
“SEO Nick went from being an upstart with plenty of fans, eager for content and loyal to their unsung underground favourite, to being a bona-fide industry leader with 500,000 monthly readers.”
Mark
SEO Nick
The Company
SEO Nick is a leading authority blog in the world of SEO. Articles focused on testing popular SEO strategies and analyzing their effectiveness help readers achieve better SEO results for their own websites.
The Challenge
SEO Nick was a quite successful venture from the start. The writers were providing solid, provable advice – content that was excellent for attracting natural interest and organic traffic. And the site was well optimized – the proof was clearly in the pudding that they knew what they were doing with SEO…their case studies were attracting the attention of not only web entrepreneurs but also SEO professionals.
However, there’s only so far you can go dividing your time between creating great content/keeping the discussion going with readers and marketing/building SE ranking/leveraging that social credibility. SEO Nick was doing a great job of building organic traffic, but they were falling behind on in-bound links, social media presence, and diversifying their keyword ranking. The result was a much lower search ranking than they were worthy of.
SEO Nick brought us on board to tap into the credibility they’d achieved with their readership and other SEO leaders. They were running on empty and they knew there was so much more that was possible, if only they had the resources. Engine Ready came into the picture in 2012 to turn an upstart into a king.
The Solution
The first thing we did was reevaluate SEO Nick’s keyword strategy and rebuild it from the bottom up. While they had already done an excellent job with primary keywords, bringing in traffic and achieving ranking on a couple key terms per article, we set our sights on expanding their reach with less popular secondary terms and long-tail keywords that got them one and two rankings on numerous hyper-relevant terms.
The second thing we did was to take control of SEO Nick’s social media accounts. Across the board, from Twitter to Facebook, to Instagram, to LinkedIn, we developed daily outreach plans that would get the message out further, through more channels and attract the attention of SEO big-shots as well as the thousands of companies in need of the advice SEO Nick had to offer. By increasing their following not only in quantity (ten-fold to be precise) but also by quality (we caught the attention of some of the most influential people in SEO, we were able to bring traffic in from new avenues every day. In short we succeeded at the number one most important SEO factor for a blog: we leveraged the quality of their content to build social sway and credibility.
From there we tweaked numerous less obvious aspects of the SEO Nick approach for SEO efficiency: design, headers, meta data, site map, as well as culling through the internal linking and tagging.
The Result
SEO Nick went from being an upstart with plenty of fans, eager for content and loyal to their unsung underground favourite, to being a bona-fide industry leader with 500,000 monthly readers. Engine Ready more than doubled their readership and helped them catch the attention of industry thought-leaders. We achieved this by working behind the scenes, allowing them to focus on creating the quality content that would keep readers returning while we built the trusted in-bound link sources and social presence that would turn them into recognized authorities.