Kamini Wood is a Life Coach based in Cary, NC. She approached Diffuse Digital in June 2020 after several negative experiences with expensive Facebook Ad Agencies, and other marketing freelancers.

Kamini was looking to change directions and work on a long-term marketing strategy. In the past the agencies and freelancers operated separately, executing independent strategies with no communication between each other. We proposed that we design a cohesive strategy between all marketing mediums and focus on driving consistent, organic traffic. She also had over 200 articles published on her site, but was generating less than 50 clicks a month on average.

We agreed on a year minimum contract in order to give us enough time to do a holistic review of all her accounts (social, website, and email marketing) and then draft and execute marketing strategies for each medium. Expectations were managed that results often take 6 months to 1 year.

Starting Point – June 2020: 516 website users/month with only 47 users/month coming from organic search.

We started with a holistic review of the current social channels, and email marketing program as well as a full-scale SEO audit to identify any technical issues on the site and analyze existing content. 

Short Term Gains: Take the Easy Wins

After analyzing all the channels, we identified Pinterest as being the easiest area to get a quick boost. Her previous Pinterest strategist had achieved impressive engagement numbers within the platform but after analyzing her work, it was clear the bulk of the engagement was all from repinned content from other accounts – NOT from Kamini’s OWN content on the platform.

Pinterest Strategy Overhaul -> 594% increase in site visits in 6 months

Kamini had a great deal of content already published on her website, we created custom graphics for each and published them to Pinterest on targeted boards. In addition, we ensured we used keywords in the titles and descriptions and added ALT text to each photo.

In 6 months, we were able to increase the traffic coming from Pinterest traffic to the site by 549%!

The simple changes we made flipped a switch in Pinterest and sent the traffic flowing to her site, instead of to competitor sites. The previous Pinterest marketer was achieving engagement on Pinterest but it wasn’t helping drive users to any of Kamini’s content. She had worked hard to create it, but it wasn’t the focus of the promotional efforts on Pinterest. This is the first demonstration of how important a COHESIVE marketing strategy is.

PINTEREST MARKETING STATS / HIGHLIGHTS (6 month period)

• Starting Traffic (Nov 2019 – May 2020): 150 visits
• First 6 months (June 2020 -Dec 2020): 974 visits (+549%)
• Most Recent 6 months (June 2022-Dec 2022): 8780 visits (+5753%)

Step 2: Optimize Site & Existing Content

While we were celebrating the easy win on Pinterest, we had also begun a technical audit of the site and its content to determine what needed to be improved in order to get it ranking. The site had roughly 200 published articles but generated less than 50 organic clicks per month on average.

Sitemap / Crawlability

One of the first issues we noticed was that there was no sitemap submitted in Google Search Console. Most of the URLs had been discovered, but not all. In recent years, Google has improved crawlers and is typically able to find the pages on your site even without a sitemap – but it’s always best practice to submit one and update it regularly. In this case, the reason some pages weren’t indexed is – they were too hard to find. There was not a single internal link between ANY of the 200 articles! We got to work building our link silos within the site to improve crawlability, as well as to spread authority through the site.

Thin Content + Photos / ALT Text

The next clear issue was the site content was relatively thin and had no photos, or headings. Google wants to provide the highest quality content when someone conducts a search – and I think most users would be unimpressed if they ended up on a website without a single photo in the article, don’t you? This was important to fix if we wanted to start ranking.

One extremely important part we uncovered during the analysis was the existing published content was unique, and high-quality. Kamini was a great writer, and extremely knowledgeable about the subjects she wrote about – she just needed professional guidance to help optimize the content for the website.

In addition to adding photos and headings, we also went through all of the articles to identify a keyword, and optimize the article for it. Over the course of 1 year, we optimized all 200 articles, added feature images, and photos throughout (all with ALT text), and ensured every article had at least 2 links to it using relevant anchor text/keywords.

By June 2021 upon completion of these goals, monthly organic traffic had increased over 2700% from 47 users in June 2020, to 1326 users in June 2021!

Step 3: Create New/Optimized Long Form Content

We had executed our original strategy to optimize EXISTING content successfully, but we had a plan to further improve this. Creating content briefs for optimized, long-form content written by Kamini.

Keyword Research / Content Briefs

These content briefs included a keyword focus, word count goal, and main headings to structure the content with – all dictated by keyword research and analysis of top-ranking articles.

As she began writing these articles, we also worked doing outreach to gather some backlinks to the content each month, in order to help boost their authority.  We included many internal links to older articles throughout, which in theory should help pass any backlink authority from the new posts and help boost the older ones and lift the site as a whole – and that’s exactly what began happening.

Step 4: Repeat What Works

We’ve been working together to continue growing the site with optimized content ever since. As we look at closing out 2022, site traffic has broken 40k visitors per month – with over 34k per month coming solely from organic search. We’ve also built an email list of over 3000 subscribers, and add roughly 300 new subs each month.

When it comes to SEO, it takes time to get results. But when given enough time, the results can be extremely impactful as demonstrated with Kamini Wood’s website. Although we cannot guarantee similar results, we have had a great deal of success replicating these strategies across multiple businesses and industries. If you’d like to learn more, book a call to discuss your project with us today.