SEO Case Study: Growing A Brand-New Website From Zero To Leads In 3 Months

[Music] Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Beginners SEO podcast with me, Phoebe Gell. Today's episode is a proper case study. This one is for small businesses. Anyone watching something new, anyone staring at Google and letters thinking where's the traffic we launched a week ago? Because this case study, the company started with zero. Literally zero traffic. Okay. So let me paint the situation. This is a brand new software as a service product. It was a subcompany of a large recruitment agency. So they had the industry knowledge. They had credibility online, bar or offline. But then online with this new software product, it was a brand new domain, a brand new website, no traffic, no rankings, no authority. So they were literally starting from zero. So this is how we got them traffic and we got them leads within just a few months. Number one, we niched down hard. So instead of trying to rank for recruitment software, which is incredibly competitive, we asked which types of recruitment agencies would you work with and who do you think needs this product most. So we researched healthcare recruitment agencies, manufacturing recruitment agencies, teacher recruitment agencies and you'll see, you know, got so on, so on. We researched lots of different industries and specific types of recruitment agencies that we think would be able to benefit. We made a short list and then we created sector specific landing pages. For example, healthcare recruitment software page or if you also did a teacher recruitment software page, we did a few others as well. And each page spoke directly to their industry pain points, their compliance requirements, the workflow challenges and we also made sure to use sector specific terminology and that's important. I'm telling you that because Google ranks relevance and humans convert when they feel understood. If they landed on a page and there are teacher recruitment software, if there are teacher recruitment agency and they landed on a page that said recruitment software for agencies, as generic, but if that same teacher recruitment agency landed on the page which said teacher recruitment software designed for temporary staff shortages and I don't know relevant teaching or what we put now relevant teaching qualifications or something specific, then that converts. So you see how we really went hard on narrowing down and niching down the keyword research. But before we even did the keyword research, we did general market research to find untapped opportunities that they hadn't thought about when they'd originally built the website. Number two, then once we built our sales pages, we didn't just leave it there. We built informational depth to support those sales pages. So for each sector, we created in-depth informational guides, not fluffy blog posts, proper helpful resources like how healthcare recruitment agencies can streamline compliance tracking, how construction recruitment agencies can reduce admin time using automation, how niche agencies can stale without cruising headcount and these guides will long form practical industry aware and actually useful with real life insights from the recruitment founders. And that was the key. We really went in depth and relevant. And then we internally linked back to those relevant sector sales pages. So now we had informational content supporting the commercial pages. We built topical authority and because of that, Google started to understand, oh, this site really knows about healthcare recruitment. It could see it could be like, okay, I trust this company and we also made sure we were linking to and from the big parent company because we got some authority from there. Then we made, you know, we like narrowed down and built authority in our niche. Then after a month or two, a couple of pages started to take off. We watched what took off and doubled down because not every sector performed equally. Some industry pages started to gain traction factor, started to gain traction faster. In Google Analytics and Google software, Google Search Console, we could see the healthcare recruitment software and the teacher recruitment software were converting better and picking at momentum. So instead of spreading effort evenly, we doubled down on what was working, which went more content around those specific sales pages, more internal linking. We went back on to those sales pages to see how we could refine them with better CTAs, more FAQs. 20% of pages were driving 80% of opportunity and we doubled down there. We also didn't just look at the website, you know, I always talk about building off-page authority as well, building the brand and for us, LinkedIn mattered. So we didn't just post by our software. Instead, we created genuinely helpful posts around things like recruitment work, flow tips, compliance changes, sector trends and we also made sure there were, you know, some controversial posts in there as well to be driving engagement and then we linked strategically to our relevant guides and sector posts. We aligned our SEO with our social media content strategy because if the healthcare posts or recruitment posts were performing well socially, then that performing well socially, then that helped our SEO content and web pages rank higher as well. That's what I love. SEO and socials or SEO and marketing aren't separate. They inform each other. You need to be looking at your marketing and all your different platforms and see how they work together. You can't have a completely different SEO strategy to your social strategy. So okay, the results won't overnight. They never are okay, but in three months from zero traffic, hang on, let me just pull up the screenshot from my Google Analytics when I was publishing this. Yeah, here we go. So in three months, our healthcare recruitment software page started getting, it's literally a brand new page on a brand new website after three months. It started getting daily visits and it made three inquiries within one month and these were proper inquiries that led to calls with discovery calls. And our teacher recruitment page was a little bit lower than that. It started getting about 15 hits a month and drove one query that month as well. But compare this to a brand new website which was getting zero inquiries. Can you see how yes SEO is slow, but it starts to compound and grow. And now two years on that same website when I went back to check the analytics this week preparing for this episode, they're now getting hundreds of visits a month on those pages. It's incredible. And you can do the same thing too by narrowing down, making sure you nail your keyword research, making sure you understand how to do keyword research, nailing search intent and then building your website around it and using the 80/20 principle. And then also making sure you're combining your socials, marketing strategy or your paid ad strategy with your SEO strategy. So I hope this episode shows you that if you're launching something new, do not try to rank for broad industry terms. Don't try to be everything to everyone. Pick niches, create dedicated pages, build informational depth, support those sales pages with the informational depth, then watch the performance, make sure you're doing off-page marketing as well that ties back into your SEO. And then once you see things starting to take off, double down on it and work harder at the areas which are doing well. Even if you're not as software as a service business, the principle is identical for you if you're a service-based business. Don't just have our services, make sure you have separate service pages. Make sure after a while thinking, okay, maybe our service pages are trying to target too broad instead of just being like a hairdresser. Why can't you be a gray blending hairdresser? Some of that specializes in blending grays for millennials or something like that. And make sure you're serving multiple locations, make sure you create proper location pages. Things like that, that really niche down, narrow down. This is exactly what I teach in the beginners SEO course. The core principle is we don't spray content everywhere, we don't chase vanity keywords, we don't try to optimize everything. Instead, we're working structured. This is how you build your website out. This is the structure you need for your website. These are the pages you need. And then this is how you do the keyword research for free mail art because I fully believe in the power of using free keyword research tools instead of the expensive, you know, $100 a month tools instead, you can just pay a couple hundred dollars a month, a couple hundred dollars one time and be able to teach yourself to fish essentially instead of having to pay these SEO software tools 100 dollars a month or worse paying an SEO professional, you know, thousands of dollars a month or one of those stamy ones and upwork which are like for freelancer, which like $200 a month for SEO is like, blah, blah, blah, blah. Your father better off learning how to do it yourself. you yourself how to fish so you can then watch your SEO grow and keep working on it slowly instead of leaving. That's what I teach in the course. I empower you to take control of your own SEO and grow your business yourself, steadily, without overwhelm. So if you liked today's episode, definitely go check out the plansuccess.com. I've got a couple of free downloads and resources for you there of course. And follow me on Instagram at the plan success. And if this episode has helped you, definitely please try and rate me five stars on Spotify to try and rate me. Rate me five stars on Apple and Spotify. It really helps me show up more in front of small business owners just like you so I can help more people. Thank you so much and that's all for today. Bye.