case studies
Below is a sample of projects I’ve picked based on their diversity and varied success; my hope is that shows how my work in SEO and Google Ads can help almost any brand. It’s worth noting that I’m not worried if the company’s revenue is $100 or £100 million – either way a 100% increase is a doubling of traffic, or conversions, or revenue – and we all know the power of exponential growth.
My hope is that by pulling all the right levers and their combined effect will allow a company to significantly grow in the numbers that count. So, what counts? The chief factors are an increase in revenue, a bigger profit margin, and more high-quality traffic: i.e. traffic that converts.
#1: FINANCIAL SERVICES client
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 new a client that allowed them to expand to another country and markedly grow their business. Sadly, covid resulted in this business closing down – there was still so much potential!
Key takeaway: Sometimes all that matters really is revenue, and for this client, they got what they asked for.
Increase in Revenue
Top 3 keywords
Months with Client
Year Updated
#2: ENGINEERING firm
Months with Client
Increase in Traffic
Increase in Revenue
Year Updated
A Cape Town based firm that specialises in a very niche service approached me for a trifecta of services: a website build, SEO, and Google Ads. Subsequently, I’ve learnt to not try and do all these things and do not offer website design anymore, but I am glad I learnt all the lessons along the way.
In the years that I have helped them, I helped increase lead generation through both the new, SEO-optimised website, and a Google Ads search campaign. A huge factor in these types of clients is that they are super busy focusing on their business, and have little time to work on marketing, and so a lesson learnt is to do a year’s worth of marketing strategy in the short quiet period.
Main success with them has been that bringing in just one, new quality client pays for all my marketing expenses for a year, and that includes the Google Ad spend!
#3: E-COMMERCE client
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.
These numbers are super impressive, and not likely to be easily matched by most industries.
Organic Traffic
Organic Conversion
Months with Client
Year Updated
#4: local tourism
Months with Client
Conversions
Jump in rankings
Year Updated
This began as a fun little “side project” of sorts. I love a challenge and this was one, as the budget was small but the lay of the land (competitors) pretty easy to navigate. I ended up doing three months work on their SEO and achieved “Top 3” rankings for key terms and so the project was completed in record time.
A key was focusing on the Google My Business profile and optimising it; for two chief reasons: a) Almost all of their competition was all Cape Town-based, and b) Their budget was small, so I had to work with what I could.
Simultaneously, I ran Google Ads until SEO results achieved meaning they had a decent amount of site traffic while waiting for the organic visitors to stream in.
Key takeaway: Use Google Ads for immediate visibility, but don’t rely on it alone. Be willing to persevere with SEO until your organic results deliver free traffic, and save yourself money in the long term.
#5: services client
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 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.
Organic Keywords
Monthly blog views
Months with Client
Year Updated
#6: WEDDINGS & EVENTS
Months with Client
Google Ads Spend
Vital SEO changes
Year Updated
Perhaps the easiest and best success story was the few hours of work I did for this brand. With my help, I outlined the necessary changes they needed to make to rank on the first page of the SERP’s, and within 4-8 weeks they managed to rank in the “Top 3” for their main search term, among other related terms.
It was in part due to the fact that there wasn’t too much competition, but it turned out there were some incredibly vital SEO components missing that once we had sorted out made a huge difference. Six months later and they were turning down jobs due to too much demand!
Key takeaway: Sometimes there are just a few major SEO problems that, once resovled, can bring a mountain of success. That is why it’s helpful starting any SEO campaign or contract with an SEO audit, and a solid understanding of what the achievables are.
#7: MEDICAL client
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 take 3-6 months to achieve from scratch, so SEO is still very appealing in comparison
Organic Traffic
Current SEO cost
Months with Client
Year Updated
#8: Financial services: TWO
Months with Client
Marketing ROI
Revenue in Millions
Year Updated
I have a love hate relationship with B2B Marketing. I hate how long it can take to generate one high quality lead, never mind one sale. But, I really love it when your efforts are finally realised and you do deliver one, or more, of these leads. With the nature of this business, it took about 16-18 months for the client to close this sale, in which time I’d done plenty of work on both their SEO and Google Ads, both in South Africa and abroad.
However, seeing the adjacent figures you can clearly see the initial investment certainly paid off. When these projects deliver they really incentivise me to take on more B2B clients, and persevere for at least two years in each case – which is something I make clear up front to every new SEO client: patience is the biggest ranking factor.
Measure what matters
If you end up working with me you will find that I only really want to focus on about five things. Increasing high quality traffic, lowering your marketing costs, increasing quality leads, lowering the cost per lead (CPA), and increasing your revenue. Together these combine to drastically change your business’s profit margin, allowing you so much freedom to do so much more.