Content Marketing

SmarterSelect: Elevating Visibility For Lead Gen

"Listening to Scott [Baradell] talk about using SEO and HubSpot to increase web traffic and leads told me he knows how to get results. A year ago, we weren’t even showing up on our prospects’ radar. But today, thanks to Idea Grove’s efforts, search engines consistently put us on page one, not just once but multiple times. It’s made a real difference in SmarterSelect’s lead generation, too. With the increased traffic, we’re now swamped with demo requests. It’s been a real pleasure working with the Idea Grove team.” ROBERT DAVIS,
SMARTERSELECT
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The Challenge: Increasing Visibility in a Noisy, Crowded World

The days of handling paper-based applications are over. Whether the forms are for scholarships, grants, internships, community surveys, data collection and reporting—you name it—application management has gone digital. SmarterSelect makes it simple to create, manage, deploy, analyze and evaluate online applications—all without bogging an organization down in complicated technology.

Despite the universal need for SmarterSelect’s services, owner Robert Davis was perplexed. The company’s new website was attractive, yet it received few visitors or service inquiries. The company didn’t appear on any first-page search results. And when it did appear on later pages, it brought the wrong kind of traffic. It was as if no one could find them online at all.

When Davis attended a HubSpot event in Dallas, Texas, he heard panelist Scott Baradell of Idea Grove speak about how inbound marketing and tools like HubSpot help solve that very problem. After a one-on-one discussion, Davis engaged us to increase traffic to SmarterSelect’s website, both through SEO and PPC campaigns.

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The Solution: Using SEO to Grow the Right Traffic

Our team took a multi-pronged approach to SmarterSelect’s traffic conundrum. First, we performed keyword research for the industry and customers SmarterSelect wanted to attract. Besides providing a list of the optimal keywords to target, we also recommended how to apply it across the website copy and meta data. Combined with making the site responsive to all devices and browsers, this would signal to search engines that SmarterSelect's website is relevant to the actual terms prospects search for.

Besides optimizing SmarterSelect.com for search engines, we saw more opportunities to grow the company’s traffic and customer satisfaction:
  • Leveraging Capterra, a review site for software companies that ranks highly for the same keywords, provides Davis with a steady stream of qualified leads.
  • Sustained blogging keeps the websites content fresh and its keyword density high.
  • Using a more robust CRM, HubSpot, provides sales reps with deeper, contextual insights on each lead, thereby improving the sales process.
  • Integrating live chat into the website promotes engagement by offering help and answering questions on key pricing pages.
  • Launching and optimizing pay-per-click search advertising on Google, as well as a remarketing campaign, regularly provides
    SmarterSelect with more qualified leads.
In short, our approach was to not only increase traffic to the website but also to keep the prospects interested for the long term.
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The Results: Optimizing SEO Yields Soaring Rankings and Leads

Our SEO recommendations and ongoing blogging caused SmarterSelect’s keyword search ranking and traffic to soar. From having no first-page search mentions at all last year, the company now appears on the first page of search results for 30 relevant keywords. What’s more, SmarterSelect now ranks for 28 other important keywords on pages 2-10 which has the potential for even greater improvement in the upcoming months.

The best part? The new rankings are all for keywords that draw highly-qualified traffic to the company’s website. Overall traffic to the website is up 18 percent over last year, and organic traffic is up a staggering 55 percent. As a result of our recommendations, the average monthly requests for product demonstrations have soared by 313 percent.

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LIZ THRAILKILL
“Despite our tight timeline, they had the capacity to go as fast as we wanted without sacrificing quality. You’ve done an incredible job of telling our story and laying our products and solutions out in a unified, coherent way. It’s been phenomenal.”
LIZ THRAILKILL
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