Case Study: SEO for Niche B2B with Zero Search Volume

This is one of my favorite clients to work with. The reason for this is that they took the recommendations seriously and executed on them!

Background

A newly launched Berlin based agency that targets purpose-driven startups reached out to me to work on their SEO strategy. Website was new with a handful of pages. They had a budget for a one-time SEO project and not an on-going retainer which means I needed to maximize the value they get for their budget. The website was built on Squarespace.

The project took around 2 months start to finish.

SEO Work

I met with the client and understood their goals. I also listened carefully to the "terms" they used to describe their services and target audience. Went back and started to do my work

Technical SEO

My first step was to find and address all technical issues on the website. Because it was a small website I knew that this will not eat into the client's budget and in the same time having a good technical foundation will set them up for success.

The issues addressed included:

• Website architecture: I made sure the website pages where structured in a clean meaningful way. This would save them from having to make big changes and move around plenty of pages in the future when the website grows.
• Setup GSC and Webmaster tools for Google and Bing.
• Optimize Website Footer: Adding location information, social links and links to the most important pages of the website.
• Duplication: I found and removed a duplicated page.
• Alt Tags: Added optimized alt tags.
• H1 Tags: Added missing H1 tags to pages that had no H1 tags.
  

On-Page SEO

Next came the content part. One of the challenges with this website was that most of their keywords were zero search volume keywords or keywords with very low search volume. Another challenge was, the number of keywords the tools were able to detect, using traditional SEO tools, I was not able to find a lot of keywords in that niche. This was very challenging but I followed my gut! I optimized the pages based of the input I got from my client earlier and what "terms" they used to describe their services and target audience.

This meant that, after we execute on this initial SEO strategy, we'll have to give the website a couple of months so GSC can collect more keyword data and then we can fine tune our strategy.

Some of the items included in the final deliverable included:

• On-page recommendations for the handful of pages on the website
• A recommended content map sorted by buyers' journey that works for their business, accompanied by description of each of the recommended content types, sample keywords and examples.

• A suggested six months content plan based of their budget to execute content.

• SEO Checklist for Writing Content.
• Digital marketing channels analysis. This was basically because, I knew that SEO will take more time for them, so I decided to dive and see alternatives. The recommendations included analysis for PPC and other different social channels and a final recommendation to focus on LinkedIn.

Results

With the minimal SEO efforts (less than 1 month of execution and a handful of pages), the website has seen consistent increase in organic impressions since we first executed. The website has now collected more keyword data, and is now ready for a more solid SEO strategy.

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