Challenge
For most of 2016, before developing their SEO and PPC strategies, we produced a huge volume of blog content for Aspect, which forms the backbone of much of the site’s authority and relevance in the field of video marketing and video production. It was in January 2017 that Superb Digital’s directors, Paul Morris and Joe Cox, sat down with Adam and Evelyn to discuss the company’s website with a view to implementing a search engine strategy, which would work alongside and inform the content production. Whilst their blog content was helping position Aspect as thought leaders in their field, without a detailed SEO strategy, we didn’t have the data and resulting direction to underpin it. Aspect’s site was beautifully designed but was failing to achieve it’s full search potential, most notably failing to rank for London based searches, despite having an office there, meaning they were really missing out on the lucrative London market. In such a competitive space, Aspect needed to take it to the next level and bring in our expertise in order to start ranking for the video related services and ROI related keywords that would bring them in those big lucrative leads. From the outset of us working with them, Aspect had broken their services into tier 1 and tier 2 areas, the former being the types keywords marketing directors and managers might use to discover their services like ‘video content agency’, ‘branded content agency’ and ‘video marketing strategy’. The tier 2 pages were more specific and tailored more to individual video types or sectors, like ‘animated video production’, ‘drone filming’, ‘explainer video production’ and ‘charity video production’. The SEO strategy from the outset was to focus on pushing tier 1 pages, as these were the kinds of enquiries Aspect really wanted. This was a challenge as many of these pages were competing with highly informational pages and the user intent was often ambiguous. Nonetheless these were the kinds of search terms marketing managers and directors in big companies were more likely to be searching for.
Solution
SEO Audit After extensive discussions with Aspect at their offices in Clifton, Bristol, we identified the areas they wanted to focus on. Much of our work had to dovetail with Aspect’s own extensive in-house marketing, so it was important that we were all on the same page. We conducted an in-depth website audit and competitor research to identify quick wins and opportunities, as well as give ourselves an idea of how much content and links we’d need to build in order to start seeing significant movement. Our entire approach to keyword research was to try and help push them towards their tier 1 pages and rank for terms that marketing execs and managers would be searching for. Our site audit highlighted straight away that Aspect weren’t really ranking for any of London based search, partly due to a lack of relevant content on the site and partly to do with an under-optimised London landing page. We had two ways we could remedy this. We could either create a local content silo on the site or conduct sitewide optimisation for both London and Bristol. We chose the latter. Overtime we built up their local signals and authority through the creation of a London office landing page, updating all metadata and building London specific citations as well as update their existing citations to show their London address. Last but not least, we started to produce some chunky and expert London centric blog content (suffice to say, this did the trick). Our audit also identified some serious keyword cannibalisation on the site. This meant that some of Aspect’s transactional pages were competing against each other in the search results pages (SERPs), meaning Google couldn’t decide which one to rank, holding Aspect back from ranking as well as they could for these terms. This was to do with too much overlap in Google’s eyes, between similar service pages (ie ‘brand video’ and ‘branded content agency’). Onsite Optimisation There was a lot of onsite optimisation to do on Aspect’s site and most of it revolved around the process of siloing their content. This would deal with a lot of the keyword cannibalisation issues that were going on by creating more relevancy and defined structure around specific services through the site’s URL hierarchy. Aspect were being hampered by the original design of the website and the way things had been implemented on the site historically. Significantly they had lots of ‘video production’ related landing pages that all existed at the same folder level in the URL hierarchy. With a flat website architecture such as Aspects, keyword cannibalisation can be a big problem, especially where there is overlapping content. Google tends to pick the page which it thinks is most relevant and that’s not always the right page. The best approach is to silo or “nest” this content within a URL directory structure, making it obvious as the webpages hierarchy. On top of this ongoing work, we also updated and optimised the metadata across many pages, identified opportunities to optimise existing content such as adding ALT tags and adding internal links. Following our keyword research we created a keyword map and identified content gaps in order to build new content. A significant issue from our perspective was that Aspect were not tracking any conversions, this is essential to understand the your most lucrative channels and marketing activities. This is easy to set up by using goals in Google Analytics. On top of this we implemented Ruler Analytics, which allowed us to track phone calls from any traffic source in order to gather more metrics and further ascertain the efficacy of our PPC / SEO work. We worked alongside Aspect’s web development agency when implementing some of the more fundamental changes, but coordinated all our suggested recommendations through Aspect. Content Production Having written service page and blog content for Aspect for some two years prior to implementing SEO, we had established a good working relationship on this front, with the client very happy in our work and expertise. After the SEO strategy was in place, the blog content we were creating became far more geared towards the SEO strategy. One of the big content projects that was born off the back of our SEO audit and keyword research, was the need for a large piece of evergreen content that helped them target keywords around ‘video marketing strategy’. This piece of content was planned in conjunction with Evelyn and our content director and the senior copywriter. The final content strategy guide is in excess of 10,000 words and broken into chapters all nestled under the new /content-strategy-guide silo. We saw significant uplift in target search terms after the publication of the video content strategy guide on their site. Another key goal of the content strategy was to help Aspect start ranking for London based search. As well as cornerstone content like the video strategy guide we chose to use the blog to begin creating London themed content. With such high domain authority already, this content started to see Aspect climb the rankings for some highly competitive London terms. One of these blog articles (Top 15 locations to film in London) remains one of the most popular blog articles on their site to date. On top of this, in 2019 we worked on a number of blog articles for Aspect that were in line with and supported their new ‘Cinergy’ brand drive. This involved attending meetings with their creative team and other heads of department to brainstorm ideas and feed into the process with our own thoughts and ideas. In this respect, in four years, Aspect have very much come to see Superb Digital as an extension of their own in-house marketing. Guest Blogging As with all search engine optimisation, creating off-site signals is a large part of helping a website rank. With video marketing and video production being a very competitive and lucrative market, it was clear from the start that onsite optimisation and content production wouldn’t alone cut it. From the start we advised Aspect to invest heavily in link building and content marketing, tapping into our extensive connections with business and marketing publishers in order to seed relevant content linking back to their own blog and cornerstone content, such as the video strategy guide. PPC Alongside organic search engine optimisation, we also took over Aspect’s AdWords campaign management in 2018. Aspect’s ad campaign, which has previously been run in-house, needed totally rebuilding from the ground up. Their current campaign structure meant they were wasting a lot of money unnecessarily and had no idea what was or wasn’t working. Another problem with Aspect’s AdWords campaign was that they were driving much of the paid traffic to their homepage, not best practice, so we identified and optimised new landing pages to send targeted traffic to. As with all campaigns, overtime we optimised their ad groups, filtering out keywords (negative keywords) to stop irrelevant traffic coming through. In Aspects case, these tended to be people looking for jobs or work experience, who were searching for things like ‘video companies bristol’. Over time we came to identify those keywords that were delivering a high volume of this sort of traffic and filtered them out.
Results
With regard to the PPC campaign, we saw a big uptick in relevant enquiries very quickly. Our organic SEO results have been extremely significant for Aspect, specifically around London based search, which is an extremely lucrative and larger market to Aspect than Bristol. From being nowhere in the search results to ranking at the top of page one for terms including ‘video agency london’ and ‘video content agency london’, this Bristol based video agency now has an extremely dominant presence in London based search. In Bristol, Aspect had historically ranked fairly well for many search terms but we’ve now increased this dominance across many more keywords, boosting Bristol based traffic considerably. Aspect’s growth has also been reflected at the national level, where they now rank on page one for many big transactional search terms such as ‘branded content agency’. We’ve seen some impressive results on the blogging front as well (which tend to rank for more ‘top of the funnel’ informational search terms). Amongst their top pages, the Top 15 Locations to Film in London and GDPR Guide are two of the most popular pages on their entire site in terms of monthly unique visitors.
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