Sweet SEO Case Study!

How SEO Can Enhance a PR Campaign and Take Home Two Four Awards for Excellent Results

By Jason Poulos (@TheSaganaki)

As digital marketing strategies evolve it’s not a bad idea to see if your PR content or PR campaign goals can integrate with other marketing channels. Traditionally you wouldn’t associate search engine marketing with PR but SEO has grown into a legit marketing channel over the years. With so many searches happening on Google we wanted to make sure that our PR message for our Maple Syrup client was getting exposure through search engines.

We did a full on-site SEO audit and execution for the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers back in early 2011. With the optimized site fully up and running we started to see some rather favorable results for the site. Seeing these increases in traffic from Google we thought we had a good case study on our hands for some award submissions. We submitted and won:

  1. Virginia Public Relations Awards
  2. PR News Digital PR Awards
  3. Bulldog Digital/Social PR Awards
  4. PR Daily’s Digital and Social Media Awards

Here’s how we did it:

PR Campaign Goal

Our goal was to raise awareness of pure Canadian maple syrup, showcase the product as versatile and innovative in cooking, and finally demonstrate that maple syrup is a healthy, natural sweetener and a good substitute for simple sugar.

Website Overview

The Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers’ website was beautiful, consumer-focused and communicated its message about the health and culinary benefits of pure Canadian maple syrup. Though rich in content with an extensive recipe database and mouth-watering photographs for the maple lover, the website was nowhere to be found when searching for relevant terms on Google. While Canada accounts for 80% of the maple syrup production worldwide, the client’s website and our message was all but invisible. As the Federation entered a year with significant news to announce, We knew the website needed to be restructured, infused with a cross link strategy, married to the client’s Facebook and Twitter pages and optimized for strategic search terms.

Research

In auditing the website’s content, we learned the site’s content, while informative, was not keyword rich making the site hard to find in Google. Not only was content not optimized for searches but some technical aspects of the site were not catering to the search engine either. Knowing that Google ranks web pages based on keyword relevance and popularity, we set out to align and restructure the content around keywords to enhance the website’s Google presence.

Planning

The first phase of planning was to determine which specific keywords should be used on the site. Google’s AdWords tool as well as Wordtracker was used to understand search volume and the strength and opportunity of particular keywords. Our goal was to raise awareness of pure Canadian maple syrup, showcase the product as versatile and innovative in cooking, and finally demonstrate that maple syrup is a healthy, natural sweetener and a good substitute for simple sugar. We targeted keywords that were relative to our content goals but had a high search volume and low competition.

Execution

With our keyword research in place it was time to think of how these keywords would influence our content and site structure.

SEO Results

With our plan fully executed and the site redesigned, www.purecanadamaple.com was re-launched on March 1, 2011. The results below compare the optimized site (March 1, 2011 to Feb 28, 2012) to the non-optimized site of 2010 (March 1, 2010 – Feb 28, 2011):

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