Small Business SEO Experiment – Week 2

We’ve finished week #2 of my small business SEO experiment and I’ve learned two things this week that I want to share with you right off the bat:

1. Posting valuable content every day is hard
2. Posting valuable content every day drives traffic to your website

Basically I took on this challenge and I knew it would be difficult and it is… But the results I’m seeing in just two weeks are well worth the effort.

If this is the first time you’ve heard about my SEO experiment below is the kickoff post and week #1:

• How My Experiment in SEO Will Change the Game on Small Business Blogging
• Small Business SEO Experiment – Week 1

We’re now 14 videos into the 100 video series.  As of writing this post I have 18 videos recorded and scheduled which means that in order to finish week 3 I have to produce three more videos.

I made two structural changes to the videos last week.

The first change came on the recommendation of on of my fellow insurance professionals and that was changing up my “outfits” in the videos.  I produce the videos in batches of three or four at a time and in the first week you could tell I was wearing the same thing in every video.  I now chop up the batches so all the videos I do in one sitting aren’t in order.  Small change but significant I think.

The second change was you add a sentence at the bottom of the post asking people to review The Murray Group on either Yelp, Google, or Facebook.

Counting Results

Total Traffic

• Baseline = 77 visitors
• Week #1 = 140 visitors
• Week #2 = 225 visitors
• Percent change = 61% ↑

I also started thinking about how I’m tracking stats and what stats I’m tracking.  This SEO Experiment is not just about getting more traffic in general it’s about getting more SEARCH traffic.  Search traffic means people typing something into Google or Bing or Yahoo and clicking on The Murray Group website.

As I said when I kicked off this SEO experiment, I’m all about social media, but the majority of consumers that are going to visit The Murray Group website and contact us are going to have an immediate need.  These people are going to have a need and are going to look to Google to find a solution for them and I want The Murray Group to be that solution.  So from now on search traffic is going to be a big focus for me.

As you can see search traffic has increased significantly each of the first two weeks.  Boom…

Results That Matter

Whether you admit it or not, you love to watching your counting stats grow, unfortunately count stats don’t pay bills (as much as I will they did).

So in week #2 we received 1 inbound personal lead.  No commercial leads this week.

For the campaign we received 3 personal lines leads and 1 commercial lines lead.

But here’s where I yell, “Yahtzee!” and you say, “Damn son, you’re killin’ it…”

The commercial lines lead from week #1 closed at $1,800 in revenue and we got a referral from the personal lines lead we wrote in week #1 that closed in week #2 for $200 in revenue.

So in two weeks of our “100 Insurance Questions Answered in 100 Days” video series we’ve booked $2,170 in revenue to the Agency…

Those are results that matter.

Last week I produced 9 more videos at 15 minutes total production time per video for a total of two hours and fifteen minutes of work time spent on the SEO experiment.  This brings my total work hours spent on the video series as a whole to 7 hours and fifteen minutes or less than one standard work day.

What I’ve Learned So Far

The formatting of our posts on The Murray Group website leaves a bit to be desired.  It is my personal opinion that the WordPress Theme we use needs to updated to premium theme like the Genesis Framework (affiliate link) which is what I use here on RyanHanleyDotCom.  If you don’t use a premium WordPress theme I highly recommend doing so.  Genesis is optimized for SEO and constantly updated so your blog is always utilizing fresh code.

I will hopefully be updating The Murray Group website to a Genesis theme soon to give blog posts a little nicer feel.

The reason I want the posts to have a nicer feel is I’d like amplify our call-to-action, especially for the reviews.  I’m not happy that we haven’t received any new reviews in two weeks.  I think review sites like Yelp and Google are going to large sources of business down the road.  Getting more reviews is going to be a heavy focus moving forward.

Week #2 words to remember:

“If you want the business you have ASK… even online.”

Thank you.

written by: Ryan Hanley

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