Background
Zap My Tax/Property Assessment Correction Group is a local agency that provides property tax reduction services for Suffolk County, New York residents. Their business is seasonal in that the deadline to file a tax grievance in Suffolk County is mid-May. Thus, in the months leading up to the deadline, Internet volume on keywords for their services increases exponentially. Then, after the filing deadline passes, activity decreases significantly.

OpenMoves provides search engine optimization and pay-per-click management services for Zap My Tax.

The Challenge

Search Engine Optimization: In April, ZapMyTax.com’s previous highest month of traffic activity, they received 209 total organic (unpaid) search engine referrals. A majority of the site’s traffic was being generated by paid advertising sources. While this was profitable, the challenge was to increase the site’s organic visibility so that they could generate new leads for free.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising: Since it can take several months for organic search engine visibility to increase after work has been done on a site, we sought to ramp up Pay-Per-Click activity to help capitalize on increasing volume for Zap My Tax’s primary keywords. The goal was to expand the coverage of their ads so that they would appear for all variations of the target service areas, even on those keywords that might not seem intuitively relevant. Additionally, we needed to make sure we did not display our ads outside of Suffolk County, because anyone searching for their keywords outside the target service area wouldn’t be relevant.

The Solution
Search Engine Optimization: We took the existing site content and enhanced it by creating brand new content pages that target keyword phrases related to Zap My Tax’s various service offerings. While the actual service of grieving taxes is very straightforward, there are many ways in which potential customers search for it. Therefore, it was necessary to research these variations and write effective search engine- and user-friendly copy for each one.

In addition to on-page content optimization, we ran multiple link-building campaigns to increase the number of incoming links pointing to ZapMyTax.com and we worked with Zap My Tax on their social media content strategy to help drive traffic from their accounts on websites like Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Pay-Per-Click Management: First, we built out a campaign structure that incorporated the various search topics users use to find tax grievance services. Then we wrote multiple ad variations to test different messaging. Finally, we geo-targeted the ads to display only to potential customers where Zap My Tax’s services would be applicable. Because some of the keywords being targeted were general terms, an opportunity existed for us to waste a lot of money on irrelevent traffic. Thus, we sought to prevent this.

The Results
Search Engine Optimization: In April the following year, ZapMyTax.com’s new highest month of traffic activity, they received 961 total organic (unpaid) search engine referrals, an increase of over 300%. In addition, overall traffic increased by nearly 200% in April. Thus, the site’s organic visibility increased and we were able to capitalize on increased traffic volume because of the enhanced keyword visibility on search engines.

We fully expect that the efforts we undertook for Zap My Tax will yield even higher organic search engine results when their hot season rolls around next year. Zap My Tax will be in a great position to receive search engine referrals on a greater variety of keyword phrases.

Pay-Per-Click Management:  By expanding to include multiple variations of the services being offered, we were able to ramp up leads generated by the website. Also, we made sure to include in the paid advertising keywords for which we had high natural search visibility, thereby increasing our first page coverage in Google.

In addition, we expanded the paid advertising to include accounts with Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter. These accounts generated hundreds of new visitors and dozens of new customers who never would have found Zap My Tax simply because they don’t use Google as their primary search engine.

OpenMoves is a full-service search marketing agency. We will be featuring a series of case studies showing how we helped Zap My Tax improve not only their SEO and PPC efforts, but also their website, email newsletter and lead generation strategy. Let us help you create a 360-degree, integrated online program so you can increase traffic, sales, and profitability. Stay tuned!