SAKS Financial Services Increased Brand Visibility By 185 Percent
Today, in this case study, we’re going to share the individual steps we took to help SAKS Financial Services to improve their search visibility, capture quality web traffic, and convert site visitors into customers.
Six months have now passed since they started this journey with us, so we created this case study to share some preliminary results we’ve achieved through our advanced enterprise SEO campaign.
About the Client
SAKS Financial Services is a close-knit team of professionals experienced across industries within the AU framework, and they work together to provide exceptional bookkeeping and accounting services to their clients.
The Challenge
SAKS Financial primary challenges included a lack of brand visibility online and lower organic search traffic â these challenges were directly impacting their business.
The Solutions
We worked together with SAKS Financial to resolve the technical and strategic issues that preventing their business website from getting the visibility and traffic they wanted. We identified the following optimization tactics that could help SAKS Financial Services resolve their challenges and reach their objectives.
- Conduct competitor research to find the organic competitors of SAKS FinancialÂ
- Run keyword research for SAKS Financial website to find the relevant, high-intent key phrases
- Explore link-building opportunities to increase the backlink profile of SAKS Financial
- Re-engineered Website Robots.txt file and Sitemap to fix the website crawling issues
- Conduct a technical SEO audit to improve website performance
- Optimize the meta title and meta description to improve the webpages SEO performanc
The Implementation
Below is a high-level recap of what we did during each step of our strategic optimization process. Take a brief look into each implementation step.
1. Conduct Competitor Research
We helped SAKS Financial Services to better understand who their online competitors really are with our advanced competitor research. We used online tools and organic SERP results to identify top performers who were in the same industry and ranking for similar keywords.
Competitor research not only helped us identify who the SAKS Financial Services’ competitors were, but it also helped SAKS Financial realize that their most significant online competitors were different from their local, offline competitors.
Tools we used to identify organic online competitors:
- SEMrushâs Organic Research
- Domain Overview
- Organic SERP Results
2. Run Keyword Research for SAKS Financial website
To help SAKS Financial Services attract the right visitors to their website, we focused on advanced keyword research for the website.
In collaboration with SAKS Financial, we developed a finalized list of relevant, high-intent key phrases. This list of keywords were then used in the link building process, website content as well as in meta titles and meta descriptions.
Tools we used to conduct keyword research for SAKS Financial website:
- Seobility Keyword Tool
- Ahrefs Keyword Generator Tool
- SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool
- Keyword Surfer
- Google Auto Suggest and Related Search Terms
3. Explore Link-Building Opportunities to Improve Backlink Profile
After identifying which keywords and pages helped competitor sites collect the most traffic and how backlinks contributed to driving that traffic. We aimed to help SAKS Financial Services build a strong backlink profile by getting more links to their website pages from other domains, also that helped them increase their domain authority (DA) score and rank higher in the search results. Our link building strategy was to assess SAKS Financial’s backlink profile and look for new backlinking opportunities.
Tools we used to find link-building opportunities for SAKS Financial:
- Ahrefs Backlink Checker
- SEMrush Backlink Audit
Before Status of SAKS Financial Backlink Profile
After Status of SAKS Financial Backlink Profile
4. Re-Engineered Website Robots.txt File and Sitemap
Crawl errors hinder search engine bots from reading your website content and indexing your webpages. When a search engine is crawling your website and encounters an error, it will turn back to find another website. You can then end up with webpages that arenât getting crawled. Robots.txt failure and wrong pages on the sitemap are the two significant reasons for crawl errors, And, SAKS Financial Services also had these two issues. But, with our thoroughly researched data, we were able to update and optimize SAKS Financial website Robots.txt file and Sitemap that helped us to improve the website crawlability.
Before Status of SAKS Financial Robots.txt File
After Status of SAKS Financial Robots.txt File
After Sitemap Submitted Via Google Search Console
5. Conduct a Technical SEO Audit
To ensure that SAKS Financial Services was not missing out on opportunities to improve its SEO ranking potential, we conducted an SEO audit. By analysing the technical state of SAKS Financial Services website, we gained better insight into where SAKS Financial Services website was struggling beyond keywords and website structure, and then we compiled a list of issues for our technical team to address.
Tools we used to conduct an SEO audit of SAKS Financial website:
- Googleâs PageSpeed Insights
- GTmetrix
- Site Audit
- Mobile-Friendly Test
GTmetrix Performance Score Before Status
GTmetrix Performance Score Before Status
6. Optimize the SAKS Financial Services Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions
We also focused on creating new keywords integrated meta titles and meta descriptions for SAKS Financial webpages to help them improve their SERP ranking and increase their click-through rate. For our meta tags creation, we used the findings from our earlier keyword research and paid close attention to search intent as well.
Before Status of SAKS Financial Meta Tags
 After Status of SAKS Financial Tags
7. Increase in Domain Authority Score & The Website Organic Traffic
After our Onpage/Offpage SEO optimization process we noticed some significant improvement in the SAKS Financial Services Domain Authority score and the website organic traffic.
Before Status of Domain Authority Score
After Status of Domain Authority Score
Before Status of Website Organic Traffic
After Status of Website Organic Traffic
Significant Results
Three months is normally a realistic timeframe to start evaluating results after you start a new SEO campaign or make significant changes on your website as this is the approximate timeframe to see the true impact of optimizations. So, within this six-month time period, we were able to see improvements in the quality and quantity of backlinks. As a result of our work, SAKS Financial Services website performance, crawlability, organic traffic, and brand visibility also improved.
Technologies We used
