The case studies on this page (a work in progress) expand on existing examples from our client portfolio to provide you with a clear picture of how your organisation can benefit from our endeavours in terms of:
- lead generation
- revenue gains
- savings to the bottom line
- brand authority and reputation
- customer retention and loyalty
- return on marketing investment.
You’re welcome to contact Alex for more specific client references along these lines.
CASE STUDY 1: WEBSITE, SEO & CONTENT UPDATE INCREASES CONVERSIONS
The client
An Extra Pair of Hands is a well-established, professional cleaning and gardening company with branches in the lower North Island and Christchurch. The business services both residential and business clients in these areas, and has an excellent reputation.
The scenario
An Extra Pair of Hands’ owner Jane Richardson wanted to improve the performance of their website. The goal of the exercise would be to increase the volume of traffic to the site, convert more leads on the site, and increase revenue. Their website was built in Joomla CMS.
The challenge
The website was carrying a considerable amount of duplicate content, particularly involving service location pages. The usability of the site was also not ideal, especially in terms of navigation (internal linking), and calls to action. The content on many pages was somewhat insufficient, and not well focused around keywords. As a result, the site’s pages were not featuring in local search results to any extent.
The solution
Beginning in early 2018, we undertook various technical, content, and local SEO enhancements to achieve Jane’s objective.
Kalpesh Bhula, expert developer at ThreePoint, was on board to build a new WordPress website, based on the existing design, that replaced the ageing and problematic Joomla structure. ThreePoint also took over hosting the site on an ultra-fast local server.
Alex carried out keyword research, and worked with Jane to revise and refocus the website content. Duplicate content was removed from the site, and multiple location pages were reduced to one page, with a cleverly designed location map showing branches and services offered. Usability was addressed with a reorganised menu, appropriate calls to action, improved forms, FAQs, customer testimonials, and an internal linking structure was devised.
The results
The new website’s customised technical, content, and local search optimisations are performing effectively. The site is up to date, responsive on mobile devices, loads quickly, is easy to manage and use compared with the Joomla version, and is set up to make SEO work easier to achieve.
Jane is spending much less on paid advertising to attract business. Her website’s pages are appearing more prominently in search results, and click-throughs from organic search and social channels are providing a rich source of traffic. These users are also converting at a much higher rate on the website than previously. There was a 57% increase in bookings and enquiries through website forms in 2018, compared with 2017. This trend has continued strongly in 2019, and through 2020 (with drop for Covid lockdown) as the graph below demonstrates.
Results summary
- Achieved higher rankings for pages in search results, generating more quality traffic to the website
- Savings on advertising costs
- Improved website usability equals a better experience for users
- Increased conversions and revenue
- Sustainable results based on ongoing monitoring and site management
CASE STUDY 2: WEBSITE OPTIMISATIONS BOOST LEADS & SALES
The client
City Print Communications is a design, printing, and mailing company in Wellington. The business was founded by Clinton Riley, and has been in operation for 30 years. Their core business is digital and offset printing for B2B clients with established brands.
The scenario
Sentence Case was engaged to help City Print achieve several objectives. The primary goal was to increase organic traffic to their website, and conversions on their website in terms of quote requests, which would drive revenue growth.
The challenge
The client did not want any work to involve rebranding, or redesigning their website.
The solution
We proposed to increase the traffic to City Print’s website through SEO. This included revising on-page content, improving title tags and meta-descriptions, and making subtle changes to the navigation and page layout to improve the user experience, such as making the CTA to get a print quote more prominent.
Firstly, we conducted a website review that captured data about keyword rankings, calls to action, site traffic sources, page views, title tags, and meta-descriptions. From this, we identified opportunities to improve the organic rankings of a cluster of important keywords.
Secondly, the City Print team completed an avatar and persona questionnaire. This clarified City Print’s ideal customer, and the opportunities and barriers associated with their solutions along the buyer journey.
We used the valuable information gleaned from these exercises to formulate a plan for the work, which we executed over a period of several weeks, working alongside Clinton and the City Print team.
The results
The graphs below illustrate the results of our efforts.
Record of sessions growth between August 2017 and end of October 2019, from Google Analytics. The major phase of website optimisation was implemented in late 2017/early 2018. The dips in data are due to summer holidays.
And here’s an updated graph of website sessions for 2020. Steady as a rock, despite the dip during Covid lockdown. Organic search (orange line) is a huge component of website traffic.
Increased conversion rate (quote requests) on City Print’s website as the result of our SEO, UX, and content revisions.
CASE STUDY 3: LOCAL SEARCH OPTIMISATIONS BENEFIT CLIENTS DURING PANDEMIC RESPONSE
The New Zealand government’s “lockdown” response to the Covid-19 pandemic affected many businesses. Those selling direct to customers in person were impacted severely, including cafes and restaurants, tourism ventures, and event companies, among many others. On the other hand, some of our clients with Ecommerce stores saw large traffic and revenue increases from the organic search channel during this period, due to page, category, and product SEO implementations we already had in place, and fuelled by a sudden shift in demand toward local online services with delivery options. So the local search optimisations we had in place proved effective as well. Here’s a couple of examples:
Steep growth in organic search traffic to client’s site during pandemic response in NZ, Feb-Aug 2020.
A valuable outcome for this business was that subscribers also increased by 100% through the sign-in forms on their website and on Facebook. Users who had been introduced to their products and services almost by necessity over lockdown, remained loyal to their brand afterward. Result!
Data
Between mid-March and mid-May 2020:
- Revenue and transactions increased by 1000% over the previous period.
- Ecommerce conversion rate increased by 147%.
- New users increased by almost 300%.
- Organic search contributed 77% of users and 71% of revenue.
- Other channels brought large increases in users and revenue, especially the referral channel from directory sites listing local essential services.
In the second example below, the pain point for people searching online for this client’s solutions during lockdown was lengthy delays in shipments from large offshore stores. Instead, they turned to boutique online stores selling the same or similar products in NZ, perhaps at a higher price. Customers were prepared to pay a bit more to ensure faster delivery and also to support local businesses. They were not interested in products on offshore-based stores with NZ search ads. We worked on optimising products on the site for search, with excellent results.
Product SEO in place drives search traffic and revenue increase during Covid-19 lockdown for NZ online store.
Data
Compared with the previous 3-month period:
- Total sales revenue increased by 515%
- Number of orders increased by 356%
- Average order value increased by 35%.
CASE STUDY 4: SOCIAL CAMPAIGN DRIVES REVENUE INCREASE
The client
Survive-it, a Wellington-based company with a sizeable e-commerce store, provides a complete solution to civil defence emergency preparedness for workplaces, schools and in the home. Survive-it is a client of Anyware Web Marketing, and Alex was involved in helping to manage Survive-it’s Facebook page in the course of providing services for Anyware.
The scenario
The managing director of Survive-it, Steven McLauchlan, wanted to increase sales and engagement with their brand through a cost-effective Facebook promotion.
The challenge
The product on offer must be seen as valuable by the audience or a campaign can fall over at the start.
The solution
We decided to run a giveaway promotion through a post on Survive-it’s Facebook page timeline.
We chose a product for the giveaway that we believed would attract a great deal of interest – a Grab n Go 4-Person Starter Kit (pictured). Wellington is an earthquake-prone area, and the general level of awareness of the need to be prepared for a natural disaster among the city’s population is high.
The promotion also offered a 10% discount on all products in the online store for the two-week duration of the giveaway, redeemable with a coupon at checkout.
People entered the giveaway competition by posting a comment. The winner was chosen by random number generator.
We set the post up carefully, paying attention to Facebook’s rules for advertisers by including a summary of the Terms and Conditions on the post, as well as in a separate Note.
Boost
We boosted the post to an audience in New Zealand with an interest in emergency preparedness.
Results
Image shows results of Facebook campaign for Survive-it.
Post and boost: 9974 people reached (7000 organic). The boost reached 2974 people, and attracted 456 engagements, with a total spend of only $28. The price per engagement of the ad was about 6c, which was better than 90 per cent of all Facebook ads of this type.
Giveaway: The post received 265 valid giveaway entries (as comments), 263 reactions, and 70 shares. It also attracted 880 link clicks, and added 134 followers to the page.
Effect of campaign on e-commerce store sales
Over the two-week period of the giveaway campaign, compared with the same time period in the previous year:
- Total orders: +160%
- Units sold: +472%
- Revenue: +170.37%
- Average order value (AOV): +3.99%
- Conversion rate: +0.22% *
* E-commerce conversion rates can be difficult to evaluate with a promotion causing a spike in traffic. However, the conversion rate increase we achieved was significant, considering that the average global conversion rate for Survive-it’s segment is 1.30 to 1.50 per cent, according to Econsultancy.
At Survive-it, we take the need for New Zealanders to be ready for an emergency very seriously, and use social media to spread this message. Anyware and Alex provided us with an excellent giveaway promotion, which not only gave us good results in terms of sales, but also helped us engage with a broad audience.”
~ Steven McLauchlan, managing director, Survive-it
CASE STUDY 5: DEVELOPING & PROMOTING A BRAND
The client
KSS Properties, a property development company.
The scenario
The developer of a landmark apartment development on the foreshore at Lyall Bay in Wellington needed a copywriter to take care of all the copy creation work around the brand strategy and promotions for the release of apartments to the market.
The challenge
There was a tight time constraint on the work, and also several different areas for copy, including naming the brand, developing the tone and key messages, and writing for promotions and the website.
The solution
Alex collaborated with uber-talented Auckland designer Daisy Zou and developer Tom Smith to successfully complete all copywriting work on time. This included:
- Naming the brand and creating the tagline.
- Creating promotional and advertising copy for a range of platforms, with input from the developer, and experts involved in the project.
Here’s the brochure:
Navigator-Apartments-Brochure-2017
The brochure is a double spread from page 3 – use the cursor hand and zoom control to view the full layout. The free embedder plugin doesn’t permit this functionality on mobile, so if you’re on your phone, here’s another option for viewing the PDF:
