Case study: +1330% in leads in 3 months

Client Overview

• Industry: Turf & Irrigation

• Products/Services: Maintenance equipment, irrigation systems, buggies, turfgrass

• Target Audience: B2B sectors including golf, landscape parks, sports fields and grounds, hotel and leisure, agriculture, and farming

• Targeted Locations: Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia

Disclaimer: This project started in February 2024. Although there hasn’t been enough time to show fully accurate data, these initial results can give you an idea of what to expect within 4-6 months of working with us.

The Challenge

Before Jebsen & Jessen partnered up with us, they had quite a few hurdles to jump:

1. No Organic Traffic: Despite being established in 2016, the website had only 20-50 sessions per month.

2. Lack of Conversion Points: The website had only one long form, with products not linked to the form but to the principal brands.

3. Poor Product Visibility: Dozens of products were invisible in organic search.

4. Reliance on Referrals: Most leads came from referrals and offline events.

Sadly, this kind of situation is pretty common in older B2B businesses that haven't caught up with the latest marketing trends. And the potential revenue loss from ineffective marketing can be substantial.

Fast Forward to Now

We're now 5 months into our partnership, and the results are nothing short of significant:

1. 527% Traffic Boost: The number of organic traffic sessions has seen a huge surge.

2. 1330% Lead Hike: We've generated 143 leads, out of which 59 have been qualified and passed on to sales. To put that in perspective, they were previously getting just 2-4 leads every 6 months.

3. 3000% SEA Traffic Surge: Traffic from targeted countries in Southeast Asia (Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam) has skyrocketed.

4. 294.17% Conversion Rate Boost: The website conversion rate has improved from a meagre 1.2% to a healthy 4.73%.

5. 80% Decrease in Lead Management Time: Thanks to automation and AI, we've drastically cut down on the time spent on lead management, qualification, routing, and scoring.

Curious about how we made all this happen in just 3 months? Keep reading!

And remember, the project is still ongoing, so we're expecting even more impressive results as we move forward.

What Were Our Goals?

Every project we take on, we set realistic goals based on what we find during our discovery stage assessments. And here's the kicker - we always strive to under-promise and over-deliver. Unlike others who over-promise just to close the deal, we're all about exceeding expectations.

💡 We offer these assessments totally free of charge. If you're wondering how we do these assessments, check out this article (what you will get from our free web assessment offer.

Primary Goals: These are the goals we agreed on with the client, and we're aiming to achieve within 12 months:

• Double the organic traffic from each targeted country.

• Boost organic leads by 50%

• Increase sales qualified leads (SQLs) by 25%

Secondary Goals:

1. Get to Page 1 rankings for all primary keywords (over 100+)

2. Achieve Top 3 ranking for all product keywords (high intent, non-branded) - for 25 products and 5 major categories.

3. Encourage high user engagement: most users should spend more than 2 minutes per session and visit multiple pages.

4. Streamline the lead collection process using automation: reduce the time spent by marketing managers by 50% through effective use of AI.

5. Open another source of leads (via cold emails) to generate +50 additional leads within 6 months.

6. Streamline reports: have a single source of truth with 90% attribution accuracy.

If you're interested in the nitty-gritty of our strategy and how we implement these projects, keep reading!

Our Strategy and How We Implemented It

We kicked things off with an assessment to gauge where we currently are, and where we want to be. This assessment was key to charting the right path to success.

Once we had a plan in place, we broke it down into three actionable phases:

1. Phase 1: Infrastructure (First 2 Months): We tackled and fixed all the issues we'd identified.

2. Phase 2: Localization of Content (Months 2 to 5): We translated and localized all the content.

3. Phase 3: Ongoing Marketing Management: We took care of maintaining the website’s health, doing regular SEO optimization, and launching tactical campaigns.

Our SEO Strategy

We centered our SEO strategy around a few crucial elements:

1. State-of-the-art infrastructure that puts user experience front and center.

2. Programmatic SEO to effortlessly rank for long-tail keywords.

3. Localization of content.

4. Localized link acquisition campaigns.

Sure, it's a long-term process, but the payoff is well worth it. For a B2B business like this, the average sale value is quite high. Just a few sales can cover all the investment, sometimes even yielding a 20X ROI.

Our Approach to Keyword Research

We like to do things a bit differently when it comes to keyword research. While many others focus on low-intent, low-competition keywords, we go for the opposite. Most of our goals are tied to conversions (leads, add to cart, appointment bookings) because that's where the money is. We target high-intent keywords that lead users to:

1. Make an inquiry about a service or product.

2. Download an offer or gated content.

This way, we squeeze the most value out of SEO. As far as keyword research goes, we're all about going big or going home. There's no point in ranking for less competitive keywords that don't add any value to your bottom line.

In our case, we aimed to achieve top 3 rankings for all prime product keywords. That way, every time someone searches for any of the products and finds our client's site, the chances of converting them are much higher.

Our Content Strategy

When we started, their content strategy had quite a few issues:

1. No blog section.

2. Thin, poorly written content on all product pages that didn't add any value for users.

3. No linkable assets.

4. No gated content.

5. No localized content.

After We Stepped In (Completed as part of phases 1 & 2):

1. We added a blog section complete with a proper content calendar.

2. We revamped the content of all 150+ product pages.

3. We translated all their content into Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Thai, making sure we localized each language, not just translated it.

What We're Currently Working On:

1. Programmatic SEO related to golf courses.

2. Creating linkable assets for use in digital PR and outreach.

Website Revamp and UX/UI Improvements

Before they teamed up with us, the website had several issues:

1. Poorly written sales copy.

2. Not enough conversion points across the site.

3. Far from stellar mobile experience.

4. Painfully slow site.

5. Incorrectly tracked data.

6. Lack of internal links.

7. Poor site structure.

8. Unoptimized product pages.

9. A ton of 404 errors and missing pages.

After We Stepped In:

We managed to fix most of these issues within the first month:

1. We gave several sections of the site a complete makeover.

2. We added CTAs across the site and connected them all to one conversion point.

3. We took care of the site speed issue.

4. We improved internal links across the site and between products.

5. We gave the product pages a total revamp.

Overall, this significantly improved the user experience. User experience is critical for SEO. According to the latest insights from Google, the time spent on site and the user’s final destination are significant factors in their algorithm. It's also important to have a primary conversion point and a secondary one. In our case, the primary conversion is the inquiry form; everything else is secondary.

Tackling Technical SEO

Given that JJSEA's site is quite large (over 10k pages), technical SEO was crucial. We came across several challenges:

1. Slow loading times

2. Loads of broken pages

3. Lack of internal links between pages

4. Most products wouldn't load or took forever to load

5. Most pages had a poor user experience on mobile

Our strategy involved:

1. Initially running an audit with Sitebulb. This tool crawls the pages just like Google or any search engine would, and reports on any issues it comes across.

2. Fixing all the issues identified in the audit as quickly as possible. We gave this task top priority and aimed to fix everything within the first 2 months.

Building Links

We used a variety of methods for link acquisition, primarily outreach. Our process included:

1. Prospecting: Finding matching sites for linkable assets.

2. Custom Emails: Drafting personalized emails for each site.

3. Automation: Using tools like Pitchbox or Quickmail to launch campaigns.

4. Tracking and Management: Using CRM (Pipedrive, Airtable) for positive responses and automation to speed up processes.

In the first month, we focused on directory links. We acquired quality directory links from each country to boost its ranking signals for local SEO.

Localization

We dedicated an entire phase of the project to localization.

The main challenge was the lack of local signals. There were no proper location pages that clearly explained the office location, address, or who managed the office.

The first step was to boost these signals.

We added their locations to the 'Contact Us' page.

A dedicated location page was created for each country and optimized for the local market.

Given our constraints of over 200 pages filled with technical product details and limited resources, we chose to use AI to speed up the process.

In the initial stage, AI was used for translation. Afterward, local editors from each country were assigned to edit and localize the content.

We also included SEO experts from each country in Southeast Asia to participate in the localization process.

AI greatly reduced both the time and cost involved.

Handling Leads

From the get-go, we knew we were going to generate a lot of leads. But the client didn't have enough resources to effectively manage these leads.

The real challenge was figuring out how to identify the best leads, score them, and direct them to the appropriate person.

To tackle this, we used our customized platform. This platform is based on the GHL system, but we tweaked it to cater to the client's needs. It gets the job done at a lower cost than other alternatives.

To learn more about our system, you can check out our article on system access.

The Results

We're only four months into our partnership, and there's still a lot of work ahead. But the results have already exceeded expectations, met our agreed-upon KPIs, and left the client satisfied. This success can mainly be attributed to one thing: ROI.

In the world of SEO, many agencies struggle with ROI because they're too focused on ranking without considering other factors. But we knew from the get-go that we needed to justify our costs by quickly showing the client their value.

Organic Traffic

The surge in organic traffic has been substantial and happened in a very short period.

The clicks and impressions have been increasing at a healthy rate, and that's just the start.

Keyword Rankings

In the first month, we did comprehensive keyword research and a competitive analysis to identify prime keywords to target.

We found around 200 prime keywords and over 500 secondary keywords (top funnel).

We also kept track of our main competitor's ranking for our keywords to evaluate our visibility and position ranking compared to theirs.

The main competitor had a high visibility of 54%, while our client was at less than 10%. However, by the fourth month, we had already made significant progress, reaching 39.89% visibility.

We also managed to rank our product pages in the top three positions, often at position one, for competitive keywords.

The project, which started in February with no ranking, now has 84 primary keywords in the top 3.

Conversion Rate

Every element in our strategy was designed with conversion in mind. Our efforts resulted in a substantial improvement in the conversion rate.

The website's conversion rate increased by 294.17% (it was 1.2% before, now it's at 4.73%).

We're still in the early stages of this journey and this number might fluctuate. However, targeting high-intent keywords and having a single conversion point have definitely helped increase conversions.

Leads

When setting up GA4, we decided to keep only one event as a conversion: the inquiry form submission.

Even though it's a long form (we're in the process of simplifying it), we've still managed to gather a significant number of qualified leads.

All our leads are managed within a single platform, where we use automation to sort, tag, score, and route them.

And all these leads are high intent, which means they’re ready to buy.

Wrapping Up and Insights

Summary

In the five months that we've been working together, we've achieved:

1. A 527% increase in organic traffic sessions.

2. A 1330% increase in leads, generating 143 leads, 59 of which were qualified and passed on to sales. Before they met us, they were getting just 2-4 leads every six months.

3. A 3000% surge in traffic from targeted countries in SEA (Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam).

4. A 294.17% increase in the website conversion rate (from 1.2% to 4.73%).

5. An 80% decrease in time spent on lead management, qualification, routing, and scoring, thanks to automation and AI.

Lessons Learned:

• Setting up the right infrastructure early on, addressing user experience issues, and making sure search bots can crawl the site without any problems, helped speed up our progress.

• Optimizing meta tags and revamping content (focusing on value over word count) were very effective.

• Getting early links from quality local directories and targeted editorial links sped up progress (we started this in the first month).

• Smart use of AI in generating briefs for the writers and translating content saved a lot of time and cut down project costs.

Future Plans:

• Implement Programmatic SEO

• Engage in Digital PR

• Build linkable assets and gated content

• Use cold emails to generate leads and lower the overall cost per lead

If you're stuck with an outdated website and unsure about how to make the most of digital marketing, we're here to help. Let's set up a 15-minute discovery call to discuss your current situation and future goals.