Today’s business world is inevitably connected with its online presence and no company should underestimate this fact. If we dig deeper SEO is the crown jewel on top of the whole online marketing scope. Search Engine Optimization is crucial for every website but is not what it used to be. The proper methods and criteria for evaluation change constantly and we, as professionals need to keep with the trends.

In this article we’ve gathered useful opinions that will be of help to everybody in the sector. Not only they are shared by professionals in the field, but are also backed up with statistics and personal case studies. Simply said – you can’t go wrong with them!

What You’ll Learn

• What advice can various marketing specialist give you, including case studies that prove which are the good and bad practices.
• How did 24 successful SEO experts achieve their progress – learn from the best!
• Valuable statistics – which will help you take the right business decisions!

What Case Studies or Statistics Did 24 Marketing Experts Share With Us

We used HARO (our guide to this amazing tool) to gather information using just a simple question about the most important case studies or statistics people are willing to share.

SEO Case Study #1: The Importance of Web Search

Graeme Watt, Digital Marketing Manager at The Zen Agency said:

The SEO statistic I wish to bring to your attention is that 68% of B2B
buyers say that they first learned of a solution via web search.

This is as important as many presume businesses will already have a
preferred list of suppliers however this proves many are searching online
anytime they have a requirement. It is vitally important your business ranks
otherwise you will not get considered.

SEO Case Study #2: Showcase Local Information

Jonathan Alonso, Digital Marketing Manager at uBreakiFix said:

Near me terms have becoming the norm for a lot of local business it shows
intent. But if your business is not up to par with Local optimixations you
may be loosing on opportunities. Starting from your website and showcasing
local information to creating a Google my business profile. It all matters.

SEO Case Study #3: Not All Created Links Come From the First Point of Contact

Tim Backes, Owner of TimothyBackes.com said:

One of the interesting takeaways is that I had the assumption most links
are the result of your first contact, and that follow ups only clean up
some hanging chads. I was incorrect.

The data showed that about half of the links created via outreach came from
the first point of contact, while half required at least one follow up to
nurture the link.

SEO Case Study #4: How we Ranked #1 for a High Volume Keyword in 3 Months

Wes Marsh, Director of Digital Marketing at Solodev said:

One of my favorite actionable case studies was completed by the guys at Pipedrive and published on Moz titled: SEO Case Study: How we ranked #1 for a high volume keyword in 3 months. I love it because it details specific, repeatable steps that lead to success, and I’ve used their format to help my own pages too!

SEO Case Study #5: Focus on Ranking Internal Pages Targeted Towards Less Competitive Keywords

Caleb Ulku, Principal of Digital Marketing at Ulku Logistics, Inc. said:

I recently published a case study where we doubled organic traffic to a client of ours in three months (from 130,000 clicks to 260,000). Our key strategy in accomplishing that was based on knowledge that Google ranks pages – not domains. The competition in this space had millions more backlinks than our client and there was zero chance that we would be able to rank our client’s homepage in three months. Instead, we focused on ranking specific internal pages targeted toward less competitive keywords. With the right content and backlinking strategy, we were able to dramatically increase traffic without significantly improving the rank position of our client’s homepage.

SEO Case Study #6: CTR’s Have the Highest Correlation for Ranking

Brandyn Morelli, Director, Growth at MojoTech said:

With Google moving towards intent based metrics for ranking decisions,
businesses need to be mindful of their Click-Through Rates (CTR’s).
According to SearchMetrics, CTR’s have the highest correlation for ranking
than any other metric calculated (0.46 Correlation). #1 results are seeing
a 44% CTR, up from 32% in 2014. #2 results are also up, seeing a 35% CTR
(14% in 2014). So what does that mean? It means businesses need to focus on
their title & description tags, to ensure they are both accurate and
enticing to attract clicks from relevant users, and boost CTR’s.

SEO Case Study #7: Be Ahead of Search Trends

Dustin Christensen, Digital Marketing Manager at JacksonWhite Law said:

According to Google, about 15 percent of all searches are brand new, which
means a significant number of searches are ones that have never been made.
What does this mean for search and content marketers? It means that
although keyword tools and past data is extremely useful, you can
supplement that research by focusing on the future, rather than the past,
when it comes to creating content. For example, if you know a new product
is coming out – something like the GoPro HERO6 Black – you can be ahead of
search trends by creating content that people may have been creating about
previous GoPro models because you know that people will likely search the
same things with the newer model. If you’re constantly ahead of the curve
instead of relying solely on past data, you have a better chance of
creating and ranking content better than your competition.

SEO Case Study #8: Biggest SEO Wins List

James Rice, Head of Digital Marketing at WikiJob said:

How WikiJob went from 3 million to 6.5 million organic
visits in 3 years. What made this possible? Our biggest SEO wins came from:

• Testing title tags for CTR improvements that led to big ranking jumps
• Consistent link wins from .edu domains
• Faster page load once we migrated to Angular JS single-page app
• Restructure of link architecture
• Removal of thousands of redundant pages from sitemap

SEO Case Study #9: Paid Search is Not Enough

Justin Knott, President  of  Intrepy.com said:

Paid search equates for just over 5% of all traffic, with organic hovering
around the 95% mark(source).
Very interesting fact considering how much money is placed into paid search
to generate website traffic yet the best investment (based on this
statistic) of funds to grow new and recurring site traffic is in organic
SEO.

SEO Case Study #10: Amazon is the New Google

Kent Lewis, President & Founder  at Anvil Media said:

According to a Kenshoo study, 56% of consumers start product searches on Amazon. On the seller-side, 63% of Amazon Advertisers plan to increase budget next year (a larger percentage increase than Google and Facebook spends). In short, Amazon is the new Google in many respects. If you don’t have a solid Amazon marketing strategy in place, you’re at a disadvantage.

SEO Case Study #11: Some Statistics That Come in Handy

Joe Sloan, Marketing and Communications Coordinator at Advice Media said:

We actually just put together an infographic with many statistics about
SEO. These statistics focus on our niche of medical marketing but are still
very insightful.

1. 1 in 2 patients use search engines to find health information. *Source:
Google Webinar. (2017). Critical Insights on How Patients Search for
Doctors*
2. 77% of consumers leave a mobile site if it isn’t mobile responsive.
* Source: Think with Google, “Consumers in the micro-moment,” Goole/Ipsos
August 2015, n = 1291 online smartphone users 18+ *
3. 60% of patients compare & validate information from their doctors
with their own research. *Source: **Manhattan Research, 2015 among
online patients*

SEO Case Study #12: Load Time is Crucial

James McCarthy, CEO/Owner of Placement Labs said:

The most interesting fact about SEO I have read this year was provided by Junto, which states that Bounce rates increase by 50% if your website takes 2 seconds extra to load. This just goes to prove how important load times are, and anything you can do to optimize your site for faster loads can have a significant impact on your SEO and traffic.

SEO Case Study #13: Writing Generic SEO Articles Works

Mladen Lukić, Content Marketing Specialist at ActiveCollab said:

You shouldn’t be afraid to write generic SEO articles (if you don’t overdo
it)

It’s fairly obvious, although not often spoken loudly, that not all blogs
and media outlets require you to produce the ultimate piece of content in
order to get published. Therefore, if you determine your own quality
standards and categorize your content production into tiers, it’s very easy
to scale your content marketing and SEO campaigns that require content
production.

SEO Case Study #14: Most Online Interactions Begin with a Search Engine Link

Carson Tucker, Front End Web Developer at Bend Cloud said:

People nowadays are using search engines in order to find their desired content. According to a study by Forrester from 2006, 93% of all online interactions now begin with a search engine link.

SEO Case Study #15: Videos will Shine in 2018

Stuart Ridge, Chief Marketing Officer at VitaMedica said:

In 2018, look for more and more companies to accompany videos with their outreach campaigns. Videos now appear on over 70% of search results, and according to studies, 46% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product after watching a video. With social videos generating 1200% more shares than text and images combined, according to WordStream, look for video sharing to be a big SEO trend in 2018.

SEO Case Study #16: New Searches Still Occur

Sam Ruchlewicz, Director – Digital Strategy & Data Analytics at Warschawski said:

“Every day, more than 3.5B searches are conducted on Google – and 525M of those searches have NEVER been searched before. For SEO’s, this represents an incredible challenge and opportunity – how do we successfully rank for an ever-increasing number of queries that we don’t know exist?”

SEO Case Study #17: Social Media Does Wonders

Shawn Bishop, Director – Founder of RankPay said:

Through an internal audit of customers we found that 91% of sites ranking
on the 1st page of Google are active on social media.

SEO Case Study #18: Aim at the First Google Spot

Vincent DeCastro, CEO, Founder of SEO My Business said:

Reaching the top of the first page of Google has a much more significant
value than most people realize. It’s not just a matter of “winning” against
the competition, the difference between first and forth on the first page
of Google is 24 percent of all clicks for that keyword search. Here’s a
breakdown of percentage of traffic for each of the top four spots on a
search engine results page from Chitika.com: First gets 32% of clicks while
second gets 17%, third gets 11% and forth gets 8%.

SEO Case Study #19: SEO Local Search Strategy is Important

Eng. Rennella, Cristian, VP of Marketing & CoFounder of elMejorTrato.com said:

Did you know that 36% of consumers who do a search on their computer or
tablet visit a store within a day? Same with 50% of consumers who do a
local search on their smartphones!. *

Yes, AMAZING stat!. Working in your *SEO Local search strategy* is key for
your business success!

SEO Case Study #20: Build Sites with Mobile Users in Mind

Jason Scott, Digital Marketing Specialist at jcscott.co.uk said:

Across the globe, mobile devices dominate total minutes spent online, passing 70% in the US and 90% in Indonesia. This is remarkable and begs the question, should we now be building our websites with mobile users in mind and not those on desktops? For me, the answer is yes. What’s important to bear in mind is the type of usage on desktop vs. mobile. Most mobile users will browse social media meaning they may not be as transactional as someone on a desktop.

SEO Case Study #21: A Good Personal Advice

Abhinav Sahai, COO at Niswey said:

We were working with a client of ours, Sheroes, when we helped them increase their organic by 11,911% over the course of 15 months.
Here’s the link for the case study.

SEO Case Study #22: Fixing Website Errors Helps Grow Traffic

Randy Mitchelson, Vice President at iPartnerMedia said:

Check out the dramatic traffic growth from 100 per day to more than 1,000
for this air conditioning repair company after we fixed their hundreds of
website errors in November 2016.

Interesting to note that the big dip in traffic between August and November
2016 was caused by the company assigning SEO responsibility to an internal
marketing employee who was unqualified.

Great lesson for business owners.

SEO Case Study #23: Use Site Metrics Carefully

Antonio Johnson, Director of SEO at Power Digital Marketing said:

Domain Authority, and other like site metrics, can only provide a reference point in terms of understanding a competitive landscape for SEO. An example of where DA may have not predicted growth potential is with the case of PlushCare. A case study conducted examined the ability to rank content organically in a saturated industry. Larger medical publications such as WebMD (DA: 95) and Mayo Clinic (DA: 96) tend to own this space. At the time of this writing PlushCare had a DA of 37 and is ranking in the top 10 for roughly 8,000 keywords organically, many of which beating out much stronger sites based on authority. The takeaway here is that with a great product, great content, and a strategic game plan, anything is possible!

Summary

Some say that Search Engine Optimization has become a real science subject. This is not far from true, but as we see there are various methods to achieve good results. Our list of important SEO statistics and case studies is pure gold for every online marketing enthusiast and every point from this list will be of benefit for your online business.

See which ones of these 24 case studies suit your needs and implement those ideas into your practice. Whether its concentrating on local search strategy, mobile users, using videos, social media or learning from the various available metrics and statistics – you cannot go wrong!