Ultimate Guide SEO Copywriting
How one Ultimate Guide article resulted in 24 new leads
Due to client confidentiality, some details in this project have been withheld.
The brief
My small-business wedding client wanted to rank highly and cash in on a very competitive industry search term. A page for the desired search term was already live but was performing badly.
Published in 2018, the page was achieving a meagre 200 views in a good month. More painful was the number of conversions, which in this case was form completion and submission. It achieved two conversions in an entire year.
With the page in its current state, my client was missing out on a large amount of traffic. It simply wasn’t showing up in search. And when people did find the page, there wasn’t the incentive to convert.
I was hired to turn the fortunes of this page around. The goals for the page were set.
- Increase keyword search visibility.
- Attract more site traffic.
- Get the client more leads.
Easy, right?
What we did
I wrote a long-form, in-depth ultimate guide article. I chose this format because:
- the 2011 Google Panda update means the world’s biggest search engine favours well-researched content
- content above 1,000 words “consistently get higher average shares and significantly higher average links”
- none of my client’s competitors had content like the type I was pitching on their site, for the chosen keywords
- it was a broad topic with lots of scope to answer customer pain points and concerns, so we did
- going long meant I could include the owner’s brand story to make it more personable (trustworthy), as well as studies and statistics, testimonials and useful public information relating to my client’s industry.
The results
24 leads, over 1,000 more organic page views and 69% in search visibility.
The completed guide is 6,190 words long. When it launched in September 2019 its first-month results were:
- 1,214 page views from 1,080 people, so prospects revisited and reread the content.
- 24 leads (form completion and submission) versus the two leads from the previous 12 months. That’s an increase of 169%.
- A 69% increase in search visibility for the primary search term and a 71% increase for the secondary search term.
The page also gained a rich snippet position for the search term on Google, putting both the link to the article and some of its information at the top of page one.
The success of this project was a collaboration between myself and Compass Digital Strategies. Proofreading and editing services provided by Sharper Copy.
Header image: Merkaist on Unsplash
