Realserve wanted to identify areas of their marketing management they could improve on to generate more leads & grow sales. We were contracted to initially conduct a marketing audit, our findings delivered over 40 immediately actionable recommendations that we were commissioned to implement.
We conducted a deep analysis of their business, services, revenues & target customers to create a revised marketing strategy. The initial focus was correcting their website search engine optimisation that delivered negligible organic growth after spending over $18,000 on seo development.
Our efforts delivered their highest rate of organic traffic in 3 years & over 200 lead interactions on their new website as well as other marketing process improvements.
THE MARKETING BRIEF
How could Realserve find more leads?
Realserve operate in the commercial property sector providing market leading building measurement & surveying services. They felt they had done everything needed on their website and wanted a marketing audit to assist with their other activities to drive more leads.
More than $30,000 had been spent on website development & seo optimisation.
The management team had invested considerable time and effort into developing a new website design & having search engine optimisation done by different specialist agencies. The reports they received indicated the site was getting incredible growth and traffic increases.
Our marketing audit uncovered the real story – no growth in Australian organic search traffic.
We were very fortunate to get access to all the critical elements of the business to conduct an in depth marketing audit to review;
- Website performance with Google Analytics & Search Console data analysis.
- Site visitor behaviour with a heatmap tracking analysis.
- Looked at all online profiles & social media usage.
- Lead tracking & measurement processes.
- Communication practices and even little details like matching sales revenue to services presented on the website.
We uncovered a number of areas for improvement, most significantly that the website hadn’t delivered any organic growth & now had over 60% of traffic coming from the USA – for an Australian business.
WHAT WE DISCOVERED
NO ORGANIC VISITOR GROWTH IN 3 YEARS
Even though two different specialist agencies were contracted to perform search engine optimisation and website development, the results showed there was no change to organic visitor growth in 3 years. What we went on to discover was overall traffic had increased that was being presented as overall growth which was misleading.
AUSTRALIAN WEBSITE VISITORS <60%
After the agencies had made their changes the proportion of Australian visitors dropped significantly while traffic from the USA skyrocketed. This information wasn't disclosed to Realserve, instead it was presented as overall traffic growth which was misleading. The visitors from the USA had a bounce rate of 96% (meaning most left the site immediately) and spent less than 3 seconds on the site. This helped prove the poor search engine optimisation work that was conducted on the site.
'FAKE' WEBSITE TRAFFIC FROM LINK FARMS
We quickly uncovered what was essentially 'Fake' website traffic that was being generated from link farms. The bounce rate trend increased significantly after the agency work was completed.
LEAD CONVERSIONS WEREN'T BEING TRACKED
The business wasn't recording or tracking where their leads were coming from or their approximate conversion rates. One of the perceptions was the website wasn't very strong at delivering leads although there were no specific analytics in place to measure this & as outlined above most of the traffic wasn't even real.
CUSTOMER CHURN WASN'T BEING ANALYSED
We did extensive data analysis to easily summarise top repeat Customers, ones that had been regularly placing orders but had stopped and other insights to aid relationship management practices.
THE WEBSITE WASN'T 100% RESPONSIVE
Even after using a specialist website design agency the website wasn't 100% responsive. On their old site the quotation button overlapped other menu items and didn't work correctly.
THE WEBSITE SITEMAP WASN'T SUBMITTED TO GOOGLE
There wasn't a procedure in place to review the work done by the website design or search engine optimisation agencies to ensure all the changes made were being correctly registered or indexed with Google.
CONTENT ON THE SITE WASN'T OPTIMISED FOR SEARCH
Even after they had paid for seo optimisation for more than 12 months there were a number of pages that didn't have suitable metadata, page titles or wording on the pages to aid search results.
A CLEAR & CONCISE MARKETING CALENDAR WASN'T ACTIVE
The marketing planning activities were ad-hoc without a constant, 'always-on', flow of executions being planned.
THE MARKETING SCOPE OF WORK
We presented our findings to Realserve with a detailed 50+ page report that outlined all aspects in detail. We were than tasked to assist implementing the suggested changes.
- Transition the website from Silverstripe to a WordPress CMS system.
- Implement website tracking of lead generation actions.
- Set up lead conversion tracking & reporting.
- Review & ammend all page wording, titles and content.
- Update Case Study content to improve quality & industry relevance.
- Competitor analysis and comparisons to highlight opportunities.
- Remove toxic backlinks to USA sources.
- Google My Business profile optimisation.
- Analysis of Google Analytics & Google Search Console data.
- Marketing calendar implementation.
- Monthly marketing reporting template.
THE MARKETING RESULTS THAT WERE DELIVERED
What impressed us was his ability to very quickly grasp lots of technical information and deliver a marketing audit that gave us a framework of practical steps across our sales & marketing teams to improve our results.
12 months on and Paul’s mix of website and seo development has seen the brand enjoy record visitor numbers, our highest ever organic search volumes & a constant flow of quality, Australian leads.
His common sense, data driven approach to marketing has given us results that previous (very costly) agencies failed to deliver."
His vast experience showed through when he was able to quickly summarise clear and concise strategic goals leading onto actionable tasks for future results in a transparent, down to earth manner.
FAST MARKETING RESULTS.
This project ran for just over six months with work being done on the existing website while a new WordPress based site was being developed. The changes to Australian search traffic could be seen within weeks. Marketing operational changes were made behind the scenes and eventually the new site was launched in early January with incredible results.
OVER 400 ACTIONS TRACKED & REPORTED
In the first 6 weeks of the new website's go live date there were over 400 interactions across the Quote form, Contact page and Call or eMail functions on the website. We were able to quickly prove the changes we had made were taking immediate effect.
THE HIGHEST PROPORTION OF ORGANIC TRAFFIC IN 3 YEARS
For the first time in years the brand experienced organic traffic growth to the website.
30% INCREASE IN SITE VIEWING TIME
Visitors average time on the site increased to over 1 minute per session indicating that navigation, content and usability had been improved greatly.
BOUNCE RATE BEGAN TO DECLINE
Early indicators showed a 2.5% decline in the bounce rate and the first declining trend in months.
AUSTRALIAN VISITORS UP TO 76%
Credible and relevant Australian visitors grew as a proportion of overall traffic very quickly.
CASE STUDIES BEING READ FOR 3 MINUTES OR MORE
The new Case Studies were helping increase dwell time on the website with an increased reading time more than triple the website average.
STRATEGIC MARKETING PLANNING CALENDAR
We created a template to map 3, 6 and 12 month marketing activities for the business with decisions being made based on services and target customer decision making.
establishment of a marketing driven foundation
Our scope of marketing management helped correct a number of errors, improve current results and put in place the foundation for Realserve to keep growing their business with a marketing driven foundation.
