“Lateral Search Engine Optimisation” - A case study on niche key-wording

PART 1 of 2

This case study looks at how to leverage niche keywords within your website’s content in order to draw in ‘lateral’ traffic.

A while back, I redeveloped a client website – www.bluefreight.com – and spent some time performing some light key-wording and search engine optimization. Granted, I didn’t build a structured SEO strategy. But we had a vague idea of the sort of keywords that were important to the site from having worked on it previously.

In fact, when we took on the project we had the default mindset of the typical web developer: Let’s just make it look nice and functional for visitors.

Usually a decent strategy, I along with most web designers get away with this approach all the time. I freely admit this. There’s not always room in the budget for 2 – 3 good solid days of Search Engine Optimisation, let along an ongoing campaign.

Along the way, we were lucky enough to make some surprising discoveries by studying the patterns of traffic using Google Analytics (I discuss this in Video #1 of our Online Marketing Diaries on our main website). As a result, we were able to make some pretty smart decisions and increase their website traffic by 300% within a few short weeks and increase Quote Requests by 1500%!

Based on this experience, I decided to change our focus. We re-educated ourselves and went to market with a bunch of strategies that we’ve found to work.

So now let me show you real proof of how important website optimisation is to generating site traffic. Additionally, I’ll briefly discuss how you can leverage this traffic to generate more leads.

Once, a typical website…
The original Bluefreight site was attracting an average of 20 – 30 page hits per day. There were no more than 2 quote requests per month being submitted through the quote web form listed on the contact page.

When I perform traffic analysis for new clients, this is the average amount of traffic for a website that has been around for a couple of years… Stagnating, sitting, doing nothing, and providing little.

Our brief for the redevelopment of the Bluefreight site was to therefore build a more interactive site and find a way to attract more visitors.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t room in the budget for 3 solid days of Search Engine Optimisation with monthly revisions. So we did what we could within the allocated budget.

A customer centric approach bears fruits…
Firstly, we decided that we’d really focus on customer centricity, communications, site usability and industry information resources. Due to the complexity of the industry Richard, Director of Bluefreight, was keen to ensure that he provided customers and prospects with important industrial and legal information that was critical to the successful transportation of commercial cargo from one international port to another.

Secondly, I spent a little time researching appropriate page headings that were both relevant to the page content whilst aiming for particular search phrases related to the Freight Forwarding and shipping industry.

Figure 1 - www.bluefreight.com page heading

For each page on the site, I also ensured that there was a decent amount of valuable content for each topic. We have the view that making a website content-rich provides customers and leads with a useful resource that will drive them back to the site time and time again (repeat visitors are critical).

After the site was completed and live, we found a 26% increase in traffic over 1 month (on average). This was purely based on fresh, decent content and relevant keywords shown on each page header as shown in Figure 1. This later increased dramatically as we added industry news feeds and email marketing campaigns… But that’s another story.

Phase 1 of the project ended and our client decided to let the site run the course of time.

But as time went on, something unusual happened.

Naturally the age of a site can heavily influence the rank of a site and with our additional home page key-wording, bluefreight.com quickly reached # 1 for a couple of different search terms. However, the biggest surprise was that 60% of all traffic was derived from a completely unexpected search term related to vessel specifications.

The super interesting part is that aforementioned page was NOT the home page.

Whilst I won’t disclose what this term was, it soon became apparent that it was obviously a highly searched industry-specific phrase. Very quickly, this particular page became #1 in Google for the search phrase in question.

Essentially, this key phrase drove a large proportion of our site visitors to a page that was unimportant in our eyes. In fact, it was simply another information page to us.

Thus, I use the phrase "lateral keywords" to describe this phenomenon. These lateral keywords attract a niche audience looking for niche information. Typically these niche keywords are not highly contested and in many cases it is very possible to quickly rank #1 for such phrases. This is where SEO can get really interesting.

An SEO constultant can help you analyse your current search traffic and define potentially successful niche terms to attract highly quality traffic with specific needs.

The fact that we had effectively key-worded the page heading and related it to the body content ensured that search engines had appropriately catalogued and ranked this page as the most relevant for this particular group of keywords.

God bless Analytics.
How did we gather all this data? We could not have know any of this information without using website Analytics to measure traffic data and analyse patterns in this traffic.

Figure 2: Website analytics

So what’s the significance of all this?

We were lucky enough to find a key phrase that is highly searched with very little world competition. And it begs the question: What can be done to leverage this traffic and capture these leads?

In the next blog we’re going to look at the solution to this problem. But before we go, I want to take a moment to ask you a question…

• Do you know what the highest ranking page is on your website?
• Do you know what keywords and phrases attract the most traffic to your site?
• Do you have any successful ‘lateral’ keywords that you can leverage?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you should. Because this is what modern marketing metrics is all about. Nowadays it’s just as important as knowing your market demographic.

So if you take anything out of this article, please remember this phrase:

Knowledge is power and measurement is the key.