case studies

A client in the financial services industry approached me for help with both SEO and Google Ads. So began one of my favourite client relationships and success stories. Google Ads in this case led to some huge leads and a new client that allowed them to expand to another country and markedly grow their business. Sadly, covid resulted in this business being severely hamstrung – there was still so much potential – but as of writing this they are slowly rebuilding.

Key takeaway: Sometimes all that really matters is revenue, and for this client, they got what they asked for.

This project started out as something small and simple, and yet it grew dramatically and is a great example for all of those SME’s out there. The goal at the beginning was pretty simple: help with Google Ads and SEO. They weren’t quite sure how so but knew they needed to be done.

I inherited a very poorly managed Google Ads account, and within months had brought the monthly Ad Spend down to a fifth of what it was, and yet increased very measurable conversions many times over. (The nice thing with e-commerce and paid orders is that it’s very clear when someone on the site actually converts, or not.)

I helped their organic traffic grow four fold in the first year, and after two years, it had grown 34-fold! As recorded by the more accurate Google Search Console). More importantly, I grew their organic conversions 14-fold – this means that they are getting free orders (in this case a conversion equals a paid order) from that organic traffic – a marketer’s dream!

And lastly, the total conversions grew nine-fold. So that is for all channels: direct, email, social media, PPC, and organic.

Key takeaway: These numbers are super impressive, and not likely to be easily matched by most industries. Two main things contributing to this was starting with a very badly run Google Ads campaign, and though there are 8-9 local competitors, it wasn’t hard to outdo most 90% of them.

One of my earliest clients and also one where I achieved “complete dominance” – first in the Western Cape (after one year) and then in Gauteng (a year later), and then the whole country (soon after), and eventually enquiries were coming in from Mozambique, Botswana, and other neighbouring countries. 

One of the highlights was getting the Ad Spend down to (no jokes) about R25/month, as over years of optimising I had homed in on the perfect keywords to bid on, had quality scores of either 9/10 or 10/10 only, and for so many terms the site ranked #1 both organically, and on the maps. 

Other successes were of course the huge dominance of typical keywords, the Map Pack results (local search terms), getting a lot of exposure on Instagram, and Facebook, and finally ended with a helpful YouTube channel. I handed over the whole project at the end of 2021, super happy and satisfied with the results.

Key takeaway: It’s odd to be so successful that someone offers to buy the high quality traffic but that is what happened in this rare scenario.

This client in the medical space had just had their website redone, but no real marketing other than the one director posting some Facebook news now and again. In the two years that I helped them, their website quadrupled their organic traffic, and more importantly, that organic traffic led to far more leads.

I am not a fan of tracking keywords (it’s not that hard to get random keywords to rank, or lots of keywords) but for the ones that they needed to rank there was great success. When I began, they had just three keywords in the “Top 3” and this went to 32 in the space of one year. I haven’t checked recently, but this is likely even better now. Organic conversions make up over 60% of all conversions – ie. “free marketing” for their business in years to come. The best part of SEO is that though it seems expensive up front, they haven’t had a bill from me for over six months and yet they are still benefitting from my work. 

PPC efforts have increased in number of conversions, and improved a lot in terms of CPA (cost per action, ie. a conversion) while maintaining the same Google Ads budget. A year in and the client’s words were they were “very happy and have really noticed an improvement” [in MQL’s] (that is, Marketing Qualified Leads) – a sign that the efforts of SEO & PPC are working.

Key takeaway: Sometimes you need to just stick to the course and trust the process. SEO takes time, and though Google Ads can be instant or quick – a well-optimised, amazing campaign there will probably take 3-6 months to achieve results from scratch, so SEO is still very appealing in comparison.