The perfect picture: Common Ground SEO campaign increases conversions for Elmtec by 59%

Project Highlights

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increase on conversions
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Increase on organic sessions
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Higher than target conversions

The brief

Elmtec are the official UK distributor of SketchUp, a software that allows users to create 3D models including buildings, furniture and interiors.

Competing against the main SketchUp brand, Elmtec’s goal is to drive UK users to reseller websites to purchase SketchUp software and its extensions.

Elmtec approached Common Ground to drive their digital marketing activity forward via a 12-month campaign (from January 2023 to December 2023), and agreed on the following core KPIs to measure its success:

1. To increase organic conversions by 40% year-over-year, with a focus on free trial downloads.
2. To increase organic sessions by 50% year-over-year.

The Challenge

The main challenge with this campaign would be competing directly against SketchUp.com, the product developer. With the obvious similarities in their names, Elmtec had been struggling to outperform SketchUp.com when it came to brand terms alone.

Not only did the main brand (SketchUp.com) have a large domain authority, it also benefited from a comprehensive set of user guides.

To combat this and to increase the amount of organic traffic for Elmtec to the level we required, and subsequently the number of organic conversions to hit our KPIs, we needed to target those within our ideal customer profile (ICP) that were unaware of SketchUp.

The Solution

So, what was our plan for tackling this tricky challenge?

Our strategy focused on three key areas: content creation, on-page improvements and link acquisition.

Generally speaking, we would target non-brand terms such as “architecture design software”, or “garden design software” in order to target our ICP who were not yet aware of SketchUp, or who were unsure of which software to purchase.

Likewise creating assets that answered general design-based questions would also be beneficial, as well as assets for those who were searching for queries around SketchUp uses.

By doing so, we’d increase visibility within SERPs and promote free trial downloads and clicks through to reseller websites.

Additionally, a link acquisition campaign would support our content strategy and add to the progress being made on SERP visibility.

Content creation

From a content perspective, we put our efforts into building dedicated landing pages for the non-brand terms, as well as guides and tutorials around the topics of our focus keywords.

This included guides for interior designers using software for the first time, as well as content to build up our authority around brand terms such as “SketchUp UK”.

We noticed that many existing “how-to” guides about SketchUp across the web were in video format. However, due to limited client resources to create these, we decided to write extended, descriptive blog posts instead.

On-page Improvements

With some high-performing landing pages already existing on the Elmtec website, we reviewed existing content and made suggestions for non-brand keyword optimisations.

This included breaking out industry pages into multiple pages in order to capture searchers within different niches of the same industry.

By splitting out the pages to target niches, we started to increase the amount of organic traffic received through improved visibility within Google of target terms.

Link Acquisition

To improve our visibility for non-brand terms across industry landing pages we needed to generate links. We utilised email outreach alongside backlink reclamation to keep our profile as strong as possible.

The results

Achieving high levels of growth and conversions for an organisation that acts as the distributor of the SketchUp product and competes directly against the main brand was a huge challenge. However, the results were exceptional.

Our approach to the state of the SERPs, targeting almost exclusively non-brand terms, increased visibility significantly across all non-brand target terms in a relatively short period of time.

For example, our top 3 commercial keywords focused on target industries, with a combined search volume of 2,230, and all moved up to page 1 of Google within 3-8 months.

Meanwhile, the blog posts and “how-to” guides that we created and were some of the best performing content on the site over the course of the campaign and to date, driving significant organic sessions.

With a small budget compared to the size of SketchUp.com, we managed to surpass our conversion target by 11.92% within the first 8 months, alongside driving 8.39% more organic sessions than projected for the entirety of 2023.

Compared to the previous year, organic conversions increased by 59% due to our work, while by August 2023, organic sessions were already up by 105% compared to the entire year of 2022.

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