Establishing Market Presence with 258% Organic Traffic Growth
OVERVIEW International Construction Firm invests in Search Engine Optimization
Increasing organic traffic often becomes an undervalued aspect in the world of digital marketing where instant results take priority over long-term foundational growth. With that said, we understand the importance of foundational marketing such as developing a strong organic search strategy and executing on it to show a positive return on investment. This is precisely what our search strategists were able to do with UHPC Solutions North America over the last year.
With ever-increasing demand--concrete, specifically ultra high performance concrete--remains as competitive of a marketplace as ever. This presented an opportunity for our search team to help develop a national search optimization plan within a competitive market. To achieve the goals set for the campaign, we prioritized proper planning as a necessary step in the larger scope of success.
The project was propelled by national headlines to show the importance of this industrial product to help repair the nearly 50,000 structurally deficient bridges across the country. Through the deployment of strategic content, UHPC Solutions successfully positioned their firm as a leading sub-contractor of a high-demand service provided by a certified team.
GOALS
About UHPC Solutions North America
UHPC Solutions North America started as a joint venture between global industry providers WALO and Posillico in 2018.
These two long-standing construction firms have operated across the world for the greater part of the 20th century. Despite being a large entity today, WALO values its long-standing tradition of providing quality local road-building in their early years of operating in the 1910s. Posillico started in the early 1990s, and is known for innovative asphalt recycling technologies. As we move further into the 21st century, UHPC Solutions North America continues to shape American roadways today.
After the founding of UHPC Solutions North America, the company helped bring to market ultra high performance concrete (UHPC) rehabilitation methods with a variety of high-end construction devices. Through the two firms' extensive experience, UHPC Solutions brings together over a century of infrastructure expertise.
The innovative nature of this new concrete technology helps to provide infrastructure with the required durability for today’s high demand for traffic. That being said, the high demand creates a competitive environment for the marketplace. This leads to challenges to gain proper exposure through online marketing channels which would have to be overcome.
CHALLENGE Growing a brand from square one
The UHPC Solutions team came to Instrumental Group with a fairly common marketing request: expand their brand into a completely new market with a focus on capturing sales qualified leads.
Yet, unlike many contractor service providers, the services offered by UHPC Solutions were tailored toward large-scale projects nearly exclusively selected by governments.
With this targeting in mind, the internal marketing team at UHPC simply did not have the proper local insights to effectively build a North American marketing strategy. With this in mind, UHPC Solutions North America turned to Instrumental Group to partner with to help create and implement their go-to-market strategy.
When creating a content strategy revolving around a key industry term, brands must plan to take into account the difficulty ranking for a broad industry keyword such as, “ultra high performance concrete.” Yet, with the right strategy, even a difficult keyword to rank for can offer brands a positive return on investment.
Key challenges the UHPC Solutions North American team faced:
- Developing an engaging and informative content plan
- Targeting governments instead of traditional commercial or residential services
- Implementing a search optimization strategy to enter a new market
To develop solutions for each of these challenges, we needed both a strategy and proper implementation.
SOLUTION A winning strategy developed with the end in mind
With our clear goals in mind, the entire search strategy required an inclusive plan to reach the established organic traffic goals. This included proper strategy and then optimization of all on-page assets, off-site optimization, and technical aspects of the site.
Starting with the main services offered by UHPC Solutions, our search team started with a keyword research session. Through this process, the team identified around two dozen target keywords perfect for their service offerings. These included core targets such as bridge infrastructure, rehabilitation, and innovative technology within this centuries-old industry.
The content strategy needed to support the desired uplift in traffic which required a creative and analytical approach. Blog content had to be valuable to our buyer personas and offer ideal search metrics. The Instrumental Group team took to this with a more analytical approach to select key topic clusters, which balanced key search metrics such as the average monthly search volume and keyword difficulty. After an extensive strategic planning session, the time arrived for the implementation and optimization of the digital marketing campaign to begin.
RESULTS Immediate growth in KPI
Looking back on the campaign, the results speak for themselves.
Through the keyword research process, we also realized the importance of developing a strategy around the brand’s usage of the industry term, UHPC. These considerations helped finalize the pillar page to direct the new content clusters toward, “Why Engineers Use Advanced Concrete.” Afterward, the selection process for supporting topic clusters started with a goal to focus on valuable content rather than simply keywords.
After we created this underlying strategy, the team then developed a list of optimal content ideas to deploy on their website. The content strategy, built on a foundation of the keyword research, helped with two separate but key aspects of the site’s optimization efforts.
First, we selected the general blog topics with an analytical approach. Second, the groupings of different content ideas led us to created three crucial pillar pages. Together, these two tasks of blog topic creation and pillar page selection created the needed foundation for a strong search optimization campaign. Furthermore, this helped to create the proper foundation for growth within a new market for UHPC Solutions North America.
After we implemented the keyword research across the website through the deployment of new blog content, metadata, and header text, the site started to slowly (but surely) rank for these keywords. Through this process, the search analysts and marketing strategists worked onsite to help properly optimize pages for their target keywords. This led to a higher rank for the keywords and helped to drive more traffic to the website.
As content started to launch onto the website, it did not take long to see results. Initially, the site saw a small spike in traffic as content started to roll out. Yet, with more time for search engines to record the many changes implemented across the website, the site started to see more noteworthy growth.
The steady growth started to lead to more noteworthy results toward the 4th quarter of 2019. With that in mind, our SEO team started to see results from the on-page optimization for our target keywords, offsite optimization tasks such as link building, and the technical aspects which factor into search rank. The site also ranked in search results for the number one position for a key industry term which through the promotion from a Public Broadcasting Service news story, skyrocketed traffic to the site.
Organic web traffic grows over 250%
FINAL THOUGHTS SEO starts with a great foundation
With careful planning and proper implementation, traffic grew exponentially on the UHPC Solutions North America website. Through the optimization process, site traffic peaked at a yearly high, showing an increase of over 600% in site visitors. To make this all possible, a proper foundation to build upon became a critical component. Furthermore, researching and understanding key industry trends helped to propel the site to have first page rankings for nearly all target keywords.