Client Garden Savvy
How a Garden Supplies Directory Achieved 200% Growth in Organic Visits Year-over-Year
OVERVIEW
Garden Savvy is an online directory that lists garden suppliers, allowing visitors to browse and compare thousands of garden vendors. Plants, flowers, fruits and vegetable seed suppliers and more are all cataloged on the site in an easy-to-digest format, making it a valuable destination for garden shoppers.
Being a lead-generating information site, increasing relevant organic search visits was a priority. Getting more relevant visits translates into more newsletter signups, new user and vendor signups, and vendor click referrals, all important goals of Garden Savvy.
307%
Goal completions YoY
198%
Organic search visits YoY
37%
Conversion rate YoY
220%
New users from organic search
THE CHALLENGE
In the crowded field of online gardening, Garden Savvy needed to gain more search visibility to stand out. When OpenMoves began working with them, their site was not yet live. From an SEO perspective, they were a blank slate.
The goal was to get their pages ranking in the search engine results high enough to generate organic traffic. Since it’s an information site, lead quality was also a concern. Poorly matched site visitors don’t become leads. Therefore, we ensured each page was laser-targeted to attract the most relevant visitors.
We asked: What are the things we could do in the shortest amount of time that would increase the number of targeted organic visitors?
121%
Increase in organic search assisted conversions YOY
OPENMOVES ANALYST
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There were a lot of moving parts that we juggled to achieve such positive growth. Trying to keep the blog up to date with new content, adding strategic internal links in the blog, identifying and building new links to the site, and optimizing everything from title tags to subheadings to body copy, amounted to a complex SEO campaign that was both challenging and rewarding.
The Solution
Phase 1: Initial SEO Work
Site Launch
To kick things off, we engaged with their site designer to ensure that the new site launched with SEO friendly elements such as full meta tags, title tags, internal site search, the ability to add SEO blurbs to garden category pages, proper SEO pagination, and more.
We also advised on enhanced website structural layouts, tracking capabilities within Google Analytics and site audit fixes
Keyword Research
We prepared an extensive round of target SEO keywords we’d be using for all future content creation and optimization
Optimized Content Creation
We wrote optimized SEO blurbs for each of the gardening categories and we wrote, optimized and published 4-6 new, original blog posts per month. We also helped jumpstart activity in the site forum by posting and responding frequently.
Link Building
We found and recommended new link and partnership opportunities for Garden Savvy to pursue
After a period of several months, organic traffic slowly crept up and then began to account for a reliable amount of visitors every day, a testament to all the important initial SEO work we did.
The Solution
Phase 2: Bringing it to the Next Level
We then began ‘Phase 2’ with the goal of identifying and then addressing any low-hanging fruit that would have the highest positive impact in the shortest amount of time. In this second phase, our approach was three-pronged: technical SEO, link building and on-page optimizations.
Technical SEO
We completed a full technical site review that identified issues that were either impeding search engine crawlers from indexing the site in the most efficient manner or were reducing the overall quality of the site, which in turn negatively affects rankings.
Link Building
We discovered a number of highly relevant sites to get links from. By getting links from authoritative garden-related websites, the types of visitors search engines sent them began to become more relevant. And getting more targeted links and improving link velocity (the speed at which your site acquires new links) helped drive up overall organic visits.
On-Page Optimizations
Of all the things we did, this had the most positive impact. By again working with Garden Savvy to determine the specific things they wanted to be found for, we were able to hone and craft more relevant title tags and on-page content that greatly increased their organic search visits, and from more relevant visitors too. Because they were more relevant and the content on the page better matched what visitors were searching for, the conversion rate shot up, from 17% to 37%
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