XINSURANCE: Spreading the Word with SEO
Dan Kogan
- August 19, 2019
Everyone talks about SEO, but how many really know what it means and what to do to achieve results? For the team at XINSURANCE, finding the right partner to get results was important in their SEO endeavors.
“We weren’t built to maximize through SEO yet. The expectations we had were to get us on track.” Logan Fitzgerald, Senior Vice President of Marketing for XINSURANCE, said.
Three months into a 12-month SEO campaign, XINSURANCE is certainly on track, raising awareness about their services and seeing an uptick in inquiries about those services.
Typically, SEO campaigns are measured not only by the increases in organic traffic from search engines and search engine keyword rankings, but also conversion rates improving over time. This commonly applies to businesses that sell multiple products and have a large inventory of tangible products. XINSURANCE is a unique 1Digital Agency client in the sense that the product is not tangible. It creates a different approach to achieving results, especially since it is not nearly as measurable as conversion rate.
“We’re not the company where we’re selling tangible products online and we can directly track our conversion rate to sales,” Fitzgerald said. “What this has done for us has gotten people into the door to give us the opportunity. We provide solutions to our insurers. We’re not the company you come to, where you have searched online for 10 places and buy the cheapest one. We’re the company you come to when you need a solution to a problem.”
The Process
XINSURANCE came to 1Digital with a fairly solid foundation from previous SEO work and continued content production in house. With the help of 1Digital, XINSURANCE was put on our SEO process that gives extensive research to relevant keywords and a targeting strategy that promotes results for favorable searches.
The 12-month SEO campaign included on-page optimization to improve site structure, page speed and backlinks, ongoing website optimization that includes updating meta descriptions, H1 tags and page title tags, and a content creation plan of off-page and on-page content that builds and improves backlinks and on-page SEO collectively.
The Results – Keywords
We put XINSURANCE on one of our starter campaigns. Out of the 25 keywords we began targeting, XINSURANCE was only ranking for 12 of them. Of those 12, only 5 were in the top 50 search results, with none of those 12 being in the top 20.
- Currently, in their third month of SEO with 1Digital, XINSURANCE is ranking for 28 keywords in the top 100 search results. Of those 28, 27 are in the top 20 results. Of those 27, 22 are ranking in the top 10, and of those 22, 10 are maintaining 1st position rankings on the 1st page of Google.
This graph (and these results) were based on the information we track in our SEO Dashboard. Our dashboard allows us to track rankings, traffic, backlinks and look at competitor metrics.
Now, keep in mind that the above results are what we see after three months of XINSURANCE partnering with 1Digital.
In their second month of SEO with 1Digital, XINSURANCE started ranking number 1 for a variety of secondary keywords. These “secondary keywords” are keywords that start ranking based on a splash effect of the work being done targeting main keywords. Three of those secondary keywords ranked in Google’s featured snippets.
The Results – Traffic
XINSURANCE started to see an uptick in traffic and inquiries to the business after about a month of indexing and starting to rank with search engines.
Typically, in an SEO campaign with 1Digital Agency, our first month consists of a comprehensive website analysis, keyword mapping, content strategy, and on-page optimization. Month two is where we really start to buckle down on SEO content marketing with on- and off-page content.
After the second month of partnering with XINSURANCE and after the first month of pushing and creating content, we saw a 42.66% increase in traffic from organic search.
We took a deeper look into where this traffic with coming from. One of the XINSURANCE classes of business that rose the most had an 85.19% jump in traffic, which resulted in an increase in leads for XINSURANCE about this class of business, specifically.
After the third month of their SEO campaign, we are seeing a 36.32% increase in traffic from organic search with a 5.50% decrease in bounce rate and a 21.13% increase in average session duration.
Comparing third-month results with second-month results, for one of the top classes on XINSURANCE.com, there was a 101.83% increase in organic traffic.
“Lately we’ve seen a huge uptick in some of our core classes of business,” Fitzgerald said. “Have we quoted all of them? No, but they know who we are and what we stand for. It’s helped spread the word.”
If we compare third-month results to our first month of content production, we see that, overall, XINSURANCE has an 80.17% increase in organic traffic.
Their top page, specifically, shows a 240.12% increase in traffic from organic search and their second-highest ranking page shows a 113.64% increase.
- If we take a look at the image to the left, we can see that of the traffic sources leading to XINSURANCE in the last 30 days, 74% of the traffic going to XINSURANCE.com comes from organic searches.
With a big part of XINSURANCE being awareness of their services and the insurance that is available, generating traffic and building organic traffic was a key statistic upon starting the SEO campaign. XINSURANCE wanted to see an increase in opportunity, to get in front of more people, build an audience, and eventually turn that into better sales as the months progress.
SEO takes time to really generate results, so for three months into a campaign, seeing exponential increases in traffic for specific keywords and organic traffic continually on the rise are all good signs and opens the door for greater opportunity to take the leads and quotes generated from these first three months and turn them into business for XINSURANCE in the future.
What’s Next?
As XINSURANCE moves to the next three months of an SEO campaign with a lot of buzz already being generated by their SEO efforts, the goal is to continue to build off of the initial results.
“With this first three months, starting the second month and now the third month, it’s most definitely climbing the hill. Over the next three months, I’d like to see more of the same, but after a good six-month period, we have more of a track record and are honing in on what we built,” Fitzgerald said.
So far, the education of having an SEO campaign has been a benefit to the XINSURANCE team. You hear a lot about the importance of SEO, but until you see the results, even early ones like XINSURANCE is seeing now, you don’t realize the importance.
“You don’t know what you don’t know,” Fitzgerald said. “Everyone talks about SEO and thinks they have a good in-house team, but when you really get with specialists, it makes a big difference.
“Everything 1Digital has is very streamlined and efficient. Any time we’ve needed a change or an edit, they are very responsive and we are very happy with our partnership.”
XINSURANCE: Where They Are Now
As mentioned before, a lead generation SEO campaign is different than an eCommerce SEO campaign. Now, while much of what goes on in any SEO campaign is the same (such as updating meta-titles, producing content, and building backlinks), what is different is where each campaign begins: keyword research.
When starting an eCommerce SEO campaign, you want to look at the keywords that people shopping for specific items related to your business will search for. These would include keywords with transactional intent while Lead Generation SEO will include keywords that are more industry-specific and even location-based depending on the type of client. To read more about the difference between an eCommerce SEO campaign and a Lead Generation SEO campaign, read our blog, 3 Strategies for Lead Generation SEO.
Now, coming back to XINSURANCE; 6 months ago, we were talking about the results XINSURANCE was getting just 3 months into an SEO campaign with 1Digital. Today, they are 9 months into their campaign. So, where are they now? What are their analytics and rankings? How is their lead generation?
The Results – Traffic
Let’s look at the traffic from the beginning of their campaign to now and compare it to the traffic they were getting during the same time period last year.
We can see in the data above, that the amount of traffic heading to XINSURANCE.com increased over 100% from 20,590 to 42,549. Along with this increase in traffic, we also saw a decrease in the bounce rate, an increase in sessions, and an increase in pages per session.
Now, let’s look at the pages that are getting the most traffic and filter that by Default Channel Grouping. What we want to look at are the pages that are getting an increase in traffic from Organic Search.
If we compare the last 4.5 months of the campaign with the previous 4.5 months, we can see that one of their classes of business increased 102.30% in Organic Search. If we compare this to the same time period 1 year ago, we see a 3,530% increase in traffic.
Many of their other classes of business also saw in increase in organic search from 300% and higher, and many of these target pages that had previously never seen any traffic at all are also showing results.
The Results – Competitors
When comparing a website to its competitors, we look at the average listing position and site visibility. The average listing position is the average ranking of a website’s keywords.
Site visibility is the number of keywords that are holding top positions in search engines.
In the graphs above, XINSURANCE is the orange line, and we can see that, over the duration of their SEO campaign, they have continued to gradually increase in rankings. We can also see, however, that there was a slight dip in both graphs. This dip can be narrowed down to one specific reason: 404 errors.
Over the last few months, XINSURANCE had been working on a redesign for their website. This redesigned website became live in the beginning of August. While running a technical audit of their website, we found that five pages we were targeting in our campaign were deleted. What happens in an SEO campaign when pages get deleted and content gets lost? Rankings start to plummet!
Within 1 week, we were able to work with the team at XINSURANCE to get these pages back up and running and the issues resolved. Unfortunately, once this happens, there is nothing that can be done to get those same rankings back to where there were right away. However, with our efforts, we are continuing our process and slowly bringing those rankings back up.
What’s Next?
Over the course of this SEO campaign, XINSURANCE has not only increased in rankings but has also been able to maintain many of their top position rankings over time. Moving forward, we want to look at how their rankings increase over the next 3 months. We also want to keep an eye on their classes of business that are getting the most traffic, and because of their site redesign, we can look at the change in traffic, the number of page exits, and the number of leads they are now receiving compared to before they redesigned their site.
We’ll start to put together a list of new keyword options to target for them in the next term and because of the work put in during this campaign and the results we are seeing, their domain authority has increased which will allow us to include keywords in our new list that have a higher search volume that the ones they are currently targeting.
Stay tuned for our next update on XINSURANCE and read our blog to learn more about Lead Generation SEO, eCommerce SEO, and other factors that can help boost the performance and conversion rate on your website. For more information about 1Digital Agency and what we can do for you, give us a call at 888-982-8269.
Dan Kogan
