In this case study we show you how StrategyBeam, a digital marketing agency in Florida, optimized their website with the help of the Searchmetrics Content Experience. Chris, the co-founder of the agency explains, how he optimized the content on 41 landing pages on the website and how he turned that better-ranking content into a growth of new leads.
What Is StrategyBeam?
Hey there, my name is Chris, and I am a co-founder of a digital marketing agency located in Orlando, FL called StrategyBeam. My wife, Ayasha, and I have been helping clients with their online marketing needs since 2013, and during that time we have had the privilege to work with companies in different industries and across the U.S. and several internal markets.
Since we are a husband and wife team, we both wear multiple hats in our marketing agency. My wife usually takes the lead on all things with Paid Media, social media marketing, analytics, and reporting, while I take the lead on copywriting, SEO marketing, and sales/customer service.
I love working with different companies with their copywriting projects because it allows me to learn about other industries. At the same time, I get the chance to go through the process of competitive research, keyword research, content review, and content creation.
These are all essential pieces of the content creation process, and each step can take a considerable amount of time and research to produce information that gets found by search engines and drives conversions for our clients.
Why Content Matters For Our Agency
Ayasha and I started our business because we are experts in our field and know that we can offer better solutions to our customers and deliver exceptional value.
During the early days of growth, we really struggled to attract high-quality leads. We used Google Ads, Facebook marketing, and even Reddit Ads to try to pay our way into the lives of our clients. But we quickly saw that while the ads were doing their job, the cost of each lead was increasing as those platforms were driving costs up for our products/services in our desired niche.
Instead of trying to compete against larger agencies with deeper pockets, we decided to flip the game and focus on winning the hearts of potential clients with educational content. This information had to be optimized to get found in search engines, read well, and lead customers down the path to contacting us.
The Profits Are In The Process
As our portfolio of clients grew, I knew we needed to find a way to continue to serve our clients while also giving enough flexibility to scale our sales process. At the same time, we also needed to continue to develop content for our own agency’s marketing efforts.
As a copywriter, I had already established a process that many professionals have used/seen to research the market, look at competitor content, and lay the foundations for great content that ranks. Like most copywriters, I created a process pieced together with many programs to do this process that looked something like:
- Create a matrix in Google Sheets with the page title, proposed URL, keywords, and reference content.
- Look at tools like Ahref, SEMrush, and Google Keyword Planner to get estimates for Keyword Volume and Competition.
- Create a list of the top 15 competitors.
- Assign competitor page URLs to each of the proposed URLs I will create. I would add this information to the Google Sheets matrix.
- Look at tools like SEMrush and Ask The Public to find frequently asked questions. I would add these to the matrix, assigning different items for each page.
- Start writing content while reviewing existing content and fact-checking. This was always mentally taxing, as I would have about 10 tabs open at a time and jumping around like a detective to find the best phrasing and optimizing content as I went.
- Review content after writing the first draft to make sure keywords were placed and then add some of the frequently asked questions that I found to boost the page ranking position in SERPs.
As you can probably tell, the copywriting process was involved in both time and resources. Not only did this process often require a long timeline to finish, but it also left itself open to errors during each step that could lead to diminishing returns.
I love researching new tools, and during the process of testing many tools that promised to help streamline the content creation process, I came across Searchmetrics. This was around the same time that I attended UnGagged 2017 and met the Searchmetrics team.
During our discussions at the conference, I learned that Searchmetrics offered a suite of solutions that streamline the entire process I was using and struggling to simplify on my own.
I saw Searchmetrics in action during the conference, and it was right after that presentation that I had the “Ah Ha!” moment, and I realized the real power of Searchmetrics. Not only does Searchmetrics offer unique insight into data surrounding keywords, but it also provides an industry-leading content suite that helps writers evaluate, write, and optimize content in real-time.
Soon after the conference, I started playing around with the Searchmetrics Suite. The user experience is easy to pick up and understand, and if you have used any other SEO tool in the past, then you will be able to start using Searchmetrics right after you pick it up and start playing around with the features.
After testing and trying out the new features, I wanted to use Searchmetrics to help grow the online presence of my agency in the local Orlando, FL market.
How We Use Searchmetrics To Grow Our Online Presence
The competition for marketing services in Orlando, FL, is fierce, just like it is in any other more significant, more established market. The competition is further amplified because of the saturation of marketing services that come with the region’s economic focus on hospitality, technology, and startups.
Since Ayasha and I need to reach qualified customers through content marketing, we know that we need to produce content that gets found in search engines and engages our customers. We need content that is laser-focused on the needs and questions of our customers while also having a broad enough footprint to grow our online visibility for a more general thematic structure in our industry.
I was creating content that was ranking in search engines, but something was missing from the mix and keeping us from seeing success in the market. Sure, we were signing new clients and increasing overall revenue, but I knew something was missing as we were only receiving 2-3 new leads each month through organic traffic.
In November 2018, we decided to redesign and redevelop our website from the ground up. We worked with a designer to create custom templates and contracted a local developer to build the site with lightning fast code. During the process, I also rewrote all the pages on our website from scratch, and to ensure the success of the content I used the Keyword Research and Content Manager suites of Search Metrics.
In all, I wrote 41 pages for the site that range from the homepage, parent/child service pages, and local SEO pages. Each of these pages was optimized based on Searchmetric’s Topic Explorer, providing unmatched insight into how I build each individual page while also optimize the thematic relationship and structure of each page on the site.
After a lot of work, we relaunched our site at the end of March 2019. Many variables lead to the overall success of the new site’s performance, but I know that the improved content guided by the Searchmetrics suite gave us a competitive advantage.
How Do I Use Searchmetrics To Create Amazing Content
Searchmetrics is a suite of AI-powered tools that bring together the best of keyword research, performance tracking, and content creation. Our agency uses Searchmetrics daily to understand how to build content that will get found in search and meet the marketing needs of our clients.
I spend more of my time in the Content Experience section of the suite as I write content for my clients and our agency. I have used similar tools, and the quality of results and insight provided in real-time is the best I have seen hands-down.
If you produce content at a large scale and work with clients who demand the best content, then you know how difficult it can be to create content efficiently. Let’s take a look at how Searchmetrics streamlines the entire research, creation, and optimization process of content creation into a straightforward tool.
This is a screenshot from a blog post I wrote a few months ago using the Content Explorer platform. After I entered the central topic into the Topic Explorer feature of Searchmetrics, the AI-driven tool searched the web for similar content and delivered a wealth of information to guide me at each step of the writing process as I use the Content Manager.
On the left-hand side, Searchmetrics lays out recommended keywords and phrases that I should use throughout the content. The keywords are a great way to keep me on track and help frame creative thinking, and the tool keeps track of how many times you used each term in real-time. This is a massive point because I can focus on research and writing instead of keeping track of how many times I used the term “SEO campaign” throughout the content.
This saves a lot of brainpower and provides an easy reference, so I know where I need to steer the content flow.
The center area in the Content Manager is a standard writing field that works just like Google Docs or Microsoft Word. This is where the magic happens, and as you type the left-hand section of the platform populates in real-time. The cool think about the writing area is that you can change the font, which is a must for any OCD copywriter (I love to write using Arial font).
Finally, the right-hand side of the platform provides several areas that give you confidence in how your content is coming along. There are several elements in this Heads Up Display (HUD) that offers more in-depth insight and confidence as you continue to write, including:
- Overall Content Score: No more second-guessing the quality of your content as you are writing. This metric takes into account several aspects of your content and lets you know if your content will do well in the wild.
- Word Count: The length of your content matters because more words provide a larger canvas for you to use keywords and phrases, plus you can answer the questions of your audience.
- Sentence Structure: Instead of thinking about keywords in isolation, you can look at this metric to understand how well people can consume your content. This metric is essential as you want your content to be read by human readers first while considering how search engines view it secondly.
- Questions & Topic Explorer: These fields are definitive editions because you can find the most critical issues and thematic clusters right in the same area as you write. No more jumping between multiple tools.
Key Takeaway For Any Agency Or Business Marketers
- Creating great content is difficult, and if you want your company to stand out from your competitors, you need a material that gets found by search engines and engages your readers.
- This is no easy task, and as an SEO copywriter with several years of experience, I have seen several methods and strategies to research, organize, write, and optimize content. Most of these approaches to the content development are inefficient and force the writer to second-guess their efforts.
- Whether you are a freelancer, agency owner, or part of a corporate marketing team, you need the best tools to help you create content that gets found on search engines and engages your customers. The old way of researching and optimizing content with several tools and spreadsheets is simply not good enough anymore.
- Searchmetrics Content Manager is a fantastic addition to any team, and you will be able to streamline the entire content production process. The time and energy needed to create significant content decreases, and the impact of your efforts will increase. Your team will love the easy to use tools provided by the A.I.-driven technology, and the simplified User Interface.
So, if you are ready to ditch the spreadsheets and take the guessing out of content production, then you should take a look at Searchmetrics today!