Digital Marketing Agency

You are here: Home / Archives for SEO

Team Building Venue Hires WSI Connect to Develop Digital Marketing Strategy

//  by 

With two fully-equipped, custom-built teaching and event kitchens located in Berkeley and Oakland, Kitchen on Fire has hosted and taught many individuals and groups in their private cooking classes. Kitchen on Fire offers a unique culinary experience for those looking for a hands-on, educational activity that can bring groups together around making and sharing food.

The areas of focus of this campaign will be promoting team building cooking classes and large group cooking classes.

team-building-seo

The professional chef instructors lead birthday and anniversary parties as well as business community groups through the preparation of various menus until it is time for participants to enjoy their finished dishes. Kitchen on Fire also offers 12-week courses, nutrition classes, and camps for youth. Previous customers have included groups from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pandora, Pinterest, and Pixar.

Kitchen on Fire is partnering with WSI Connect, a member of one of the nation’s largest digital marketing networks and a Google Partner, to expand their visibility online and generate and convert new leads. WSI Connect began with learning about Kitchen on Fire’s business and the audience they want to grow in order to understand the digital marketing strategies that will best fit their needs.

WSI Connect will develop a tailored SEO program beginning with a website audit as one of the first steps for SEO optimization. This SEO optimization process includes an extensive competitive and keyword analysis, as well as developing an SEO page level strategy and page development. Kitchen on Fire’s SEO optimization will also entail link building through on and off-site content creation with the development of two onsite blogs and two offsite blogs. The offsite blogs will be shared on a lifestyle blog and wellness blog.

As an ongoing component of their strategy, the SEO program will focus on the development and syndication of original and engaging content relevant to Kitchen on Fire’s audience, including SEO optimized blog posts and social media updates. With this digital marketing strategy, WSI Connect expects to increase Kitchen on Fire’s visibility in SERPs and grow their audience.

Click for a FREE Consultation
(and discover why you should work with WSI Connect!)

Case Study: Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (HERC)

//  by 

About The Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (HERC) 

The Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (HERC) is supported by over 700 universities including Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford. Their mission is to help universities promote diversity and inclusion among their faculty and administration. They serve two primary audiences. The first are the universities that need help filling open positions with diverse candidates. The second are diverse job seekers. HERC provides a wide range of resources to those job seekers to help them find, develop, and advance their careers in higher education.  By doing that, they are able to help Universities that financially support HERC source great administrators and faculty members from a very diverse pool of candidates.

The Challenge

HERC’s previous website was difficult to manage. They had two versions of their website (one for desktop and one for mobile) and any changes or updates had to be individually applied to each version.  It was time consuming and impossible to maintain. As a result, the volume of organic traffic from Google was consistently declining.  Therefore their jobseeker audience was also declining and their members were dissatisfied as they had smaller and smaller pools of qualified candidates to choose from.

HERC needed a new website that would be easier to manage and update and they needed a strong SEO strategy to help recover from the decline in organic traffic.

The Assessment

WSI Connect was initially brought in to do a technical SEO audit along with a competitive analysis.  We completed the SEO audit, identifying a number of problems with their existing website and attempted to work with the existing marketing agency to fix a number of those problems.  However, the existing agency required a significant investment to rebuild HERC’s website on their own proprietary platform.  HERC asked us for a proposal as well and we put together a package that included a new WordPress responsive website, monthly SEO work, content marketing deliverables, website hosting and support, and monthly reporting and analytics. According to the team at HERC, the comparison of the proposals lead to a decision that was a “no brainer” and we signed the contract a week later.

Implementation


The timeline for deployment of the new website was very aggressive and both teams worked overtime.  The home page needed to be better optimized for job searchers.

HERCjobs - Home Page - WSI Connect Digital Marketing-1

HERC has 17 regional offices and we created SEO content for each location to help improve their rankings in Google.  Along with extensive technical SEO improvements, we also provided a significant amount of graphic design.

HERCjobs - New England Regional Page - WSI Connect Digital Marketing-1

After deployment of the website, we continued to support HERC’s website and developed a content marketing strategy.  The content marketing strategy included combining multiple blog posts into ebooks.  We created landing pages and workflows so that the ebooks could be used as gated content that helped build and segment their email database.Each month we produce a report tracking KPI’s based on data from Google Analytics and discuss areas for additional growth.

HERCjobs - ebook landing page - WSI Connect Digital Marketing-1

The Results

  • 30% increase in Google organic year over year growth
  • Since the new website launch in September: 60,000 people registered for a free account with HERC. Unprecedented numbers of jobseekers. 
  • 1,100 eBook downloads to date.

Harvard University is HERC’s largest supporter and Ruth Molina (featured in the video) is a key decision maker.  She is employed by both HERC and Harvard University and her video testimonial shows her level of satisfaction. 

Ruth provides great feedback on the new website and highlights the growth in job seeker registrations which is essential to HERC’s existence.  Without a growing pool of job seekers, the colleges and Universities (member institutions) that HERC depends on, would not provide their financial support. 
In less than a year WSI Connect was able to turn HERC’s decline into significant growth.

We were very excited to partner with WSI Connect in order to help us redesign our website… WSI Connect has been a great partner helping us come up with creative ideas to improve our marketing strategy. The WSI Connect team has come up with relevant and creative ideas for driving traffic to our website like ebooks which helped us repackage our content into materials that can be accessible … I was delighted to participate during this process. We hope to continue to engage with WSI Connect in future projects and we hope that they continue to assist us in helping identify ways to improve our marketing strategy”

-Ruth Molina, New England HERC Director at Harvard University

Very responsive and willing to go the extra mile

We had WSI Connect do a complete redesign of our website. They made us a responsive website, and it is now optimized for mobile phones. It really turned out great, and we are very happy with it. The WSI Connect team also helped us out with search engine optimization (SEO), and we are starting to see some really positive results on that front. It has been an excellent overall experience, and I would definitely recommend WSI Connect to anybody interested in website redesign and SEO!

-Erin Bruns, Marketing Director at HERC

Click for a FREE Consultation
(and discover why you should work with WSI Connect!)

Case Study: Helping a Montessori School Increase Enrollment

//  by 

Increase Montessori Enrollment - WSI Connect Digital Marketing Case Study -Core Results

About Hill Point Montessori

Hill Point Montessori is a private school for children ages 2-12. Their curriculum is based on Dr. Maria Montessori’s Montessori Method.  Hill Point’s students consistently test several grade levels ahead of their peers, illustrating the great success of their education programs. They specifically target parents looking who want to provide an advanced form of education beyond what the local public schools are able to offer. They deeply care about their students and put a tremendous amount of effort into hiring the best teachers and creating the best educational environment.

The Challenge

Despite having an outstanding educational program, enrollment was declining at Hill Point Montessori.  In the past, they grew almost completely based on word of mouth.  As students graduated from their program, they found it difficult to fill the excess capacity with new students.

Hill Point Montessori specifically struggled to attract new elementary level students.  They lacked the marketing ability to help local parents clearly understand Hill Point’s unique differentiators.  Without those distinctions, many parents were opting for the free public elementary option.

Hill Point Montessori needed to attract new families to the school, specifically parents. They knew they needed to get more parents to tour their school and really see the value of their educational program.  The conversion rate on tours is very high but they were only averaging 1-2 tours each month.  It wasn’t enough. 

The Assessment

We engaged Hill Point Montessori with a discovery call to clearly understand their goals for growth, current marketing strategies, and local competition.  They were anticipating 30 open seats across all of their classes for the upcoming school year.  With an average annual tuition of $13,000, Hill Point Montessori was at risk of losing $390,000 in potential revenue. 

We identified two core personas.  Parents with preschool aged children and parents with elementary school aged children.

The next step was conducting a competitive analysis to identify the marketing strategies used by other local schools.  Several of their competitors had better websites, stronger social media presence and had invested in PPC (although it was clear there was a lot of wasted ad spend).

The Strategy

At that point, we crafted the overall marketing strategy.  We focused all of our efforts on parents with an elementary school aged children persona.  This is where Hill Point Montessori had the most unused capacity.  Acquiring preschool students was less challenging as they didn’t have to compete with a free public school option.

It was very clear to WSI Connect that every part of the marketing strategy needed to be focused on driving parents to the school for a scheduled tour.

Increase Montessori Enrollment - WSI Connect Digital Marketing Case Study -2

Implementation

We began implementation of the marketing strategy by creating a new responsive WordPress website.  
We then optimized the content for SEO which significantly improved their search engine rankings. 

Increase Montessori Enrollment - WSI Connect Digital Marketing Case Study -1

We focused on conversion rate optimization in several areas.  We helped them develop content highlighting their highly qualified faculty and administration.  We added several CTA’s to drive parents to a dedicated landing page for the tour process registration.

We added several photo galleries for their programs, summer camps and extra curricular activities to help prospective parents gain a deeper understanding of their educational environment.
Upon completion of the tour form, parents are taken to a “thank you” page that includes videos highlighting a recent parent testimonial, a school overview and recent commencement speeches.  Parents also receive an automated email response with additional information about the tour process and next steps.

Increase Montessori Enrollment - WSI Connect Digital Marketing Case Study -4

We implemented a monthly content calendar and inbound marketing program to help attract and educate new parents about Hill Point Montessori and the Montessori Method. This includes blog posts that are distributed across their GMB, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts. 

The Results

In the video above you our client details the metrics that we discussed frequently to help judge the success of the campaign.

Here are the core metrics that we reported back to the client to illustrate that success:

  • 96% Year over Year, Google Organic growth
  • Which led to a 300% increase in school tours.  
  • Based on their tour conversion rates they’ve been able to receive a 356% Monthly ROI!

Quote:

“ WSI Connect has helped immensely from implementing SEO, building an attractive and effective website, writing informative blog posts, creating Facebook ads, giving us monthly updates about our progress, being available to us for anything that we need and working with us collaboratively on different ideas. Always offering a creative and informed perspective… We could not be more pleased with our experience with WSI Connect. We recommend WSI Connect to all the other small businesses we know and we owe a great deal to their team for all of their outstanding work.”

Anishka Nawagamuwa
CO-ADMINISTRATOR
Hill Point Montessori

Do you need help increasing enrollment?
(Contact WSI Connect today!)

Expert Website Consultant and Developer Enlists WSI for SEO Services

//  by 

Snapdragon Services offers a full range of website development and support services for a wide variety of organizations across several markets. The services provided include web design, training, software maintenance, and website migration for the three platforms Joomla, WordPress, and Squarespace. Founder and owner Jennifer Gress has over a decade of experience in Joomla, including co-authoring the book Using Joomla! which is now in its second edition, and in 2018 added the Squarespace and WordPress platforms to her stable of expertise and services. With their focus on people, whether its prioritizing the relationship between the website developer and the business or the website and its intended audience, Snapdragon Services has garnered an exceptional reputation and enjoys a growing client list of large and small businesses, entrepreneurs, educational institutions, and nonprofits.

Expert Website Consultant and Developer Enlists WSI for SEO Services

Snapdragon Services is partnering with WSI Connect, a member of one of the nation’s largest digital marketing networks, to expand their visibility online. WSI Connect began with learning about Snapdragon Services’ business and the audience they seek to attract to understand what digital marketing strategies would best fit their needs.

WSI Connect will develop an advanced SEO program beginning with a technical website audit to prepare for SEO optimization. This SEO optimization process includes developing a SEO page level strategy and page development, as well as link building through on and off-site content creation. After an extensive keyword analysis and site structure review, WSI has identified three pages to start SEO efforts:

● Joomla Web Design Services – https://snapdragonservices.com/web-design-services

● Joomla Migration Expert – https://snapdragonservices.com/joomla-websites/joomla-migration

● Joomla Update Maintenance – https://snapdragonservices.com/web-design-services

Moving forward, the SEO program will focus on the development and syndication of content relevant to their audience. This will include SEO optimized blog posts, social media posting as well as monthly reporting. Offsite content will be published on WordPress, Weebly, and Blogger. With an SEO optimized website and long-term link building, WSI Connect expects to increase both Snapdragon Services’ visibility in SERPs as well as driving more traffic to their site.

Contact WSI Connect for a FREE SEO Consultation

Directly From Google: How to Hire an SEO

//  by 

This video was published Feb 14, 2017 and is still one of the most helpful pieces of guidance for businesses looking for help with their SEO efforts.

In this 11:37 minute video, Maile Ohye, Google’s Developer Programs Tech Lead, defines a clear process to follow when hiring an SEO agency.

Maile provides a clear explanation about what SEO is and how it should fit into a business’ overall marketing strategy.

At WSI Connect we follow the same process that Maile recommends when evaluating an SEO agency. Here is the summary of her recommended process:

  1. Conduct a 2-way interview with your potential SEO. Check that they seem genially interested in you and your business.
  2. Check their references.
  3. Ask for (and you’ll probably have to pay for) a technical and search audit.
  4. Decide if you want to hire.

This happens to be the same core process that we’ve followed with our clients since inception.

If you are interested in learning more about how we can help your business develop and implement a clear digital marketing strategy, reach out to schedule a discovery call.

Discovery Call