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20 Comments

SEO done. What Next?

In November, we implemented SEO on our website hunterand.co and slowly our organic search has increased. However, getting people to contact us is still super low. We're not a high traffic transactional business. More customised service model. So with that in mind, it would be great to get some thoughts on what you guys would suggest the best way would be to grow our traffic and also convert into leads.

I'm thinking of writing content, but not sure what to write that will get people excited enough to reach out to us. Thoughts and suggestions welcome.

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    Hey @nomis_mikah, other folks on this thread have given you some suggestions on positioning and CTA, so I'll get into more tactical:
    SEO: Your SEO is not 'done', but it is started. I assume you mean you've taken initial steps for technical on-site SEO. This is important, but the next step is to get people to link to you. Also, keep in mind you want to check-in on SEO every couple months to make sure nothing has changed with Google's algo, or on your site, that could negatively impact you.
    Content: I recommend creating a content marketing campaign in an area where you can establish thought leadership. This will get you both direct visitors and links, which will help your SEO.
    Listings: I would get listed on https://www.getcredo.com/ and https://clutch.co/ as a start. I can intro you to the folks at Credo if you like.
    Partnerships: There are lots of product companies, including mine, that work adjacent to branding. For example, I expect to have a lot of smaller brands using my upcoming product, https://www.1brand.co/ who need branding help, and we don't plan to become an agency. If you're interested, DM me and we can figure something out.

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      I second this. Giving your domain a quick check on ahrefs reveals some pretty drastic negative changes. I'd go back to take a good hard look at your SEO. Perhaps "Mo Works" (also from Melbourne in the same niche) does a pretty job seo-wise.

      Also @tela's advice establish thought leadership is a nice one. Go full Gary V. style on Linkedin and sprinkle some Lead Gen campaigns in there as well. All gated content, with some nice content about insert_your_thought_leadership_topic_here.

      Figure out what your CPL/CPA really is and how high you could go. This should set the tone for your lead gen campaigns. Make sure you have an exceptional follow up strategy in place as well. Have your best sales guys make the first dozen lead calls and question them thoroughly after each call. Use that info to tweak your lead gen campaign even more.

      Make use of the sales freebies Steli Efti is handing out. Not sure of the email address right now (just Google Steli Efit) and write "Can you send me your books?" as the subject line. Amazing stuff, for sure.

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        Thanks David. I'll download the book and take a look.

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      Thanks heaps for your comments and feedback. The IH community has been awesome. You're right that SEO is never done and it's a long-term play. We will def. monitor it every month and then tweak if necessary. We're also looking at writing content. The challenge we def. have is site linking/getting listed. We're already the number one branding agency in Australia on Clutch.co. I don't know about getcredo.com and sure it would be great to be introduced. I also like the idea of 1brand.co. and will def. DM you. 👋

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    The design of your site is amazing! I think that speaks well to what you do.

    If I were in your shoes, I would not try the SEO path first.

    We're not a high traffic transactional business. More customised service model.

    I think you should do direct outreach. Contact businesses, tell them what you can do and find out if they have a need. It's going to take a lot of work.

    Since it's a service and not a self-serve SaaS app, you'll benefit a lot more from directly talking to potential customers. You'll be able to answer their questions and personalize the interaction. You can link them to your site if they want to see other projects you've done.

    Something about design work makes it so that people don't decide after visiting a site once. It's a human-to-human interaction so people generally want to have some trust in who they hire. As you do more projects, your name will be out there more. You'll probably get most of your customers from word of mouth.

    All that said, one way you could improve your site is by adding testimonials onto your landing page. Testimonials help foster a bit of trust. I see you have some in 'client reviews' on that clutch site. Ask for permission from the customer to add the best ones to your landing page.

    I would also recommend setting up some type of drip email campaign. That would help capture visitors into a list that you can remind them you exist every once in a while, so if a need ever comes up, you're in their mind. See "Building a storybrand" by Donald Miller. It talks about the importance of a drip-email campaign.

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      Thanks Ryan. Yes a drip email campaign is something we need to do. I'll also check out Donald Miller.

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    Hey Simon..like your work but not your website. First of all, UX vise you are losing people by not offering them a clear way to contact you. Use your first screen ie what people see first when they come to your website to give them a clear CTA and get in touch with you.
    Your heading, the transparent one that follows user when he scrolls down, does not work either. You ought to be using it to have another CTA and give visitors the possibility to contact you whenever they scroll. Why not transparent? Well, it messes up with your writing when scrolling (or at least on smaller screens).
    Footer is your last chance at giving visitors the option to click further into your website. If I did not click on the menu I wouldn't know there is a news section (or contact and about us pages).
    About us page...who are you? I mean who is leading the company, who is client point of contact etc. You have to personalize it and showcase who is working for you, with you.
    Finally, message bot does not work for me (not sure why) and it messes up with links that re underneath it ie you can't click on them.
    SEO. You can, as you did, piggy ride brand names you've worked with but you might get better results by writing about topics in About us page and basically about topics you are into. This is too big of a topic to cover it here but the basic would be KW research on topics > write meaningful content > share/link it and raise brand awareness and your domain strength to be able to do it the same with a much (traffic) bigger keywords. You'll catch new clients along the way :-)
    Social. is close to SEO so think about, plan, your presence on Linkedin and Twitter for your brand but also Dribble and other work showcasing websites. For example, your projects would sit fine in Dribble, while your future posts on stuff you do would sit well on your Twitter and Linkedin. All of them can have their place on Facebook :-)

    Long post sorry...what you need to think firs is what you want your visitors to do on your website (contact) then work on the rest.

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      Our site was made back in 2016. Originally created more as a portfolio to show off the work. We've recently spent some money fixing the site and we know that it can be improved a lot more from a UX and lead conversion POV. Money is tight and we'll wait until we have enough money to overhaul/rethink it. From a new client perspective everyone who's contacted us loves the work. Thanks for your feedback.

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    In my view marketing is a long game, you need to identify your target audience, and really focus on them, identify the channels / media they use and then focus on getting in front of them so they know you exist.

    That could be videos, blogs, instagram posts, linkedin direct messages, events, breakfasts, ads or all of the above.

    Once they know you exist you can then entice them to want to know more, and show them the benefit of using you. But first they need to know you exist, otherwise it doesn't work.

    So... who are you targeting, and where do they spend their time?

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    Hi Simon. Here are some On-Page SEO items that still require improvement on your website: https://cloud-access.online/reports/ljXBOPfTv2OQgsjMe_kcQeODxfJyZrUq/hunterand.co/2019-12-27/Site Audit (Details).html

    Feel free to ask any questions that you may have.

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      Hey Ștefan, thanks for the report. I have no idea bout the links and will need to go in and check everything. Some make sense to me with my limited knowledge and others I don't understand. But will take a look.

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        You are welcome. Every point comes with a brief explanation that can help you for a start.

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    It sounds like a combination of content marketing and BD/sales outreach is the logical next step.

    BD/Sales since you are low volume and more services oriented. It only takes a few clients to have a real impact on the business. IMO, that means going out and spending more time with fewer clients to court them and bring them over to your business. Since it is lower volume, you can do things that are more time consuming to win individual clients.

    Content marketing is a longer term play (like SEO). You need to build that up and develop that side of the marketing engine, which won't immediately pay dividends. I would think about thought leadership content and how to write articles that directly addresses the needs and questions you are seeing from your audience. One of the best ways to figure out your users needs and questions (besides just asking them which is the best way) is to research key words your users are searching and see volume and quality of those searches

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      Thanks for your feedback and comments. This is 100% right. We def. need to do a combination of things. Outreach to a specific target audience is key.

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    Hey! I'm still new to this - can you share the ways you implemented your SEO?

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      I worked with an SEO specialist. They did a review and then they put together a detailed plan. The plan covered short-term and long-term strategies. The first thing was to review how people searched for companies like ours. " Australians search by services + by agencies delivering those services per city". In this instance it was creative agency melbourne, branding agency melbourne, packaging agency melbourne. We then reviewed competitors to see how they ranked. How many searches, links, content, etc. We then rewrote the content on our pages to reflect this. Using the CraftCMS in the backend of our site, we then rewrote the title tags and meta descriptions. I.e. https://hunterand.co/projects/vodka-soda-packaging. On each project page we explicitly listed the services associated with that project. In addition to all this an easy win was to get our past client/existing clients to give us a review on google my business. And finally, we updated our content in the projects and also the about page to reflect who we are and what we do. This is super targeted and narrowly focused. The next step which will be to write more content from a branding expert POV. It needs to be written around what people would be interested in reading. We'll also look at building links.

      We are not SEO experts and every business is different so my recommendation is to reach out to someone who has the expertise to help you navigate it. In order to maintain a differentiated position within our market place we wrote our own meta descriptions highlight key search words, but also are in our tone-of-voice.

      I hope that helps.

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      I would also be interested in a quick summary

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    First, I would give the visitors, a form in front, not hidden inside the menu. Also, scrolling on the menu shows an arrow for the next image (chrome, 1766*768). And the chat window is not opening.
    Please get this checked.

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      Thanks Siddhant for your feedback. The pop-up forms I've come across are horrible and interruptive. Which is why we're trying the bot. At the moment it's a free thing provided by Pipedrive (CRM). Having said that we'll try and create a form or something more user friendly down the track. I'll mention the issue on Chrome. Thanks for sharing that.

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