I’m currently working with a number of newer companies who are showing varying degrees of commitment to this process. I can point them to various examples of websites where I took over the SEO and helped them grow traffic but here I’ll offer a fresh look at a case study in SEO investment. This is a broad look at a case that is, in some ways a uniquely successful case (as all successes are) but in other ways typical and even predictable.

The initial approach
This company approached me about two years ago around the middle of 2009 and told me that they were spending X amount of dollars (a mid three figures number) per month on SEO and it wasn’t doing anything for them. Unfortunately, there are many companies and people (let me emphasize unfortunately) who take money in the SEO business without delivering growth or, at least, measurable value in some respect. This company had built some backlinks from some time before but other than that had done little to continue growing traffic to the client’s website.

Every SEO has their own unique strengths
When I looked at the website’s situation, I realized that I could do a lot to grow the site’s traffic through content development. This is an admitted strength of mine (hence the name of this site) and is a focus of mine vs. the focus of many SEO’s which is linkbuilding (while there are still others who, it seems, are questionable as to whether they have any focus).

The work
I took over the site, got to work and started developing content, telling the site owners that if they invested about $1000 per month I would double their search engine traffic in 6 months time: from about 50 visitors per day to 100 for a concentrated niche that was somewhat competitive (for page one results, anyway) and also highly interested. I never quite topped out on this budget as I follow the old adage to under-promise and over-deliver.

Since the company was already investing money in SEO, though, the investment was relatively easy for them.

Here’s a graph of those first six months:

What you see in the graph is that the traffic was basically flat-lined when we commenced work on SEO for this site. (I say ‘we’ because I did work closely with the site’s developer on some critical changes.) During initial work, traffic rose only very slowly, so little that it barely registers on this graph. We could see progress in terms of pages getting indexed and getting some traffic from new keywords.

However, there was no great payoff and we had promised the client that traffic would double within six months. They kept spending the requisite high three figures per month, though. They may have been growing worried, I’m not sure, but I don’t think I was.

What happened was that there was a cumulative effect of activating the site’s development and continuing to add content as well as working with partners to create links into the site, then tweaking the site structure as we went along. All of that work cumulatively added up to an eventual spike in traffic.

And that’s the way it goes.

After this, the site owners felt that the site had grown enough and they were happy with the amount of traffic they were getting for the investment they had put into it. Of course, others like continued growth, although a doubling of traffic every six months is not likely, especially as you start to top out on terms that you can truly rank for and as you run out of content ideas (as happens with sites that are focused on a small industry or consumer niches).

The point in all this, of course, is that your search engine optimization payout is often frontloaded but in the end there is a payoff. It hurts at first but in the end you will enjoy results and from there, clients can decide to continue to grow traffic or simply enjoy the benefits of your investment for a while… as long as your competition stays asleep.

If I google and look around at search engine optimization companies in Kitchener, I see a few names that I know among the results. I know Nardo Kuitert of fergus-ontario.com, (okay, so technically in Fergus), from a few years ago, back in the day when we were both freelancing for a company called Geosign. I barely know Ashish Kothari, only because he found me on linkedin.com.  I do not know who SEO Expertise is in Cambridge, nor do I know who runs Just Say On. (What is that supposed to mean, by the way?) There’s some company in Waterloo called Local Search Engine Marketing.  (Apparently their area of expertise is listing companies in Google’s Local Business Results?) Of course, just down the road from Kitchener-Waterloo (home of the Blackberry!) the inimitable Rae Hoffman makes her home in Guelph. (…At least the last I heard.) Other results include AroundKW, aka Kim Burnett, the extremely helpful web host for a number of sites I own…. and as well, some company with the interesting name of Lift Media.

I have little doubt that the area can sustain this number of search engine optimization companies. And I am still of the opinion that Kitchener Waterloo companies are by and large quite ignorant of the web (part of a national pattern, apparently). Also, the area still really lacks a strong web publishing presence, in spite of the area’s supposed designation as the Technology Triangle. (For my part, I am working on increasing web publishing in this area.) Most of the technology in this area is still software or software-based.

To further argue this, let me point out that there have been no great web successes in Kitchener-Waterloo; no Diggs, no Flickrs, not much at all…. just a RIM …. and a Geosign.

Anyway, search engine optimization (SEO) in Kitchener-Waterloo is – just as it is everywhere – still in its juvenile phase. (That sentence, with its silly link, and this post, with its silly subject and title both exemplify how juvenile SEO still is, currently). But anyway, to all my competition, I say, may the best SEO company in KW win the most business!