28 Apr Case study: N&S Cars and Commercials

Increasing search impressions by 946%

N&S Cars and Commercials are a car scrappage business based in Red Lodge, just outside of Newmarket.

Nick who runs the business was struggling to find success in Google search ranking and paying huge advertising fees for an unsuccessful Google Ads campaign. N&S Cars and Commercials had a website already built and live, the main issue was that the search engine optimisation was not well implemented to promote the business for the keywords for the business. In fact the website was not performing for any keywords other than the name of the business.

Only appearing in search for your own business name in a competitive industry such as car scrapping is not ideal. Small and local businesses are most usually unknown by the name of the business until such time that you are a regular client of that business or the business is well established in the area. It turns out that car scrapping is a growing industry and with in the local area N&S Cars and Commercials had a lot of competition.

Here is a screenshot of the Query terms

(search results the website was being found for before Digital Park took over)

This query results above cover a span of 3 Months (October 16th – Jan 15th)  as we can see from the screenshot that the keywords are not really specific to the business of scrappage, the impressions alone for those 3 Months are extremely low.

Here is a screenshot of the Query terms

(search results the website after Digital Park took over)

This query results above cover a span roughly of 3 Months (Jan 16th – April 4th) in the above screenshot we can see 2 very important differences. The website is now appearing for more keywords that are more specific to the business of scrapping cars, it focuses more on location based results and the impressions per result is drastically improved.

Also it is worth noting that from the original screenshot of only 4 search queries (keywords) the new screenshot shows 115 search queries (keywords). This is the number of times your website would be listed in search results list on Google for the keyword you see in the list.

So how did we achieve the results above?

The first thing to note is that the above is purely organic search traffic and does not take in to account Google Ads (paid advertising). The results are based on search results alone.

As I mentioned above, its not worth using up valuable keyword space with just the business name, so in the effort to improve SEO we overhauled all the website pages with new meta titles and meta descriptions that focused on keywords such as scrap my car, car scrappage etc.

In the list you will see that most of the results appear with location names. The reason is that Google likes to promote local businesses and for us to appear in the search results we needed to change the way the website was targeting those areas. We added additional copy to each page that promoted the areas that Nicks business serviced in.

We then create separate landing pages for each prime location, which is linked at the bottom of the website, so each location had its own unique page ‘Scrap my car Cambridge’ with its own curated meta titles and descriptions focusing purely on Cambridge. We replicated that for each location that Nick highlighted he wanted to focus on.

Later in this blog we will explain how we used the landing pages to help target with our Google Ads.

With our quite simple SEO implementation, over the next few days the search queries started to change to more relevant keywords. Along side this we resubmitted the sitemap to Google Webmaster tools and indexed our new location based landing pages.

We added a SSL (security layer) to the website, this helps encrypt the website data and users of the website which Google has publicly announced will improve search engine ranking.

how did the above affect the website impressions over time?

Before impressions where sporadic ranging from 0 to 6 total impressions with no consistency in search result impressions.

The peaks look high in this screenshot but that is based on the scale of 6 impressions being the peak. You can see that some days the website was not featured at all in search results most days averaging around 2 impressions.

Fast-forward to now:

Notice the impression scale is now up to 75 and not 6. You can see that overall we have a much more consistent growth pattern which is trending upwards, meaning that the website is appearing more in Google search results for related search keywords. You can see the impression results are not as sporadic as the first screenshot, hitting high peaks then dropping to 0 impressions.

Over the period of screenshot 1 for impressions we saw a total of 83 impressions in 3 Months from October to January, screenshot 2 was a total impressions of 869.

That calculated as a percentage is an increase of 946%

Let’s move on from Organic search results and focus on Google Ads.

When I first came to the Ads Nick had 1 Ad running that focused on trying to generate phone calls. The cost for this 1 Ad was very high and returned little to the business as a lead generator.

Our aim for the Ads was to help increase leads for the business and drive traffic to the website. After all the website had new landing pages for location based search it would be a shame not to utilise them in promoting Ads to those areas.

Taking the 3 main services that N&S Cars and Commercial provide, Car scrapping, Car Recycling and Car purchasing we created a campaign for each and then set up 5  – 10 Ads per campaign focusing on keywords that related to the business. This is where Google Webmaster Tools helps you out. You can take the keywords from the list and add them in to Google Keyword Planner to find related keywords that have been searched for.

We created keyword lists for our Ads to appear for and started the campaign. At first it was clear that the Ads had not be performing very well. With a lot of competitors paying higher cost per click our Ads where not featuring high enough to lead to a conversion. A conversion is a Ad click through that leads to an interaction or sale. Our Ads generated a lot of traffic to the website which in turn would help overall with our Organic search. But with all the traffic coming in to the website we had not seen any interaction and saw a very high bounce rate of 95%. eeeek!

Bounce rate is based on users visiting the website then leaving without any interaction or clicking through.

We need to change the website for better lead generation

It was clear from that point on that although our Ads had been performing well and driving traffic to the website with a new healthier Ad spend budget per click, that the website was not helping convert Ad click users to leads. At this point we took it upon ourselves to make some small but drastically needed changes to the website layout. The current contact form was very formal focusing on user data such as email, name, car description and was at the bottom of the homepage with no real incentive to fill out the form.

Taking this in to consideration we create a new form that focused mostly on the car age, type, model and a contact number. We made it very clear the 3 easy steps to selling their car for scrap. Although the steps are detailed throughout the website is was not clear how easy it was. Fill out the form, get a quote, N&S Cars collect your car free. Making this the homepage main feature and moving the text further down saw an increase in lead generation.

With in the first few days the new form generated 7 leads then a subsequent 10 leads the days following. Success! Nick was happy that his website is now generating leads for his business from organic search and paid advertisement.

The end goal for this SEO project is to reduce the Ad spend to a minimum and drive leads and traffic from organic search.

N&S Cars and Commercials tasked Digital Park to help improve the website organic SEO and help set up some better Google Ads.

We achieved our brief,  however once we saw that everything we had implemented was working to generate traffic, the website was not effectively converting users to customers. At that point we took the decision to go beyond the initial brief and take a more active marketing role to help generate leads. We adjusted the website to help improve lead generation and still actively help manage Google Ads and the website.

At Digital Park we want to make sure that all our clients have the right tools to help promote their business online. We pride ourselves on helping small businesses grow their online presence.