6 Unbelievable SEO Success Stories

Hiring an SEO company or buying SEO services can be a daunting process. Unlike PPC, where a return on investment can be demonstrated almost immediately, often, it can take several months to begin to generate results with SEO, so naturally, business owners will want to do their due diligence before committing time and money to a campaign. In this article we’ll take a look at 6 of the best SEO success stories to show what you can expect from an SEO campaign.

1367% Organic Traffic Increase

The first case study is one of our clients, a start up business. The company was based around running a website which compared care homes and care providers, allowing users to find the best care providers in their areas and leave reviews. The business is dependent on website traffic to grow, however it had initially been built in such a way that Google couldn’t find all the pages on the site.

With just a few simple changes to the site’s structure and a link building campaign, we were able to increase the site’s traffic by a massive 1367% in just one month! The full case study can be read here.

300 New Visitors In One Week

This Case Study by Aran Smithson at the Moz Blog gives a great insight into a quick, creative strategy to drive website traffic in a tough niche: coat hangers. As Aran notes, no one gets excited about coat hangers, so certain tactics like guest blogging are unlikely to be effective.

Aran’s creative solution was to create a meme image based on the popular “keep calm and carry on” WWII posters. By sharing this image along with a description and link back to the site on social networks including Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, and others, he was able to drive an additional 300 visitors to the site in the space of a week with a very small time investment, and negligible monetary investment.

He concludes that by repeating this 30 minute activity each week, it would be possible to grow natural, organic backlinks over time.

190% Organic Traffic Increase Over 6 Months

Over a 6 month period we were able to grow our client, a nationwide funeral plan provider, from 907 visitors per month to 2,127 per month, thanks to a 190% increase in organic traffic (traffic generated using SEO). This was achieved through content marketing, by building a blog on the client’s site. These blog articles were designed to educate and inform people in the market for the client’s services, and resulted in over double the enquiries per month.

The full case study can be read here.

Increasing Qualified Traffic

An increase in website traffic (visitors) is meaningless if it doesn’t produce an increase in sales. This case study by Eric Horan at EPageCity demonstrates just that. While traffic saw a modest 13% increase, the real value of their SEO campaign came through improving the quality of that traffic.

Their SEO campaign specifically targeted users who would be interested in their client’s services, which resulted in an 87% increase in online enquiries. Meanwhile, the product pages on the site saw an average of 33% more traffic. Some product pages saw their traffic grow by an impressive 125% and 156%. This all meant that while overall traffic increased modestly, the campaign served to remove ‘time waster’ traffic, and instead grew qualified traffic, I.e. the visitors who were interested in buying something.

An analogy might be to use a shop. The campaign had the effect of removing people browsing in a shop but not buying and replacing them, with customers who were taking items off the shelves and taking them to the tills to buy.

Growing An Online Business With Traditional Marketing Techniques

Many business owners can be put off by online marketing due to assumptions that online marketing is ‘new’ and ‘untested’. Nothing could be further from the truth. Online marketing is reliant on the traditional marketing strategies that have been used for many years, with a few new tactics.

A great case study is Gym Talk, a community based bodybuilding site grown from zero to 284,000 visitors in the space of 12 months.

This has been achieved through using marketing strategies that have stood the test of time:

1. Building a product that offers value

2. Finding and engaging your audience

3. Being there for your audience

4. Networking and outreach

You can read the full case study here.

SEO Is One Of The Cheapest Ways To Promote Your Business

This great case study at SEO 4 Advisors helps to put your SEO investment in perspective, comparing it to PPC, another online marketing tactic. While both services work well together for a complete online marketing strategy, SEO is the most cost effective over the long term. In the case study on Meridian Financial, a total of $3,650 was charged with a $800 per quarter retainer. The result was an increase in monthly traffic from just 103 to 365, a 254% increase. A year later, traffic increased further to 442 per month.

meanwhile, if this traffic had been bought through Google Adwords (PPC), it would have cost over $1,500 per month. That means in their first year, Meridian Financial paid $6,850, while if they had invested in PPC, the same amount of traffic over the year would have cost $18,000, almost 2.5 times the price.

While PPC is usually quicker to start generating a return on investment quicker, SEO won out in the long term as the more cost effective service.