The following explains how you can use whitehat SEO to grow organic traffic to your website and generate a 2-3X (or more) return on your investment.
Background
My name is Brandon King (LinkedIn), and I use SEO to bring more paying customers to small and medium-sized businesses. I work with clients in industries ranging from tech to healthcare to manufacturing, and while their technology and business models are diverse, their aim is always the same: to grow their base of happy, paying customers.
Conversions, not vanity metrics, are what matter.
Unlike a lot of SEO agencies, we don't just sell SEO services. We take our own advice and apply it in-house as well. The strategies and tactics that we recommend for you are the same that we have used to build a profitable service business, SmartIntern, as well as a suite of other sites.
A few accomplishments:
- Gotten our brands or clients featured in Business Insider, Newsmax, Huffington Post, Thought Catalog, Tech Crunch China, and many more.
- Built, ranked, and sold sites for multiple 5 figures (like this one).
- Bootstrapped a profitable internship placement company, with organic search as our largest marketing channel.
- Ranked dozens of websites in a variety of niches.
- Built an instagram account to over 20,000 followers.
- Worked in SEO product management for FindTheBest (now Graphix), a KPCB-funded startup led by the founder of Double Click (which was sold to Google for $3.1 Billion USD).
The most rewarding thing for me is helping other companies to build healthy businesses with predictable sales funnels. Here is what a few of them have to say:
Brandon made a steady but profound impact to our rankings on Google and Bing. Before he joined us, our sales were entirely ad based. Our organic sales have rocketed from virtually zero to almost 15% of total revenue. He legitimized our brand and saved us 10s of thousands each month. Brandon doesn't over promise in his SEO services but he certainly over delivers in value. We knew we needed an SEO strategy, but we had no idea that by working with Brandon, we would not only have better search results, but our entire business was analyzed by him and pivoted towards the future rather than the past. Whatever reservations you have about hiring an SEO, rest assured, Brandon is the real deal.
Biz Dev, B2C
Brandon is a self-starter with an uncanny ability to predict trends in tech/SEO and capitalize on them. The positive results we've seen in our web presence through Brandon's SEO and marketing work speak for themselves, but beyond these objective markers it has just been a consistent pleasure to work with him on a day-to-day basis.
Sales Manager, Card Manufacturing
Brandon is adept at leveraging technology to engage large amounts of people. For one client, he conceived of and managed a contest on Sina Weibo, China’s largest social networking site, that gained nearly 20,000 participants in just a couple of weeks.
CEO @ Toowards
While I was in the beginning phase of my law firm in the Los Angeles area, I relied on Brandon to further design my website and implement the best SEO... Brandon worked expediently to achieve fast results in a competitive criminal law niche.
Criminal Defense Attorney
[Brandon] took out all the barriers to making and launching an infographic. From idea brainstorming, to confirming all the facts, to promotion - it took out all the stress and made it happen! Making an infographic is a specialized service - put your resources back into what you do best and have these experts take care of it from A-Z.
Entrepreneur
Philosophy
Before diving into specifics, here are a few things you should know about my packages:
- Month-t0-month plans: You can cancel anytime with one month of advance notice. I won't lock you into a long-term contract because I am confident you'll love the results you get from our linkbuilding and will want to continue.
- Pay in advance option available: Pay for 12 months in advance and receive a discount.
- Free preliminary SEO audit is included in each of the below packages.
- Whitehat Linkbuilding Strategies: Each of the below packages is whitehat, meaning that links are built and earned through a highly manual process. Greyhat solutions like Private Blog Networks are still effective and are cheaper, as they require very little manual work, but I don't recommend that a business use greyhat SEO for their main web property.
- Minimize Risk: There is risk with all types of SEO and anybody who tells you otherwise is wrong. Any time you focus on a single platform, whether Google Organic or Adwords or Amazon, any change that platform makes has the potential to impact you. That said, the purpose of whitehat SEO is to minimize risk and to operate from a strategic perspective rather than a tactical one, so that your site can survive and thrive for years to come. We build for the long-term.
Onpage SEO
Onpage SEO relates to the quality of your website itself. You can think of Onpage SEO as being your car, and Offpage SEO (links) as being the gasoline that you put in it. Even a Ferrari won't go anywhere without gas in it.
The first step of any SEO initiative is to make sure that your website itself is in order.
As part of our free onpage assessment, the main things that we'll be examining and fixing are:
- Site Taxonomy: Is your site structured correctly? Are silos properly implemented?
- URL Structure: Are URLs properly optimized and are any 301 redirects necessary?
- Content Overview: Is your site at risk for a thin or duplicate content penalty?
- Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools Configuration: Are both of these set up to properly track visits to the website?
- Indexing Issues
- Product Listing Optimization: Are product pages optimized properly, and does the team have a template that they can use to build out future pages?
- Are title tags and meta description tags optimized?
- Is the site's internal linking structure optimized?
- Sitespeed
- Image Optimization: Are all images on the website properly optimized, titled, and labeled with alt text?
Offsite SEO
Linkbuilding should form the bulk of any SEO package, and that is what I focus on.
Each of the three packages below is designed to net you a 2-3x (or more) ROI. For more on how we are estimating ROI, look to the Estimated ROI section further down this page.
Plan Features
Links + Social Signals/Month
Guest Posts/Mo
Blog Posts/Mo
Ecomm Tracking Advice
Blog Images
No Setup Fee
Free Audit
Keyword Research
Content Calendar
Monthly Report
High DA Promise
Monthly Infographic
Premium SEO
30
3
2
$2295 / month
SEO Juice Plan
40
4
3
$3295 / month
Link Plus SEO
20
2
1
$1795 / month
SEO Juice Plan ($3295 a Month)
This ROI-focused package is designed to cover the bulk of your content marketing efforts. You make the edits and uploads to the website that we request, we do the rest. This package is a combination of linkbuilding, content creation, and design skills that is extremely effective and hard to replicate in-house!
This package includes:
- 40 Whitehat Links + Social Signals/Month: More links and social signals = more SEO authority passing to your site. These links are a combination of comment links, directory links, editorial links, and links that that are gained from manual outreach. Social signals are organic signals from sites like Facebook and Pinterest that result from publishing + promotion of great content. Our years of experience mean we can get you links from sites that other agencies can't. Included within these links are…
- Four Monthly Guest Posts published outside of your website. Guest posts (like this) are high quality pieces of content that appear on other websites and link back to yours. Not only are they a great way to earn backlinks, but they often drive targeted traffic as well!
- Creation + Promotion of a Monthly Infographic: We’ll create an infographic for you every month and then promote it to relevant blogs and news outlets using the same strategy that we have executed to gain links and mentions from websites like Business Insider and Tech Crunch China.
- A Guaranteed Editorial Link from lifehack.org, huffingtonpost.com, elitedaily.com, or thoughtcatalog.com. These are extremely high authority sites that your competitors almost certainly can't get links from. We are so confident in our ability to land you a link from one of these high authority sites that we guarantee one within three months of beginning this package or we'll offer you a 50% discount on a month of SEO.
- Keyword Research and Content Calendar: Selecting the right keywords is essential. Ranking page one for a term without purchase intent behind it will drive traffic but not revenue. We'll identify the keywords that you should be targeting, and will create a content calendar that you can use to publish content about them on a regular basis.
- Three 1,000 Word Blog Posts/Month published to your Content Calendar: We’ll identify the content that has performed best historically for competitors, and will then create and publish 4 monthly blog posts of 1,000 words each to your site. For each of those blog posts, you’ll also get…
- 1 Custom-branded Image published with each blog post
- E-commerce Tracking Advice: We want your SEO campaign to be as profitable as you do, and will tell you how to setup E-commerce goals in Google Analytics so we can measure the specific results of our campaign.
- Monthly Analytics Reporting: Reporting of rankings, traffic, and recommendations on what to do next.
Premium SEO ($2295 a Month)
- 30 Whitehat Links + Social Signals/Month: More links = more SEO authority passing to your site. These links are a combination of comment links, directory links, editorial links, and links that that are gained from manual outreach. Our years of experience mean we can get you links from sites that other agencies can't. Included within these links are…
- Three Monthly Guest Posts published outside of your website. Guest posts (like this) are high quality pieces of content that appear on other websites and link back to yours. Not only are they a great way to earn backlinks, but they often drive targeted traffic as well!
- A Guaranteed Editorial Link from lifehack.org, huffingtonpost.com, elitedaily.com, or thoughtcatalog.com. These are extremely high authority sites that your competitors almost certainly can't get links from. We are so confident in our ability to land you a link from one of these high authority sites that we guarantee one within three months of beginning this package or we'll offer you a 50% discount on a month of SEO.
- Creation + Promotion of a Monthly Infographic: We’ll create an infographic for you every month and then promote it to relevant blogs and news outlets using the same strategy that we have executed to gain links and mentions from websites like Business Insider and Tech Crunch China.
- Keyword Research and Content Calendar: Selecting the right keywords is essential. Ranking page one for a term without purchase intent behind it will drive traffic but not revenue. We'll identify the keywords that you should be targeting, and will create a content calendar that you can use to publish content about them on a regular basis.
- Two 1,000 Word Blog Posts/Month published to your Content Calendar: We’ll identify the content that has performed best historically for competitors, and will then create and publish 4 monthly blog posts of 1,000 words each to your site. For each of those blog posts, you’ll also get…
- 1 Custom-branded Image published with each blog post
- E-commerce Tracking Advice: We want your SEO campaign to be as profitable as you do, and will tell you how to setup E-commerce goals in Google Analytics so we can measure the specific results of our campaign.
- Monthly Analytics Reporting: Reporting of rankings, traffic, and recommendations on what to do next.
Link Plus SEO ($1795 a Month)
- 20 Whitehat Links + Social Signals/Month:: More links = more SEO authority passing to your site. These links are a combination of comment links, directory links, editorial links, and links that that are gained from manual outreach. Our years of experience mean we can get you links from sites that other agencies can't. Included within these links are…
- Two Monthly Guest Posts published outside of your website. Guest posts (like this) are high quality pieces of content that appear on other websites and link back to yours. Not only are they a great way to earn backlinks, but they often drive targeted traffic as well!
- Creation + Promotion of a Bi-monthly Infographic: We’ll create an infographic for you every month and then promote it to relevant blogs and news outlets using the same strategy that we have executed to gain links and mentions from websites like Business Insider and Tech Crunch China.
- One 1,000 Word Blog Post/Month published to your Content Calendar: We’ll identify the content that has performed best historically for competitors, and will then create and publish a monthly blog posts of 1,000 words each to your site. For each of those blog posts, you’ll also get…
- 1 Custom-branded Image published with each blog post
- E-commerce Tracking Advice: We want your SEO campaign to be as profitable as you do, and will tell you how to setup E-commerce goals in Google Analytics so we can measure the specific results of our campaign.
- Monthly Analytics Reporting: Reporting of rankings, traffic, and recommendations on what to do next.
Estimated ROI
Calculating expected ROI for SEO is not as straightforward as calculating ROI for a paid traffic campaign, but nevertheless it is an important starting point.
To calculate ROI, we just need to know the Conversion Rate (CR) of a website, the price of its average sale, and its monthly traffic from organic visits.
These estimates are imperfect and will be revised over time, but they are designed to show the predicted effectiveness of organic as a channel. Based on past experience, we believe that a 2-3x return on investment is absolutely attainable as a conservative estimate for SEO over a six month to one year period.
Estimating the ROI of an SEO campaign is an imperfect mixture of art and science, and relies on a set of assumptions, some of which will be proven wrong over the course of a campaign. Very few companies will ever even attempt to calculate this for you.
Here is a breakdown of some of the terms and assumptions we are making in the table below:
- Visits/Month: This is our estimate of visits per month that we think we can achieve based on search volume in your space
- CR (Conversion Rate): The percentage of customers who make a purchase on your website. We are estimating a 2% conversion rate from organic visitors.
- LCV (Lifetime Customer Value): We are estimating an average sale price of $50/conversion and that 50% of customers return to make a second purchase. This is a conservative estimate as it doesn't take into account the estimated number of customers who will make more than one repeat purchase or take other quantifiable and revenue generating activities like sign up for a newsletter. Our formula thus is: average sale price + (average sale price * percentage of people who make a second purchase), so $50 + ($50 * .5) = $75.
- Additional Visits/Mo: The number of additional organic visits/month we believe we can deliver on top of the current estimated baseline of 900 organic visits a month.
- Added Rev: The amount of additional revenue each package is estimated to deliver to you
- Monthly Target Sales: The number of sales needed/month to hit revenue estimates.
Package | Visits/Month | CR | LCV | Est. Rev/Mo | Added Visits/Mo | Additional Rev/Month | SEO Cost | ROI | Monthly Target Sales | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
None | 900 | .02 | $75 | $1350 | 0 | $0 | $0 | 0x | 18 | |||
Link Plus SEO | 2700 | .02 | $75 | $4050 | 1800 | $2700 | $1495 | 1.8x | 54 | |||
Premium SEO | 6000 | .02 | $75 | $9000 |
5100 | $7,650 | $2095 | 3.65x | 75 | |||
SEO Juice Plan | 9000 | .02 | $75 | $13500 | 8100 | $12,150 | $3295 | 3.68x | 180 |
Success Stories
Here are a few examples of results that we have been able to achieve...
Rapid Growth Since Beginning SEO in March
The blue line represents organic traffic, the orange line paid traffic. After beginning SEO, the client was able to immediately reduce their Adwords budget by thousands of dollars a month while still growing revenue.
From 0 to 1500 Organic Visits a Day...
This site went from no organic traffic to averaging 1500 organic visits a day in under a year. Sold.
Quadrupling Organic Traffic
A near quadrupling in monthly organic traffic from a basic link package. The link packages I am proposing are far more robust than this.
Page One Position Two
Page One Position Two
First of 10 Million Results
Page One Position One
Page One Position Three for a Lucrative Term in Health
Page One Position Three for a highly competitive term in the addiction and recovery niche.