Synopsis

A client who’s brand dominates online visibility within the corporate intelligence market, had a very different beginning. Early on, the client had severe brand visibility issues and lacked a coherent marketing strategy which was impacting business performance. Our consultant's job was to reverse this situation

Begin with the end in mind

When our consultant was first approached, the client’s brand was nowhere to be found online. The client said that, although visibility had never been great, what had been achieved resulted in a healthy funnel of sales leads. Recently though, this had almost completely died.

They had a marketing company working with them that also supported their online activities, including the website. However, after repeated complaints, no significant progress had been made.

To complicate matters, the client was a third party in many of the services they offered, essentially providing a ‘middleman service’. This had value because of the complexity of the solutions they offered, which included the following:

• Corporate financial fraud investigations
• Digital forensics
• Forensic accounting
• Due diligence services
• Multi-jurisdictional asset tracing
• Corporate surveillance 

Our consultant was tasked with the goal of the online channel becoming the dominant revenue stream within the next 18 months and with providing a clear road map for how the business could move forward.

Our consultant set the objective of identifying those specific services which the client felt they had a clear value proposition, and in the first instance, focusing on those.

As a first step though, the task was to find out why their brand visibility had vanished and resolve that situation.

Occam's Razor

During the investigation into the visibility issues, our consultant was faced with conflicting thoughts on the underlying problem. 

The marketing agency was adamant that the problem was that the content being produced was not well targeted, and accordingly Google’s algorithms were simply differentiating and giving more credence to competitors. They wanted the client to spend more money on content creation and social media.

The individual responsible for the website and technical SEO, felt the website itself was the problem and wasn’t up to the demands expected by visitors and Google.

The client was blaming its own staff for not participating enough in the website content and for not having a clear strategy as to how to achieve its online goals.

In reality, all three arguments appeared credible and could result in some of the issues being experienced with visibility.

However, our consultant identified a fact not realised by the other parties, namely visibility, had tailed off relatively quickly. Given this fact, he was able to put aside the other competing theories and try to identify an alternative root cause, one he already suspected as being much simpler, but not identified by the marketing agency. He also suspected that the marketing agency had employed a ‘black hat’ SEO technique that had now backfired and was covering up.

Further investigation revealed that the reality was very simple indeed: The website had been penalised by Google for using this technique - one where links to the website are gained through artificial and blacklisted methods in an attempt to boost the website’s visibility in Google’s search engine.

There is only now

The client was aware that until this point they had not taken a great deal of initiative with the marketing agency or its online presences. They’d assumed that by simply having a website was sufficient, along with charging the marketing agency with generating leads through it.

The client was guilty of some complacency and also not really understanding the effort required in digital marketing for it to be effective. This led to some unrealistic expectations. These expectations drove the marketing agency to take some unorthodox actions to match those expectations. 

Our consultant reviewed the multiple markets and competition for the client’s services, along with the client’s current positioning and online assets. Our consultant then presented an audit report that outlined a clear market objective, the issues that needed to be overcome if the desired visibility was to be achieved. Along with the report was a detailed explanation of what had caused the problems with the website.

Following our presentation which included the clear recommendation that urgent action needed to be taken, the client fired the marketing agency with immediate effect, despite the existence of a 6 month contract.  When faced with the evidence provided by our consultant of what had gone wrong, the marketing agency had no choice but to step down.

Don’t chase horses

The mistake the marketing agency made was one many such agencies and their clients fell into at the time. They were fixated on chasing top positions in Google’s search engine for what often amounted to vanity search terms.

Our consultant was able to explain and justify the fallacy of this approach, one that may lead to increased web traffic, but not much in the way of quality leads. His proposed approach was to focus on: 

• Improving the technical capabilities of the website, so as to support the initiatives being planned and match Google’s own expectations
• Restructuring the website towards user intent by creating clearly defined service areas that relate more to customer’s solutions rather than the core service being offered. This changed the narrative from ‘Here’s what we do” to “Here’s how we solve your problem”.
• Developing core content that supported the new narrative and identifying core issues customers faced within the bounds of the services the client offered, and then explaining how the client could solve the customers' problems.

The objective of this exercise was to create a 'web' of branded content focused on user intent in the specialist areas the client operated, thereby demonstrating to both its audience and to Google that they were experts in what they did. As a result there was no longer a need to chase search positions on Google, as they and the customer would both realise the authority and value of the client's offering and naturally gravitate to the client.

Outcome

The process of resolving the penalty with Google took six months. Once Google's penalties were lifted, the benefits of the new approach began to materialise.

Google began to recognise the client's brand as authoritative. Potential customers searching for solutions to their problems in the client's areas of specialism began to find the client more often through search terms that posed questions rather than simple key words.

Today, this client dominates the search results for terms related to the services they offer. Even though the strategy doesn’t focus on specific keywords, the client still holds top positions for them - at the time of writing, they hold around 20 number one positions, 30 top three positions and over 50 top ten positions. And these relate just to the ones tracked. The value of the traffic generated by the strategy equates to over £20K per month of advertising expenditure.

Most importantly though, the client has enjoyed a healthy flow of monthly leads.