The SEO Trust Factor: How SEO Can “Maca” Difference

Some businesses are cautious about investing in SEO campaigns because they worry about the length of time it will take to see results or the difficulty of drawing a hard definition between the work put in and the return on investment. Others yet shy away from SEO projects because they have a hard time locating an agency or a specialist that places as much of a premium on communication and transparency as on results.

At 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency, we have always strived to provide clear results attributable to our efforts while at the same time remaining open and honest about the work we put into a project. Whether it is communicating with a client regarding proposed changes to site structure or collaborating with them on a keyword-rich blog post intended to generate traffic, our process is straightforward, transparent, and dependable.

There is a level of trust involved in any SEO campaign, as results take time to build, which is precisely the reason we so highly esteem transparency and communication. For The Maca Team, trust was a factor in the decision to pursue an SEO project with us.

The Maca Team is an online store that sells premium maca products, derived from the root of a unique root crop that grows only at high altitudes in South America. Maca has been used for thousands of years for a number of reputed health benefits, and so the market for it is well established. As is the case with any vendor online, however, high traffic and conversions are not well established.

Mark, CEO at The Maca Team, commented that “originally there was no need for SEO because SEO was easy. I knew what I was doing and it was easy to rank in my niche.” They experienced fair results in the past on their own without professional help before Google upped the ante with several updates that made it harder to rank without specific, technical expertise. After Google’s updates, The Maca Team worked with several other providers on SEO projects before landing with 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency.

To Mark, transparency and communication were key. He understood that it would take time to generate results as he had experienced firsthand how to perform basic SEO friendly operations in the past. That gave him some insight into what to look for in a provider.

As far as what he was looking for in a partner, Mark said he needed an “agency [that knows] what they’re doing in terms of Google’s proper SEO tactics for 2020. The barrier was finding an authentic company that had a transparent process so that I could vet it. That was the biggest thing for me choosing a partner at this time.” After several meetings with members of 1Digital^Ⓡ’s team, he knew that we were the agency for him and his business.

Previously, Mark had mixed results with communication from previous eCommerce SEO companies and specialists, the very reason that he was looking for transparency from 1Digital^Ⓡ. However, within only a few short weeks into the project, Mark reflected on the experience in a holistically, even effusive, positive light.

“First of all, transparency was really what sold me on starting and it’s been fantastic. The project base is great. There’s a weekly report that’s been good. What I love about 1Digital^Ⓡ is that I know what you guys are doing and what the team members are doing. It’s project-based so we can see the results. Our meetings are great because we can measure our efforts. Overall I’m super happy with 1Digital^Ⓡ’s efforts.”

And that was just the beginning.

Letting The Results Roll In

There are a number of ways to measure the success of an SEO campaign, with no shortage of metrics to look at. Therefore, there’s much more than one figure you can look at to determine the efficacy of a strategy. However, as most important figures deal with organic traffic, growth, sales, and conversions, we’ll take a look at a few of these.

Below you can see a chart tracking organic traffic to The Maca Team, covering a period from March 2020 to just about the end of June 2020 superimposed over the preceding period from November 2019 to February 2020. The orange line represents the earlier period and the blue line represents the most current period. Their campaign with 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency began right at the beginning of April and you can clearly see a steady increase in growth over the duration of the campaign so far.

What is significant about this is not one explosive rise in growth, but rather a pronounced, sustained increase in visitors to TheMacaTeam.com over the course of the project. That is what makes trust such an important component of the campaign. There often isn’t one single thing you can point to in order to indicate success in the short term, but the results convalesce out of the details over time. In The Maca Team’s case, their organic traffic nearly doubled since they began their SEO campaign with us.

However, organic traffic is only one way to gauge the success of an SEO campaign. Let’s take a look at the increase in new users to their website, which you can see represented in the image to the left.

Not only did their total number of users increase significantly, but their number of new users skyrocketed as well. In both cases, the number of visitors nearly doubled from the previous period – this time corresponds to the timeline represented by the graph above.

Of course, there’s more to take into account than simply the visitors that come to any given website. You can also look at hard figures for conversions, transactions, and revenue. With The Maca Team, as it turns out, not only did traffic increase significantly but so did these three metrics: eCommerce Conversion Rate, Transactions, and Revenue.

As you can see, during the same time period as their charts above, the eCommerce conversion rate for The Maca Team increased by nearly 17% during this period, but most significantly, the number of transactions and revenue both more than doubled. The Maca Team has not only seen more visitors and more sessions, but they have seen an increase in sales as well.

We’ve already shown how organic traffic grew tremendously and that this growth corresponded to significant growth in transaction and revenue, but how about their impressions and click-through rate? To give an impression – no pun intended – of the kind of reach The Maca Team achieved as a result of their campaign with us, take a look at the chart below.

This representation tracks total clicks, impressions, and click-through rate for the period from the beginning of April 2020, when their campaign began, through the end of June 2020. A steady upward trend is clear here, as it is in the representations above. What is most telling about this increase, however, is neither in their total clicks or impressions – which, by the way, are both respectable. The most telling figure here is the average click-through rate.

Without context, 5.9% might seem like a low, even a very low, figure. Yet, at the time of this publication, the average eCommerce click-through rate is hovering just above 2.5%. That means that The Maca Team’s average CTR is significantly outperforming the overall average, by a factor of nearly three.

The reason this is so significant is twofold. First, a click-through rate that high indicates some success in marketing strategies, positioning, or other effort. It means that the people who see their listing or their ads are interested in what they have to offer and thus follow-through, or click through and visit the website. The other reason it is so significant is that it means that 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency’s efforts in keyword research put The Maca Team right in front of the people who were searching for their products organically and thus only had to find them in order to become customers.

Considering our keyword research and our SEO efforts, we strategically targeted competitive keywords for which The Maca Team needed to see improvements to gain a more competitive edge. The initial keyword research phase of the project sets the stage for a lot of our on page optimization efforts and our backlink building strategy, and is critical to the success of a campaign. At the beginning of their campaign with us, The Maca Team was ranking for about 1400 keywords, with just over 100 in the top three spots. At the time of this publication, and only 3 months into their campaign, The Maca Team is ranking for over 2500 keywords, with more than 230 in the top three spots. In just three months, the volume of keywords for which they were ranking, and their possession of keywords in the top spots, both nearly doubled.

With The Maca Team, as with all of its projects, 1Digital^Ⓡ’s team of SEO analysts and experts took the time to become familiar with their industry in order to deliver the results that mattered for their business. It takes a lot of keyword and industry research, site structure optimization and content publication to pull it all together, but pairing some elbow grease with our years of experience in SEO best practices always gets the job done.

Mark at The Maca Team even reflected on the matter of trusting the process and the difficulty of getting results. “We had really good results on our own at first, but SEO has become difficult to tackle on your own. Updates have been really tough on a lot of industries and it pays to work with the experts.”

As for Mark, he trusted the process, and now he knows, as we all do, that SEO really can “Maca” difference, even in highly competitive, niche industries where visibility can be difficult to gain.

Checking Back In

Returning to the success of The Maca Team’s SEO campaign with 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency in October 2020, we can see some other additional advantages that our ongoing efforts with their project have had. Namely, for some reason that Mark at The Maca Team has never been able to identify, he has had a dip in traffic every year for the past few years at the end of summer – except for this year.

As you can see in the graph above, all traffic to The Maca Team’s website is represented from April 2020, about when they started their campaign, to the present time, October 2020. This is superimposed over the traffic from the previous period from the following year. As you can see, there is an upward trend in their traffic from the start of the campaign, but more importantly, no corresponding dip at the end of summer. As indicated by the red arrow in the graph above, their traffic fell substantially towards the end of summer 2019. This unfortunate happenstance occurred to them not only in 2019 but in several years beforehand. Notably, it did not occur this year. In fact, as might has been expected from our ongoing SEO efforts, their traffic actually increased, continuing it overall growth.

In addition, their average keyword ranking has been continuing to climb as a result of our efforts. Some of their keyword ranking statistics have been disclosed above, but their average keyword ranking position was not. By the present time, October 2020, it had increased to 10. That is the highest average we have yet achieved for The Maca Team.

If your business is looking for inventive, creative ways to build awareness online, drive organic search trafficⓇ, and bolster sales, SEO may be the ticket for a long term, sustainable solution. We’ve garnered similar success stories for many clients in a surprising number of different industries. It goes to show that our experience and hard work pay off when it comes to creating customized campaigns for businesses in diverse industries facing unique challenges.

Check out some of our case studies on the success of various clients, and if you’re interested in generating high traffic, sales, revenue and conversions, contact our search engine optimization team today to get the lowdown on our eCommerce SEO services and see how we can put them to work for you. We offer BigCommerce SEO services, Shopify SEO services, and everything in between – including web development, eCommerce web design, and support services. If eCommerce websites have experienced it as a problem, 1Digital^Ⓡ can help you come up with a solution. Contact our team at info@1digitalagency.com or give us a call at 877-829-4013.

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