SEO Strategy Trends and Insights

Global SEO Case Study for Scientific Company

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 02:02:47 GMT

Increased Organic Qualified Leads by 91%

Simplified Science Publishin g is a scientific illustration company that specializes in creating scientific figures and professional development courses for a global audience. The goal was to do a minimal number of website optimizations for maximum increases in organic traffic and leads.

Strategic SEO content and conversion design updates have been made every year for 3 years and resulted in an average 91% increase in quality monthly organic leads and with a 120% increase in annual profit from organic clients and course purchases.

The Challenge

Issues: In 2017, the website was only bringing in 34 organic new website visitors and less than one lead each month.

Goal: A new SEO website that increases qualified leads and ranks on the first page for "scientific illustrator," "scientific graphic," and "scientific illustrator course" keywords.

The Solutions

Small SEO and conversion design projects were completed each year to increase brand awareness, traffic, and leads:

2017: Website with no search engine optimizations
2018: Keyword and content optimizations for all pages
2019-2020: Conversion funnel design optimizations
2021: Website redesign and 4 targeted SEO blog pages
2022 (through Aug 2022): Added 12 new website pages to create professional development resources and ecommerce products for scientists
91% increase in qualified leads and 120% increase in monthly ecommerce profits compared to 2020.

Global SEO Case Study Results

Below is the SEO performance summary for organic traffic, leads, and keyword rankings for a scientific illustration company.

Website Leads and eCommerce Performance

Website Traffic Growth

Keywords and Backlinks

How to Increase Website Leads Using Quality SEO Content

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 13:56:38 GMT

With the right content strategy, websites can become a powerful lead magnet for your business and generate strong traffic growth with minimal oversight.

What is Quality SEO Content?

SEO content is a website page that is designed to rank in search engines, such as Google. Most websites make the mistake of using marketing-focused SEO content that only describes their brand. Quality SEO content is different because it focuses on solving your customer's pain points by using in-depth target audience research to create useful information that your potential customers are seeking. By combining useful content with relevant keywords, websites can bring in thousands of new leads each month from organic search.

How to Create Content that Increases Qualified Leads

In order to create SEO content that both generates leads and ranks on the first page of Google search, you need to apply a research-based SEO strategy for every page on your website. This process beings by understanding the psychology of your customer-base to come up with a list of relevant keywords, completing keyword and target audience research to make sure you are focused on a useful topic that will earn high volume traffic from your customers, and then building a website page that combines technical SEO with engaging content and design. Finally, after the page is live, you need to build links and leverage the content in all of your digital marketing channels and incorporate them into your social media posts, emails, and influencer content. Learn how to implement this high quality SEO content creation process for your own business with the four steps below:

Step 1. Choose the right keywords

The first step to creating successful SEO content is to make sure you choose a keyword that your customers will be typing into a search engine and that the topic is both relevant and useful. After you choose a set of relevant keywords, the next step is to use keyword volume and competitor research tools such as Ahrefs or SEMrush to make sure that you are using the best possible keyword that will bring in the most traffic from your target audience.

For example, a client was using the keyword "virtual mixology class" for a page that wasn't earning as much traffic or sales as they expected. After reviewing the page content and completing keyword research, I revised the page keyword to focus on the keyword "virtual happy hour" which had over 4X the projected monthly website visitor volume (1,700 monthly website visitors compared to just 400 monthly visitors with the original keyword target).

Step 2. Perform in-depth topic and target audience research

After choosing the right keyword, you will need to do topic research and create a page outline that will cover all of the the things that your target audience expects and wants to know. This includes covering subtopics that Google expects to have for a specific keyword, which you can find by using content research tools and reviewing the topics covered in the current top-ranking Google pages. This step critical to making a page that will rank on the first page of Google search because you need to make content that makes sense to both potential customers and the search engine algorithms.

Step 3. Create an engaging website page

Many content marketers make the mistake of creating "fluff" content that simply stuffs the keyword multiple times into useless website pages. The right way to create quality SEO content that works is to make every page easy to understand, engaging to read, and provide real value for your potential customers. You also need to make sure that the content follows all of the SEO best practices that allow it to show up in search results. Below are detailed tips on how to create an effective website page.

SEO Best Practices:

Strategic Keyword Placement: Include keyword in page title, URL, and thoughtfully within the page content.
Meta Description: Write a compelling meta description that would make a customer interested in clicking on the link with natural use of a core keyword.
Image Optimization: Include custom images with optimized file names and alt text to engage customers and allow Google to understand the content.
Internal and External Links: Link to relevant resources, both within your website (internal links) and to other websites (external links), with descriptive text links and buttons in ways that improve the reader's experience.
SEO Page Structure: Every page needs strategic text headers (H1, H2, H3, etc.) that allow users to skim the information and provides context for search engine algorithms.

Example SEO Content Outline

SEO Content Writing and Design

In addition to applying a thoughtful keyword strategy, you also need to write engaging content that answers the search intent and design the page in a way that makes it easy for your audience to find the most important information they were expecting to see.

This includes writing using a language style that is both friendly and knowledgable. It is also important to create logical sections that make it easy to understand the main points on the page from a quick scroll. Studies have shown that the majority of website visitors do not actually read a page , but only read the titles of each section and then read a couple additional sentences if the bold text suggests that it will provide solution to their pain point. Make sure your written content is organized thoughtfully to best support a skimmer's experience without extra fluff. This includes using bold headers to identify different sections and using white space and engaging images to break up the page.

Mobile and User Experience (UX) Design

Google also rewards pages that provide a good user experience. The algorithm that determines whether your page will reach the top of search results incorporates real user interaction data to help decide whether website visitors are engaged with a page for a relevant keyword search. They also crawl the mobile version of the page and assess download speed to determine if the page will load fast enough for a good experience.

The best ways to improve your UX, mobile, and pagespeed design is to make content that provides the valuable information for a given keyword, use design best practices to make the font, white space, color, and button design easy to read, and use a responsive website platform that is optimized for mobile experiences and image upload speeds. (See the SEO content example page : BioRender Alternatives ).

My top recommended website platforms for search engine optimized websites:

Duda: Great UX design on desktop and mobile with impressive pagespeed
Wix: Great for do-it-yourself SEO websites
Squarespace: Easy-to-use templates and fast pagespeed
WordPress: Best for blogs (Oxygen site builder is best for pagespeed with Rankmath recommended as your SEO plugin)
HubSpot: Great for UX design and managing full business operations.

SEO Content Page Example

Step 4. Amplify the content impact

Every page you create for SEO has the potential to be both an organic traffic magnet as well as an outreach tool for all of your other digital marketing channels. That is why the final step is to amplify the impact of the page by using in all of your other digital marketing channels. This includes posting links to the new page on all of your social media accounts, sharing the resource in your email campaigns, and seeing if there the content is an appropriate fit for advertising with influencers in your industry.

High Quality Content Summary

Quality content = quality leads. By executing a combining a good SEO strategy with high quality content, your website can become a lead generation machine. Below is a summary of the four steps that we use to create SEO content that generates results:

Choose the right keywords using keyword tools and behavioral psychology insights
Perform in-depth topic and target audience research
Create an engaging website page that provides real value for your potential customers
Amplify the impact of the content by using the content in all of your digital marketing channels

By implementing this SEO content strategy on my scientific illustration website, I was able to increase my annual website leads by 91% and my monthly organic website visitors went up from 200 new users a month to over 5,000 new users a month.

Global SEO Campaign to Increase Leads and Traffic

Karen Thiebes, Founder of Simplified Science Publishing

What is SEO and Why Doesn't My Website Show in Google Search?

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Sun, 21 Aug 2022 13:56:38 GMT

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making updates to your website that can bring in thousands of new visitors that become customers.

What is SEO?

In order to show up on the first page of search engine results, such as Google, you need to know how to optimize every page using SEO best practices for keyword strategy, content, and UX design. The goal of these website updates is to create high quality content that aligns with a relevant keyword and useful information that address the pain points of your potential customers. Learn more about these three key SEO elements in more detail below.

Why Doesn't My Website Show Up in Google Search?

In my experience with hundreds of website audits, there are four main reasons why a website page does not show up in Google search results.

1. Technical SEO Errors

One reason that a page may not be showing up in search results is that there are technical issues such as the page having a 'noindex' tag, the page is an orphan page that isn't included in the Google Search Console sitemap or linked from another page, the website has no backlinks, or the page has remarkably slow pagespeed.

Tech SEO Solutions: These issues are most easily diagnosed using free tools to scan your website such as Google Search Console or paid tools such as Ahrefs and SEMrush. If relevant, you can also connect your website pages to Google My Business, Google Merchant, and Google Events to expand your options for showing up in Google search.

2. Competition

Another common reason that a page may not be reaching first page search results is that the target keyword is too competitive for their website's current level of backlinks and topical authority. For example, a brand new website with only 5 pages and one backlink will not be able to rank above the competition for a keyword such as "financial advise." The competition for this keyword are international financial firms and news outlets such as Forbes magazine, which have hundreds more high quality backlinks to thoughtful resource pages.

Competition Solutions: The best way to avoid this error is to use keyword research tools to help pick long-tail keyword phrases that your website can rank for and optimize your page for results in specific locations if you are a local business. For example, the "financial advise" target may instead focus on a more niche keyword and topic such as "How much does a financial advisor cost in Texas?" You may also need to earn more backlinks for your website and specific pages to rank in competitive search results.

3. Content Quality Issues

If the website page has a good keyword target but still isn't showing up in results, then the most common issue is that the content on the page is not providing the right kind of useful information that both users and Google would expect to see covered for the topic.

Quality Solutions: In order to avoid this issue, you need to focus on two elements of content creation: target audience and topic research. You can consider interviewing subject matter experts if you don't feel you can provide all the relevant information your audience would need to find the content useful.

4. Keyword and Content Do Not Align.

Finally, another common reason why a website's content may not be ranking is when the content does not support the target keyword. For example, a page won't rank if their goal keyword is "window cleaning services" but the page only lists types of windows without addressing essential questions about services such as locations, hours, and rates.

Alignment Solutions: The best way to improve keyword and content alignment is to focus on improving search intent. Search intent is the reason "why" a user will type in the target keyword and the content needs to answer the search intent seamlessly. If you are new to this concept, I recommend reading the Ahref blog's thorough review of search intent to learn more.

Additional SEO Resources

If you would like to learn more extensive tips and tricks that will help your website rank on first page search results, I recommend checking out the blogs below:

By implementing SEO strategies on my scientific illustration website, I was able to increase my annual website leads by 91% and my monthly organic website visitors went up from 200 new users a month to over 5,000 new users a month.