Case Study - CaringForOrchids.net
Project
SEO & PPC Campaign
About Caring for Orchids
Caring for Orchids is a blog aimed at true orchid enthusiasts and hobbyists. The purpose of the blog is to clearly present the most up-to-date information and tips for people with a passion for orchids.
The blog is monetised by a few affiliate advertisements displayed in the sidebar of the website.
Objectives of the SEO & PPC Campaigns
- Rank on the first page of Google for the blogs primary keyword phrase: caring for orchids
- Determine market viability of affiliate advertising by initially generating 200 visitors through a PPC campaign
- Re-structure blog to capture natural search engine rankings for less trafficked terms (the long tail), including the addition of tailor made content
The Solution
The solution was to create high quality, keyword rich, link worthy content for distribution through social media. To use various targeted directories and bookmarking sites to generate buzz.
All this was built on the foundation of extensive keyword research, which was later used to re-structure the blog contents.
The PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign was simply a case of first identifying the strongest keywords (a combination of traffic and commercial intent). Then monitoring the campaign at a keyword level to increase Click Through Rate (CTR) and Average Ad Position whilst at the same time lowering Cost Per Click (CPC), ultimately resulting in cheaper customer acquisition.
Keyword Research - First Page of Google
The starting point for keyword research was to use latent semantic indexing (LSI) to locate terms similar to the primary phrase (Caring for Orchids). Once the high traffic terms had been identified further analysis was then taken to drill down to the most profitable (traffic and commercial intent wise) terms.
The predominant metrics used to determine the most suitable terms for the blog were:
- Search Engine Competition - Total number of global web pages that contain the keyword in a phrase match search
- Search Engine Traffic - Estimation of the traffic a 1st place website would receive for the specified keyword
- Phrase to Broad Ratio - The percentage of phrase match searches out of broad match searches for the keyword. A high percentage indicates a focused market around the keyword
PPC Campaign, Market Viability
The PPC campaign was short but efficient, generating the target 200 visitors in 4 days with minimal spend.
The results of the campaign were as follows:
- Increased CTR from an initial 3.62% to an 11.18% CTR
- Average Ad Position went from a low of 2.2 to its highest point of 1.5
- Both of these performance improvements were backed-up by a decrease in CPC going from £0.13 to £0.09 per click
One technique that was used specifically to dilute the effect of under performing ads and keep the CTR high was to use identical ad copy for several of the advertisements. Once a statistically significant winning ad was confirmed it would then be duplicated twice more so that should the next test ad copy fail it would only be 1 of 4. This meant that the new ad would not reduce the CTR to the same extent as a typical A/B split test, which would account for 50% rather than 25% of the CTR.
Re-structuring the Blog to Capture More Long Tail Traffic
Again the most important factor in creating a blog that would rank well for long tail keywords as well as the primary key phrase was the initial keyword research performed.
By using these lower traffic terms as categories, tags and as supplemental keywords in blog posts the CaringForOrchids.net blog now receives additional traffic it otherwise would not of had.
Result
The result is a blog that ranks 4th on google.co.uk and 3rd on google.com for its primary key phrase and on the first page of Google for another 20+ keywords after just a week of SEO. The Caring for Orchids blog has also been naturally linked to from sites such as eHow.com.
