How I Grew My Client's Business––And Mine--With SEO

Hey all! I’ve been enjoying this subreddit for a while now, and at the beginning of last year I quit my job to start my own branding/marketing agency. We offer a full range of services, and SEO has become a focus and want for a lot of clients. Thanks to a lot of what I learned by starting my marketing career at some of the most cutting edge SEO agencies, trial and error, and with the help of resources like this subreddit, I have a few case studies to share.

Case Study #1 – Local Beer/Wine Store

One of our first SEO clients ever was a small, local beer & wine store in our neighborhood. We provided the technical SEO to their existing website. From not pulling any organic traffic prior, they are now pulling ~130 monthly traffic from search volume.

Using Ahrefs and noting trends in the area, we were able to secure the #1 spot for people searching for natural wine in our city. We built out a separate web page to give their natural wine selection its own place, and for SEO. While not a high ranking keyword at the time, natural wine is consistently becoming more popular, even with casual wine drinkers. We put them in a position to be recognized as the shop to carry it. Over time, this led to them also ranking for more general terms such as beer store and wine shop.

Case Study #2 – Small Interior/Exterior Painting Company

This next client is a longtime friend of mine, and the first company we started working with for both technical and blog SEO content. We also built his website, logo, and run his social media so it’s a full-on case study of how we run his branding and SEO.

We started by measuring the local competition, their backlink profiles, and checking out their blog content. What was surprising to us was how often small local companies use sketchy backlinks, and that it was working for them. We don’t guarantee anything in our contracts because we don’t use these tactics (and we’ve seen this issue pop up regularly now). If anything, this pumped us up because we knew it would be easy to outrank these sites, as these spam backlinks were virtually worthless. There simply isn’t any other competition besides these sites, until we came along.

By targeting easy keywords and securing a couple solid backlinks through HARO and local online newspapers, his company now ranks for ~56 keywords. Several of these are highly specific with their intent and area, giving him a great chance to get new clients. As I said earlier, we also run his social media. We were able (by luck, timing, and a bunch of factors) to garner 50k impressions from a single post. We saw a big uptick in traffic to his site, and multiple leads coming through his social media accounts asking for projects.

Our campaign with him is still ongoing, but as of now, he has 10 projects lined up on his calendar––with more leads coming in regularly. He has to hire a couple of employees to keep up with demand for his services.

Case Study #3 – Us! Our Marketing/Branding Company

We’ve grown a bunch in the last couple of months, so we haven’t been able to give full attention to our own content and marketing. That being said, we have done a bit of work. Similarly to our local painting company, we secured backlinks by using HARO and local news outlets for some of our content. My background in Public Relations has helped tremendously here and we’ve been utilizing this for clients across the nation now.

One of our best performing pieces of content is for a topic I’ve always found important to brands, especially to small local businesses. While creating the content, I also created custom graphic content to easily demonstrate the concept. No other site ranking for the keyword had anything like this, so we were able to secure the top spot and a featured snippet position. We’ve gotten a little bit of traffic from the keyword, and brought on several clients by utilizing the main idea behind it.

Ideally, we want to grow to take on clients with larger projects, but for now, we’re growing steadily. We have two full time employees, and we’ve been able to work with small businesses all across the US.

Thanks to everyone who read this far!

Also, if there’s any key takeaway from this for other marketers and SEO agencies reading this, make sure you focus on your customer service. Your clients often don’t know much about the specifics of how and what you’re doing for them, but it’s up to you to talk to them in an informative, but not know-it-all kind of way. So many clients come to us with hesitation because of past burns from previous experiences with agencies. You don’t have to be the absolute best SEO wizard to provide noticeable results and a great working relationship with your clients. You do, however, have to be personable and respectful of the fact that they’re running businesses too.

Feel free to ask any questions about our processes and services!