B2B Supplier Holistic SEO Strategy Case Study
82% Increase in Top 3 Keyword Rankings!
488%
Increase in Organic Conversion Rate
82%
Increase in Keywords Ranking in the Top 3
181%
Increase in Referring Domains
Challenges
Standing Out in an Ultra-Competitive Field
When they joined up with Sure Oak, the company wasn’t doing terribly, SERP-wise: they ranked in the top ten for a number of their top keywords. In some industries, that might be good enough. But the partition industry is hyper-competitive, to the point that if you’re not in the top 3 for your desired keywords, you’re going to be missing out on a massive amount of business. After all, search rankings send a clear signal to consumers: the first- or second-ranked for a given keyword will always seem more important and trustworthy than numbers nine or ten, whether or not that’s actually the case.
Making matters more difficult was the fact that their higher-ranking competitors had already been investing in SEO for years: they’d clawed their way to the top of the search rankings through aggressive backlinking, content optimization, etc. Displacing them would be an uphill battle.
Competing Against Itself for Attention
Then there was the company’s website. As it turned out, one of their biggest SEO problems was self-inflicted: multiple pages on their site were duplicated or poorly organized. Accordingly, they had created a situation in which they were competing with themselves for organic traffic—and losing in the process.
Pushing the Wrong Kind of Content
And while the company’s website was well-stocked with content—a crucial SEO tool—this content was unfortunately not particularly relevant to what they were actually offering customers. Google prizes coherency and clear signals: content can only help you when it’s ultra-relevant to your core business. In fact, a surplus of irrelevant material can actually hurt your case, as Google might suspect you’re trying to game the system.
Solution
Keyword Strategy
The first order of business was, of course, expanding the client’s set of target keywords. The client prided itself on offering a wide array of partition-types—arguably the widest in the industry—and taking advantage of that fact through creative keyword-generation was key to our strategy here. The idea was to find unexploited opportunities and gaps in the existing SERP hierarchy—to think deeper than the company’s competitors and find new, previously-unexplored opportunities for growth.
Technical SEO
Next came a technical SEO audit, a cornerstone among professional SEO audit services. This is a routine part of the process, but its importance should not be underestimated. If—for instance—certain key pages are operating slowly, you can wind up losing a not-insignificant percentage of your potential customers. The fact is that few people will wait longer than a few seconds for a website page to load.
Content Optimization
Next, we dealt with the website’s content. Top-level service pages were restructured and optimized for search. Duplicates were identified and consolidated. Irrelevant blog posts were nixed and substituted with relevant, easy-to-read, SEO-friendly material. Headlines were rewritten to be as clear and direct as possible. Title tags and meta descriptions were added where necessary.
Link Building
Finally, we turned to link-building. Here we had to get creative: backlinks today only count when they’re from relevant websites, and our client was operating in a very specific niche. Still, we put our heads down, found a number of viable partners, and made the relevant connections.
Results
The results were even more than we were hoping for!
Organic Impressions
In the first year alone, the client saw a 44% increase in organic impressions for “partition” phrases.
Keywords Ranking in the Top 3
Meanwhile, over the course of about two years, the client saw an 82% increase in keywords ranking in the top 3!
Organic Conversion Rate
Most impressive of all, in the same two years period, the conversion rate for their primary goal increased by a staggering 488%, shooting up from just 1.28% to 7.52%!
About the B2B Bathroom Partition Supplier
This client is one of the country’s leading suppliers of commercial bathroom partitions. Their partitions can be found in restaurants, bars, offices, and hotels all across the country. They’ve been at it for over a decade and a half, selling thousands of partitions a year—so the odds are higher than not that you’ve encountered one of their projects without realizing it.
In particular, this client prides themselves on their dedicated customer service. Despite how large their company is, they strive to maintain an unusually intimate, one-to-one relationship with clients. That means walking them through each step of the process and offering extensive customization options. It means offering mockups and product samples. And it also, crucially, means no hidden fees: many other partition companies sneak in hefty shipping prices at the end of the process, while this company makes it a point of pride to find the most cost-effective options for their customers.