By Jason Poulos (@TheSaganaki)

I have touted the power of SEO over several posts now. It truly is a necessary element to your web strategy and should be considered if you are looking to increase visibility through search engines. In my first post, I talked about why SEO should be a part of your digital strategy. One of my reasons in that post was that SEO works. If SEO is truly a powerful tool how about some results?

For those of you that need to “see it to believe it” today is your day. Skeptics and naysayers step aside because I have results to share with you. Let’s hope that results like this can sway any SEO doubters (if they exist).

Problem

Our client, The Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup created a microsite dedicated to pure Canadian maple syrup. However this site was experiencing poor Google rankings. The age old “I can’t find my site in Google” was presented to our team. What they had was a nice looking site that was aimed towards consumers but this nice looking site’s content and architecture weren’t aligned with their brand or communication strategy.

Goal

Our SEO goal for this project was to simply generate more traffic to the website. Our content goal was to raise awareness that pure maple syrup is a versatile innovative ingredient and a healthy, natural sugar substitute.

Solution

To increase traffic to the website, and achieve our goals it was determined that an optimized website that caters towards a search engines needs would be the solution. In order to achieve our search and content goals we looked at several elements on the maple website.

Our solution entailed:

• Keyword research based on current content and would be content
• Restructured the sites architecture to cater towards specific keywords and content
• Rewrote the content to be keyword rich
• Implemented keyword rich page titles and page descriptions
• Redesigned the homepage to promote/cross link deep content
• Restructured the interior page sidebars to cross link content

Results

Our keyword rich, optimized site was launched March 1st of this year. The results below compare the optimized site (March 1, 2011 – Oct 16, 2011) to the non-optimized site of 2010 (March 1, 2010 – Oct 16, 2010).

• Visits increased by: 431%
• Page views increased by: 704%
• Pages per visit increased by: 51%
• Avg. time on site increased by: 17%
• Visits from Google increased by: 765%

The keywords that we selected are ranking well and we also have about 40 terms that when “Googled” land you a page one result.

What’s Next

Our client was thrilled with these results but as nice as these metrics are more work needs to get done to the website. What we’ve accomplished are on-site, organic rankings. To keep the momentum going we need to look off-site. We plan on integrating an off-site strategy for next year’s SEO campaign.