don't like it." And then they leave. And I agree the user interface in GA4 leaves a lot to be desired. I don't think there's necessarily been a lot of good education, especially for those of us who aren't analysts on a day-to-day basis.

We're not all data scientists. I'm not a data scientist. I do marketing. So what I'm hoping is I can tell you the things you should know about GA4 on just a basic sort of level, so that you have a better vocabulary to talk about it when people are horrified by the move to GA4, which is inevitable. It's going to happen. You've got to get it on your site starting basically immediately, if you don't already have it. So I started out with three things, and then I realized there was a fourth thing. So you get a bonus, exciting bonus, but we'll start with the first three things. 

1. It's different

So the first thing it's different, which I know is obvious. Yes, of course, Dana it's different. But it's different. Okay, so in Universal Analytics, there were different types of hits that could go into analytics, which is where hits came from originally as a metric that people talked about. So, for example, in Universal Analytics, you could have a pageview, or you could have a transaction, or you could have an event.

And those were all different types of hits. In GA4, everything is an event. There is a pageview event. There is a transaction event. There is, well, an event event. I mean, you name the events whatever you want. And because of that, it's actually a lot better way to report on your data.

So, for example, one of the things that I know people always wanted to be able to report on in Universal Analytics is what pages did people see and how did that relate to conversion rate. And that was really tricky because a pageview was something that was at the hit scope level, which means it was just like the individual thing that happened, whereas conversion rate is a session scoped thing.

So you couldn't mash together a hit scope thing with pageview with conversion rate, which is session scoped. They just didn't combine together unless you did some fancy blending stuff in Data Studio. And who's got time for that? So now in GA4, because everything is an event, you have a lot more freedom with how you can slice and dice and interpret your data and figure out what pages do people engage with before they actually converted, or what was that path, not just the landing page, but the entire user journey on their path to conversion. So that part is really exciting. 

2. Engagement rate is not reverse bounce rate

Second thing, engagement rate is a new metric in GA4. They do have bounce rate. They did recently announce it. I'm annoyed at it, so we're going to talk about this a little bit. Engagement rate is not reverse bounce rate. But it is in GA4.

So in Universal Analytics, bounce rate was a metric that people reported on all the time, even though they shouldn't have. I hate bounce rate so much. Just picture like a dumpster fire GIF right now across your screen. I hate bounce rate. And why I hate bounce rate is it's so easily faked. Let's say, for example, your boss says to you, "Hey, you know what, the bounce rate on our site is too high. Could you fix it?"

You're like, "Oh, yeah, boss. Totally." And then what you do is whenever somebody comes on your website, you send what's called an interactive event off to Google Analytics at the same time. And now you have a 0% bounce rate. Congratulations. You got a raise because you made it up. Bounce rate could absolutely be faked, no question. And so when we moved over to GA4, originally there was no bounce rate.

There was engagement rate. Engagement rate has its own issues, but it's not measuring anything similar to what bounce rate was. Bounce rate in UA was an event didn't happen. It didn't matter if you spent an hour and a half on the page reading it closely. If you didn't engage in an event that was an interactive event, that meant that you were still counted as a bounce when you left that page.

Whereas in GA4, an engage session is by default someone spending 10 seconds with that tab, that website open, so active in their browser, or they visited two pages, or they had a conversion. Now this 10-second rule I think is pretty short. Ten seconds is not necessarily a lot of time for someone to be engaged with the website.

So you might want to change that. It's under the tagging settings in your data stream. So if you go to Admin and then you click on your data stream and you go to more tagging settings and then you go to session timeouts, you can change it in there. And I would recommend playing around with that and seeing what feels right to you. Now GA4 literally just as I'm filming this has announced bounce rate, which actually it is reverse engagement rate. Please don't use it.

Instead, think about engagement rate, which I think is a much more usable metric than bounce rate was in UA. And I'm kind of excited that bounce rate in UA is going away because it was [vocalization]. 

3. Your data will not match

All right. So next thing, your data is not going to match. And this is stressful because you've been reporting on UA data for years, and now all of a sudden it's not going to match and people will be like, "But you said there were 101 users, and today you're saying there were actually 102. What's the problem?"

So, I mean, if you have that kind of dialogue with your leadership, you really need to have a conversation about the idea of accuracy in analytics, as in it isn't, and error and everything else. But I mean, really the data is going to be different, and sometimes it's a lot different. It's not just a little bit different. And it's because GA4 measures stuff differently than UA did. There is a page on Google Analytics Help, which goes into it in depth. But here are some of the highlights that I think you should really know sort of off the top of your head when you're talking to people about this. 

Pageviews and unique pageviews

So first thing, a pageview metric, which we're all familiar with, in Universal Analytics, this was all pageviews, including repeats. In GA4, same, pageview is pageview. Great.

So far so good. Then we had unique pageviews in Universal Analytics, which was only single views per session. So if I looked at the homepage and then I went to a services page and I went back to the homepage, I would have two pageviews of the homepage for pageview. I would have one pageview of the homepage in unique pageviews. That metric does not exist in GA4. So that is something to really watch for is that if you were used to reporting on unique pageviews, that is gone.

So I recommend now changing your reports to sort of like walk people through this comfort level of getting them used to the fact they're not going to get unique pageviews anymore. Or you can implement something that I talk about in another one of my Whiteboard Fridays about being able to measure the percentage of people who are reloading tabs and tab hoarders. You could work that into this a little bit.

Users

Okay. Next thing is users. Users is really I think a difficult topic for a lot of people to get their heads around because they think, oh, user, that means that if I'm on my laptop and then I go to my mobile device, obviously I am one user. You're usually not, unfortunately. You don't necessarily get associated across multiple devices. Or if you're using say a privacy- focused browser, like Safari, you may not even be associated in the same device, which kind of sucks.

The real only way you can truly measure if someone is a user across multiple sessions is if you have a login on your website, which not everybody does. A lot of B2B sites don't have logins. A lot of small business sites don't have logins. So users is already kind of a sketchy metric. And so unfortunately it's one that people used to report on a lot in Universal Analytics.

So in Universal Analytics, users was total users, new versus returning. In GA4, it's now active users. What is an active user? The documentation is a little unclear on how Google considers an active user. So I recommend reading that in depth. Just know that this is going to be different. You never should have been reporting on new versus returning users anyway, unless you had a login on your site because it was such a sketchy, bad metric, but I don't think a lot of people knew how bad it was.

It's okay. Just start changing your reports now so that when you have to start using GA4, on July 1, 2023, for real UA is done, then at least it's not so much of a shock when you do make that transition. 

Sessions

So one other thing to think about as well with the changes is sessions. So in Universal Analytics, a session was the active use of a site, so you're clicking on stuff.

It had a 30-minute timeout. And you may have heard never to use UTM tags on internal links on your website. And the reason why is because if someone clicked on an internal link on your website that had UTMs on it, your session would reset. And so you would have what's called session breaking, where all of a sudden you would have a session that basically started in the middle of your website with a brand-new campaign and source and medium and completely detached from the session that they just had.

They would be a returning user though. That's great. You shouldn't have been reporting that anyway. Whereas in GA4 instead, now there's an event because, remember, everything is an event now. There is an event that is called session start. And so that records when, well, the session starts. And then there's also a 30-minute timeout, but there is no UTM reset.

Now that doesn't mean that you should go out there and start using UTMs on internal links. I still don't think it's a great idea, but it's not necessarily going to break things the way that it used to. So you can now see where did someone start on my site by looking at the session start event. I don't know if it's necessarily 100% reliable. We've seen situations where if you're using consent management tools, for example, like a cookie compliance tool, you can have issues with sessions starting and whatnot.

So just keep that in mind is that it's not necessarily totally foolproof, but it is a really interesting way to see where people started on the site in a way that you could not do this before. 

4. Use BigQuery

So bonus, bonus before we go. All right, the fourth thing that I think you should know about GA4, use BigQuery. There's a built-in BigQuery export under the settings for GA4. Use it.

The reason why you should use it is: (a) the reports in GA4 are not great, the default reports, they kind of suck; (b) even the explorations are a bit questionable, like you can't really format them to look nice at all. So what I'm saying to people is don't really use the reports inside GA4 for any sort of useful reporting purposes. It's more like an ad hoc reporting. But even then, I would still turn to BigQuery for most of my reporting needs.

And the reason why is because GA4 has some thresholding applied. So you don't necessarily get all the data out of GA4 when you're actually looking at reports in it. And this happened to me actually just this morning before I recorded this Whiteboard Friday. I was looking to see how many people engaged with the form on our website, and because it was a relatively low number, it said zero.

And then I looked at the data in BigQuery and it said 12. That amount could be missing from the reports in GA4, but you can see it in BigQuery, and that's because of the thresholding that's applied. So I always recommend using the BigQuery data instead of the GA4 data. And in Google Data Studio, if that's what you use for your reporting tool, the same issue applies when you use GA4 as a data source.

You have the same thresholding problems. So really just use BigQuery. And you don't need to know BigQuery. All you need to do is get the data going into BigQuery and then open up Google Data Studio and use that BigQuery table as your data source. That's really all you need to know. No SQL required. If you want to learn it, that's neat.

I don't even know it that well yet. But it is not something you have to know in order to report well on GA4. So I hope that you found this helpful and you can have a little bit more of a better dialogue with your team and your leadership about GA4. I know it seems rushed. It's rushed. Let's all admit it's rushed, but I think it's going to be a really good move. I'm really excited about the new kinds of data and the amounts of data that we can capture now in GA4.

It really frees us from like the category action label stuff that we were super tied to in Universal Analytics. We can record so much more interesting data now on every event. So I'm excited about that. The actual transition itself might be kind of painful, but then a year from now, we'll all look back and laugh, right? Thank you very much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com