Project Overview
Project Overview
This company is an industry-leading manufacturer and supplier of high-quality, value-priced performance chemicals – such as fuel additives, air and fuel system maintenance kits, engine degreaser and tire sealants – based in Arlington, Texas. The company has been serving the local and international market for more than a century and continues to expand its reach to cater to the automotive needs of professional mechanics, automotive chemical buyers and car enthusiasts.
The client tapped the expertise of Thrive Internet Marketing Agency to manage its digital marketing presence, improve site traffic and ramp up its global keyword rankings. Since taking over its online marketing campaign in 2014, Thrive has helped the company achieve 68 first-page keyword rankings for tracked search terms and increase its conversion rate from around 10 lead conversions a month to an average of 40 conversions per month.
The Highlights
Since working with Thrive, the company has seen dramatic organic traffic growth, even during the pandemic. We saw an eight-month-straight, record-setting monthly traffic streak in 2019. From only 9,016 total sessions in January 2015, we were able to generate a record-high 63,299 total sessions by the end of 2019.
Total Traffic Year-Over-Year
Our holistic digital marketing strategy has also generated the following results year-over-year (YoY):
- Monthly Traffic: +18%
- Organic Traffic: +13.8%
- New Website Users: +19.6%
- Goal Completions: +64.3%
- Organic Conversions: +62.5%
The pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns have resulted in:
- Impressions: +1,174,571
- Clicks: +132%
- Click-through Rate (CTR): +260%
- Average Cost per Click (CPC): -63%
Thrive’s social media marketing efforts have driven:
- Bounce Rate: -11.4%
- Instagram Stories Sessions: +129%
- Facebook Sessions: +138%
- New Facebook Users: +133%
- Twitter Sessions: +657%
- New Twitter Users: +700%
- YouTube Sessions: +156%
- New Instagram Users: +160%
The client’s website blog, which we optimize and promote across social media platforms, continues to be one of the largest sources of traffic to its website.
Executing the Strategy
THE CHALLENGE
The client partnered with Thrive not knowing what to expect from digital marketing. The company had done offline marketing before, including radio promotions and advertisements at sports games, but it didn’t have any online marketing experience.
Through a comprehensive conversion rate optimization (CRO) audit, we identified the following major issues with the client’s website:
- Technical issues, such as non-optimized page titles, broken images, duplicate content, missing meta description tags and internal links pointing to non-existing pages, were affecting the page load.
- Google PageSpeed Insights score in both mobile (13/100) and desktop (50/100) were extremely low.
- Social media icons were not properly visible on all devices.
- The website was responsive, but not all elements were easily navigable, causing issues for some mobile users.
- Some product pages lacked content.
- Homepage design was slightly cluttered and disorganized, with some images pulling focus away from the website’s unique selling points (USPs).
- Website visitors engaged with the homepage in several different places, with 11.6 percent using the search bar and 23.5 percent being desktop users whose primary click point was the product sliders in the footer.
The company also needed help with social media marketing to grow its social media presence and appeal to the younger generation.
THE SOLUTION
To address the client’s website issues and bolster its brand visibility and online conversions, Thrive’s digital marketing experts implemented an online marketing strategy focused on four key areas: website optimization, search engine optimization (SEO), PPC marketing and organic social media marketing.
Web Design and Development
Thrive’s web design and development experts focused on improving the site design and functionality to maximize the platform’s online potential. Initially, we created eight design mockups to provide the client with plenty of options to choose from. Once the new web design was approved, we set up the following site functionalities:
- SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) protocol
- Photo gallery
- Online forms
- Advanced search results
- Blog page
- Predictive search
- Full checkout functionality for products offered
- Product sliders to feature certain products
- Google Translate functionality
- Unique product category pages
Our web development team performed quality assurance and cross-browser/platform testing to ensure all site elements were working properly.
Search Engine Optimization
We ran backlink profile analysis, site speed audit, technical SEO audit, metadata review and Google Analytics audit to determine the direction of our SEO campaign. After gathering and analyzing the audit reports, we launched an SEO strategy focused on:
- Building up the client’s profile with quality backlinks
- Expanding onsite content
- Improving page speed
- Optimizing images, alt text, schema and other technical SEO elements
- Building local business citations
- Updating outdated or incorrect listings to ensure consistency
We targeted long-tail keywords with a fair amount of search volume – such as “carburetor cleaner,” “fuel additive,” “fuel stabilizer” and “brake cleaner” – to bring quick traffic and conversions to the website. Once we started seeing results, we expanded our content strategy to reach more high-volume competitive keywords.
Thrive’s SEO team also maximized outreach for additional guest blogging opportunities.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Our PPC specialists set up Google Ads campaigns to boost the company’s online exposure. We reviewed the client’s products and keywords to target specific market segments and determine additional quick-win opportunities.
Thrive’s PPC strategy honed in on:
- Addressing keyword conflicts
- Optimizing bidding strategies and targeting systems
- Verifying conversion tracking for form entries in addition to calls received from the ad campaigns
- Building an audience to remarket to
The primary goal was to direct traffic towards the client’s ideal demographic while simultaneously boosting its impressions and online exposure. We periodically reviewed and analyzed the Google ads campaign data, managed the negative keyword lists, created unique, engaging ad copies and landing pages and updated the keyword lists and bidding strategies as needed to drive incremental increases in impressions and traffic.
Social Media Marketing
Thrive’s social media marketing campaign centered on boosting the client’s brand engagement and launching more strategic content to target audience segments that are most likely to use and are interested in the products.
Our social media marketing campaign involved:
- Refining the audience targeting strategy
- Choosing monthly/time-based themes to track the success of specific campaigns throughout the month
- Leveraging brand partnerships and industry influencer outreach
- Interacting on social media with other brands
- Leveraging positive consumer product reviews on social media
We’ve needed to be more forward-thinking in planning out the social media content and schedule to get ahead of industry trends and events and acquire new customers for the brand.
We continuously improve our keyword research and mapping strategy to adapt to any algorithm changes and deliver profitable results for our client. Our goal is to ensure consistent, long-term success for our digital marketing partner.
