3 Case Studies From the Uproer Team

This month's Searchlite intro was written by Sr. SEO Analyst, Ben Bjerken.

Welcome to this month’s edition of Uproer’s newsletter, Searchlite. We hope your 4th of July was filled with fireworks, bomb pops and some ice cold refreshments. The Uproer team had a blast either at the lake, with family & friends, or taking part in a good ol’ American barbecue bash.

If you're a Searchlite super fan, you’ll remember that last year we shared some of our favorite "mini" case studies. Every Monday our team huddles up to share some case study findings that level up our collective knowledge and this month, we wanted to pass that along to you!

So without further ado, kick back, relax, and enjoy this month's edition that is jam packed with insights and the data to support it.

How to Use Slack and Asana for Better Focus & Organization

by Dave Sewich, SEO Manager

Situation:

• At this time last year, we were sending a collective 250 - 500 Slack messages each day as a team of ~10.
• By overusing Slack, we were inadvertently making our work less focused and efficient. We found our days becoming fragmented as our attention was pulled in different directions.
• Important due dates, project information, and decisions were sometimes relegated to Slack threads as we fell back on ad-hoc messaging for project management.
• However, we didn’t want to abandon Slack, as it was necessary and had many upsides.

Solution:

• We set about implementing a new, more intentional framework for when and how to use Slack. This included:
  • Limiting Slack use to time-sensitive, low-effort messaging and using email for more important and complex communication
  • Adopting a set of best practices that would minimize notifications and extraneous communication on Slack
• We moved virtually all project management to Asana, including communication about ongoing projects.
  • This had the double benefit of reducing Slack messaging while making us significantly more organized in our day-to-day project management.

Results:

• After rolling out our new policy, Slack messages declined precipitously.
• Qualitatively, our team felt less distracted by Slack and more energized to spend time on high-leverage projects.
• At the same time, leaning into Asana minimized the amount of brain space we were dedicating to tracking projects, freeing up our attention for the things that matter.

Removing Duplicate Content Helps Site Recover Post-Migration

by Griffin Roer, CEO & Founder

• A SaaS client of ours rebranded to a new domain and traffic dropped by 40% after migrating!
• This occurred despite a proactive migration plan that included a validated redirect map as well as pre- and post-launch QA.
• Nothing had changed on the site from a technical or content standpoint, so the performance drop was baffling at first.

Solution:

• What should any good SEO do when they’re stuck? Turn to their network (shout-out Nick LeRoy) for outside perspective.
• We realized that the site had 10k+ similar pages that weren’t negatively impacting performance on the previous domain. However, on the new domain Google took a fresh look at this content and thought “hold up… 99% of this site is near-duplicate content.”
• The only way up was down. Our solution was to noindex over 7k of these pages.

Results:

• After removing thousands of pages from the index, we immediately began to see a traffic recovery.
• Why did this work? The near-duplicate content was holding back the performance of our highest-value content. By no-indexing many of these pages, we communicated to Google not to include them in their assessment of the website’s quality. ​

How to Use Average Revenue Per Lead as a Case to Invest in SEO for SaaS

by Jessica Girardi, SEO Manager

Situation:

• With any service based company, it can be difficult to assign a revenue value to any marketing channel, but especially the organic channel.
• One of our SaaS clients wanted to know how SEO would play into their overall marketing strategy, and to define our impact in a quantitative way.
• They have excellent tracking that assigns leads values in their CRM but still retains the lead’s original channel - Shout out to Hubspot!
• This SaaS client has two levels of clients - low and high tier revenue. This was another factor we had to get our heads around.​

Solution:
Using their CRM’s assigned revenue per lead based on their status level, we were able to create a historic record of revenue from organic, and overlay older SEO initiatives to give us a fuller picture of how SEO work has impacted their revenue in the past.

Eventually we were able to forecast their revenue conservatively and aggressively across the next 6 months for both tiers.

Results:

• We used the SEOMBA Forecasting models to create a conservative and aggressive forecast for both tiers of their customers.
• We were also able to include other investments that could influence the effectiveness of our SEO program, and therefore forecast.

While this is still a forecast, it enabled us to have conversations with the SaaS company at those higher levels, able to talk dollars and cents rather than traffic and ranking. This helps us tell the story of their business, our involvement in it, and create real impact for our clients.

Other Interesting Stories:

• The SEO Skills Maturity Matrix

• [THREAD] Client Management

• Meta's Holiday Ecomm Guide for 2022

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