
Marketing case study: +2,100% organic traffic
One of Ontario’s newest financial companies had been building its marketing plan for a year before launch.
But 6 months after launching, the team wasn’t seeing the results it wanted.
That’s where Webb Content enters the scene.
The company’s marketing challenges
This company knew it had to succeed online to circumvent its larger competitors that had been established for decades already. To that end, the marketing team invested heavily in display advertising on the Google Display Network (banner ads on other websites).
The team poured the equivalent of a CEO’s healthy salary into that ad campaign every month, and hired a large international agency out of Toronto to manage the ad spend.
They didn’t see much ROI on that ad spend.
Established competitors had deeper pockets, and they’d been around for decades already.
The campaign caused exorbitant advertising costs, only making a penny back on each dollar spent.
The agency of record neglected the campaign, essentially throwing money down the drain.
The company was blogging alongside that advertising campaign, but not in a way that drove traffic. This financial company hired a content mill in Toronto to write 300-word fluff pieces that didn’t impart any value to the reader, which meant Google never ranked it.
In fact, most of the content wasn’t even about the company’s area of business. The marketing team produced dozens of posts about vegetarian recipes and short pieces on work-life balance. Google had no idea what to make of a financial site producing recipes, so it just ignored the site.
There was no content strategy, which meant each blog was a shot in the dark.
Content was shallow, and Google pushes those results down into obscurity.
The website’s ontology was a mixed bag. Google only ranks trustworthy and consistent sources.
How I solved the problem
First, we brought the company up to speed on how digital advertising works, even though Webb Content didn’t sell advertising as a service. When the marketing team realized it had spent a fortune chasing the wrong traffic, everyone’s faces went pale.
Pro Tip: Never use display advertising for traffic acquisition, either. Even paid search ads tend to perform better as remarketing campaigns because the people representing that traffic have an existing relationship with your brand.
Showed the marketing team the real cost of misusing digital advertising dollars for acquisition.
Identified ad traffic’s lack of targeting and the lack of a relationship with the financial brand.
Discussed more cost-effective alternatives for traffic acquisition to the financial website.
That’s when we got down to brass tacks. The company needed to convince Google that it was both about a particular financial niche and a reliable source of information for that that niche.
That’s where search data and content strategy came into play. Webb Content created a content strategy driven by the intent of the company’s prospective clients and keyword data to justify the traffic gains from each piece of content. The content leveraged official sources, industry data, and the kind of style that only comes from years of experience in writing.
Formed a content strategy based on the financial company’s niche to capture relevant traffic.
Created every piece of content with keyword data to make sure that the content was found online.
Raised the quality of the content high enough that the gneral public used it as a financial resource.
Bonus: technical SEO helped, too
The financial company also paid a “global agency” an obscene amount of money for an amateur-level website. The font files didn’t even load properly, and the thing took 12 seconds to load.
Google considers anything above 3 seconds to be “slow,” for reference.
Webb Content sped up the website by more than 250% with image optimization, implementing some performance WordPress plugins, and creating accelerated mobile pages (AMP) for the blog.
Website speed improved from 12 seconds to 3.5 seconds.
New content ranked faster in Google’s search results with AMP technology.
Strategic internal linking between content and service pages boosted the entire domain’s visibility.
2,000% More Organic Search Traffic
The content strategy worked, putting the broker on the digital map. Over the span of 18 months it carved out a traffic niche that most competitors didn’t even realize existed.
400% More Conversions from Search
The qualified traffic from Google was more interested in what the company was selling. Why? The content answered their questions, building trust and a rapport between visitors and the brand.
Hundreds of Thousands Saved Monthly
Instead of spending a fortune every month, the company earned even more client acquisitions than the advertising had generated after 9 months—and for a fraction of the price, too.
Let's talk about your next project

Everything starts with strategy.
Let's talk about where you want to take your business and how content fits into that plan.
Coffee's on me.