Organic Marketing Case Study

Half Million Dollars ($500,000) In 4 Months

Objective: To grow the reach of an Online Pharmacy

Through complete Organic Marketing methods

Businesses worry about optimizing their advertising ROI but often overlook one major component of digital marketing. We have often been approached by online businesses looking to improve their conversion ratios despite having successful advertising campaigns running on Facebook and Google AdWords. Conversion rates depend on the platform you are targeting. If you are not focusing on search engine exposure yet, continue reading. We will show you exactly how we improved an online business’ sales by more than 200% within 6 months.

Google drives the highest conversion rates and focusing on AdWords is a natural choice. Most local and online businesses swear by AdWords. What most businesses do not realize is that there is a way to make such massive conversions without paying arm and leg to Google. The secret that differentiates a quickly growing business and a business just making ends meet, is Organic Marketing. We consider this the holy grail of marketing – a long-lasting, dependable source of traffic that converts as good as the best Google ads but without the constant budget drain.

Making You STELLAR

This case study is about an online is an online store selling Kratom worldwide. We will refer to this store as <SITE> because the information below contains sensitive data and we do not want to cause any competitive disadvantage to the website owner. So, what is Kratom? Kratom is actually a drug that is used to alleviate depression, lessen anxiety, fatigue, pain relief and bring relief from withdrawal symptoms. The issue is – advertising it is banned on Google, Facebook, and almost anywhere that matters due to healthcare and medicine policies of these networks.

So <SITE> could not do ads. They depended on Influencer Marketing and had a Facebook group of enthusiasts. We found in them the perfect opportunity to show the power of Organic Marketing. This is a site which is banned from doing paid ads on almost all networks, so the only way they could make sales was through word-of-mouth, sponsorship, contextual link-backs and a lot of content. The content had to reach the right groups of the audience to bring the most interested visitors. We created and implemented a strategy that grew their revenues by as much as 200% within 6 months. We have been thrilled by the results.

Remember

This is a product that cannot be promoted on normal paid advertising channels. The improvement was all brought through Organic Marketing. Almost every business should be able to get better results than this.

Fixing The Page Speed

We first set out to fix all the issues of <SITE>. The major problems were with site speed and meta-data optimization. The website got a very low Google Pagespeed score of 36/100.

In the first month, we did an extensive website audit at <SITE> and set up a plan of action. We crawled and audited the website and analyzed the core SEO data like index rate, redirect rules and robots.txt. Instead of making recommendations for site changes, we completely overhauled the website ourselves. We made the following changes–

Website structure – Fixed broken links, improper canonical tags, render blocking scripts and meta-data. Optimized images and website assets to load quickly and from fast sources.
Site speed – We streamlined the scripts, compressed images,set up proper caching TTL,and a CDN to parallelize resources loading. The Google Pagespeed ended up at a healthy 95/100. The site was loading quick and stable.
Writing and scaling existing content – We built a keyword matrix to understand prioritization and did a content gap analysis. We then wrote many pages of content and blocked unnecessary “thin pages” (those that have more HTML code than readable text) from search results with robots.txt. We improved the contextual relevancy of the pages for additional keywords by reshaping the content, without stuffing keywords.

Tracking and Google Tools

Once the site was optimized, we set up the full suite of Google’s tracking tools and Facebook remarketing pixel, for gathering data for studying and improving the user experience further.

The most important Google integrations are Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google Tag Manager. These tools are important for tracking and understanding Google’s crawl information and user behavior.

We verified that Google Analytics was firing properly and proceeded to schema element installation, 404 error correction and site-wide tags definition.Now the website looked good to users, as well as to Google.

Getting Noticed

Once the above steps were completed, we set out to do Off-Page SEO, reputation building and content marketing for <SITE>. We wrote a lot of content, sparked conversations on Reddit and asked their existing users to chime in their experience on Reddit. This results in improved social proof and improves conversion.

Over a period of one and a half years, we have built a great team of writers, partner magazine sites and blog networks. We put these resources to work for <SITE>. We wrote numerous articles, lists, news, and press-releases about Kratom over a period of weeks, and got them syndicated on reputable blogs and online magazines like CNN, Huffington Post, etc. Every article had a very contextual link back to the main site.

Creating good online citations is not a one-time job. Velocity is key for online stores and sites looking for continuous growth. We had to build a steady inflow of new links day after day and week after week. The Kratom market is a rather competitive space due to the lack of many advertising opportunities, and we had to build about 30 new linking root domains every month.

Remember

The best links usually come from Reviews, Donations, Sponsorships, and Contests. For an eCommerce store, the link targets are almost always incentivized. The property owners realize that you are a commercial operation and they want to be rewarded for the value you are getting from their website. I will explain how we approached each of these.

Optimize Reviews

If you have a reasonable budget and a good margin on product sales, getting reviews is a scalable and worthwhile strategy. First, using advanced search operators, we found sites that already have articles having keywords related to Kratom like how to use it, when to use it, where to buy, types, benefits and so on. We scraped all these to a Google Sheet and qualified them based on link quality criteria (usually a DA25 and TF15). Now we had a list of reputable sites that have written about Kratom. We loaded the filtered domains to our outreach tool (we use BuzzStream) and kicked off the campaign. We suggest you follow up at least 4-5 times for every link target, even if they initially say ‘NO’. Make sure that you get a response.

Give it away!

Donations work like reviews – you need a budget, but it doesn’t need to be just cash. You can find people or groups that need the products you are selling and are willing to show off your logo on their website in exchange for free products. We got such links built for <SITE> over a period of few months.

Sponsor a cause!

Sponsorship works like donation. For great sponsorships, think beyond simple sponsored articles and seek out opportunities that support causes that are important to your business and (if possible) in your local area. Good examples could be youth sports leagues, non-profit and independent organizations with sites. For <SITE>, we were able to get sponsored citations from advocacy groups, NGOs and other organizations. These were reputable websites with a visitor-base already interested in advocacy of Kratom. They gave high-quality citations for our site.

Contests

Contests are an amazing way of creating a buzz and lots of backlinks. The most important part of a contest is designing it. The contest must be compelling enough so that people REALLY wish to win it. Holding a contest could be expensive, but if its execution is done right, it can mean a lot of link juice and buzz for your website. For our contest, we gave a 75% discount on the purchase of Kratom to users for a period of 1 year. So, the users could redeem the code any time during the next one year. We promoted this campaign among online groups and contact lists that are already interested in Kratom. Knowing that they WILL be interested in the product at least once in the next year, this discount got a wonderful response.

Reclaiming Existing Links

Links are online citations in the eyes of search engines. The more reputable sites link to you, the better. For any business that has existed for even a few months, there will be citations at various places like review sites, blogs, forums, etc. But most such citations do not link back to you. Reclaiming these links is the process of converting normal text citations to link citations. We reclaimed both image and text links for <SITE> to the maximum extent using the following steps that you can replicate–

Images – Use reverse Google Images searches of all your original website images. This will show you all the people who have plagiarized your assets without your permission. Contact the website owners politely but sternly to either remove the image(s) from their websites or link back to you properly.
Text – Run searches for brand queries, scrape the results and get the contact details of each website. Now send emails to all of them asking for existing mentions of your site to be converted to links. Usually, people oblige, and this process gets you up to 20-30% of link acquisition rates.

Seeing Results

This is the most important question in the mind of every business owner – how soon can the results be seen? The answer is not a good one, because it depends. Results depend on how established your site already is and how much impact the above activities have on your ranking. This varies in every vertical and industry.

It depends on your site trust, crawl rate of search engines and citation flow of sites linking to you.
It depends on your link velocity and how Google is treating the links coming from other websites.
If Google is delaying the link value passed to your site, this could impact the results as well.

For <SITE>, with newly found rankings came fast results. We had been aggressive with our promotions and were able to grow the traffic significantly within months of starting our process. Here is how our marketing efforts improved organic traffic within the first 3 months and translated into sales and revenue –

Results in numbers

3000

Growth In Traffic

7.5

Growth In Revenue (USD)

We Build On Success

We were not only able to improve the traffic, but also the conversion ratio of sales. This meant more traffic and even more sales. <SITE> owner was and still is thrilled with the results and we are now squarely focusing on Organic Marketing and improving sales. This made a great case-study demonstrating the power of Organic Marketing.

If you are a business owner and are looking to build your brand online to potentially double or even triple your sales, this is the way to go. If you are looking for professional help in marketing your business online, we are always glad to help you out and add another successful business name to our portfolio. Contact us and we will help you out.

More Sales

49%

Your Marketing Partner

At AdCortex, we have had years of experience with major networks like Google and Facebook.

We have expertise in ad-copy writing and budget management and we make sure that your campaign is getting only the absolute best ROI.

We have recognition from the largest advertising networks. This allows us to provide you with the best support, tools, and resources to create a successful advertising campaign regardless of your budget.

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