Please consider this a rough draft with some assumptions.
A few questions:
Are you selling the service through partners? We deal with a few financial, debt and credit card websites that have Canada wide coverage and monthly traffic in the low 100,000’s. They would consider this as a value offer for their users.
Is there enough margin in the service to negotiate a performance/commission based SEO program?
What are your realistic expectations in terms of ranking and sales? Based on 4 months of work including the items listed would incur costs for the campaign plus Adwords spend. At that point, you would have 4 months worth of clients developed through Adwords and the beginnings of productive SEO traffic/ranking across Canada for key terms.
Do you have internal staff to devote some work to or have you considered bringing someone on? To save costs we can work with less expensive internal resources and let them do the heavy lifting for content writing and link outreach.
The situation: new entry (less than a year) into identity theft and recovery industry. Currently targeting Canada with a .ca website. No SEO ranking as yet, the industry is just starting to grow in Canada and there is still an opportunity to be a dominant player.
Current search landscape: The identity fraud industry in Canada is lagging behind the US in terms of user interest/awareness and actual search volume. Large players like TD, Experian, Lifelock and & Credit Karma occupy top ranking positions and ad space on Google. The search terms in the US are more mature as is customer awareness of the service. That said, the Canadian identity fraud market is gaining in search volume month over month.
Goals: the suggested offer below assumes the client wants Canada wide ranking with an early focus on major city ranking. The website will need a heavy content push to ensure the website is relevant to search terms with purchase intent. It also needs a back-link push to bring the website inline with competitors. Adwords is an option that can be used now to get immediate sales. If time is on our side then we can look at 9 – 12 months for the SEO generated traffic to be strong enough to be the main traffic generation channel.
A website without search engine optimization (SEO) is like a billboard in the desert – ineffective
How I would approach:
1. Perform SEO basics
2. Setup conversion tracking, Google analytics sales funnels, Google Smart Goals and call tracking metrics/recording for sales and phone calls from the website.
3. Setup Adwords Remarketing & InMarket
4. Social media build out – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest
5. Content marketing campaign paired with social media sharing
6. SEO – ongoing national
7. Brand SEO – write-ups on HuffPost, Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur, Maclean’s etc with back-link to the website.
8. We Measure, refine and improve monthly
SEO – Basics
– On-page – editing of meta and content around chosen keywords
– Citation build – these are localized links that verify your business name, address & phone number
– Server change – for load speed & Google trust – current load speed
– Dedicated IP – for Google trust
– SSL / https: – for security and user trust
– Setup Content Deployment Network to improve load speed Canada wide
The above items will bring the site inline with competitors and best practices. The on-page SEO & citation build will provide moderate rankings on Google in Ontario. Not enough to drive productive traffic though. The additional SEO marketing services below are necessary to generate the back-links and content needed for targeted Canada wide organic traffic.
Engagement & Conversion Tracking
Setup conversion tracking, Google analytics sales funnels, Google Smart Goals and call tracking/recording for sales and phone calls from the website.
Adwords Remarketing & InMarket
Adwords comprises a few services. The one most people are familiar with is the ads in search or PPC ads. They are prohibitively expensive for most businesses to use as a main advertising channel. You either need enough margin in your product or service to offset the costs or see the cost as a means to building a client base. As a temporary channel to focus on in the beginning and as a secondary traffic channel it works well.
I would use a modified strategy. Remarketing and InMarket are complimentary Adwords services, one targets previous visitors to your site and the other targets users that are actively looking for your service and have likely visited your competitors. The cost is considerably lower and the CTR / conversions are higher as they are targeted users with a documented interest.
We add a process to this where you use Adwords to target an array of competitor brand name related terms. For example, being found for “competitor brand name + reviews” would be the ideal time for them to consider your alternative service/product. This works best against large players that use TV, radio and Google ads to advertise. Done right you can have your ad appear on their brand search terms and peel away a small percentage of those searchers to your website.
Social Sharing Setup
We build our campaigns using the hub and spoke system. The website is designed to be the central source of all content sharing. We will set up your website to automatically share newly posted content to your social profiles. This method is the most effective for building a larger social profile without the large cost.
➾ Facebook Page Creation / Optimization
➾ Twitter Page Creation / Optimization
➾ Youtube Channel Creation / Optimization
➾ LinkedIn Company Page / Optimization
➾ Company Blog Setup – industry keyword
➾ Blog Auto Posting Setup
SEO – Ongoing national
Content
In order to drive enough SEO traffic to make the investment worth it, your website will need to create ongoing topical content about identity theft recovery. Consider 8 pieces of 750 words content pieces per month as a minimum. Paired with a good social media campaign, you should be able to make your website and social accounts “active & lived in” within 3 months.
Content Promotion
Content will serve no traffic and SEO benefits if it only sits on the website and goes unnoticed. To gain valuable, natural back-links, incremental click-through traffic, and brand recognition, the content has to go through a promotion process.
Below are the ways in which we will distribute and popularize your content online:
– Content will be passively shared through social profiles & as part of the outreach
– Guest posting on relevant blogs
– Press release distribution via newswires
– Posting of decks in SlideShare
– Posting of PDF’s
– Sharing of audio on SoundCloud & Apple
– Using outside interviews to gain inbound links by sharing an optimized summary to post
Link Building & Link Outreach
Build Up the Link Profile – Inbound links from relevant, high-quality websites will help maximize the website’s ranking potential. Blue Tide Website Design will use a variety of tactics to encourage authority sites to link to your website pages.
Citation building – a group of industry-specific and general directory sites are used to generate and confirm NAP data for Google and other data providers. Clean, consistent citations at a volume higher than your competitors will deliver solid rankings – a time-proven technique.
Brand PR – Blue Tide Website Design has developed a large network of news reporters, bloggers and industry writers throughout Canada. We work with our writers to create on-brand professionally written pieces for publication, brand mention and a very high-quality link back.
SEO Outreach – Identification & Outreach to relevant authority websites (high profile industry sites). We will identify ideal link placement targets, prioritize them and use our outreach process to gain guest posting opportunities. Blue Tide Website Design will produce approved content for the authority website that includes a relevant, well-placed link back to your website pages.
Capitalize on Video, Audio, and Slideshows – Text content and link building are not enough to guarantee success in today’s search engine optimization landscape. Google’s algorithms tend to reward websites that look like legitimate brands and rich media is a good way to capitalize on this. Posting YouTube videos and SlideShare presentations is a great way to expand brand awareness and attract more visitors to the website.
Measuring Success
A high-risk auto insurance website from 0 to online industry leader in 9 months – SEO success
Our system follows a clearly defined, proven process of clean site design, fresh content, keyword focus & quality link & off-site development. We implement that process in an environment that is out of our control – the search engines. That said, we acknowledge that as a client you need to see tangible results-oriented progress. To track performance we will show you how to understand & see improvement through Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools & Agency Analytics reports.
At the end of each monthly campaign cycle, we will use various tools and techniques to measure and improve the following key performance indicators:
• Search engine rankings
• Search engine traffic
• Domain authority growth
• Top traffic-driving keywords
• Top traffic-receiving pages
• Conversion funnel drop-off points
• Create page & engagement goals to measure
As part of our commitment to transparency and client buy-in, we will train your staff to understand the important metrics, the 3rd party platforms that provide this data and how to gain insights from it.
