Existing challenges within the account limited their ability to test new prospecting strategies and limited their growth potential. For example, prior to our involvement, the majority of the budget was dedicated toward branded search campaigns, as many competitors were bidding on their branded terms in hopes to capture away TaxJar's most valuable traffic. Unfortunately, this fierce competition resulted in higher-than-expected costs and required much of the focus, energy, and budget.

Even after successfully freeing up budget from the branded search issues, profitably acquiring new business was no easy feat. Tax services are consumed on an as-needed basis. A brand awareness effort would only be effective if the messaging was powerful and the timing was perfect. That is, even if a business owner hears about TaxJar and thinks they should sign up for the services, it’s typically something that is pushed on the back-burner.

More than ever, if would be crucial to meet their potential customers when they are actively in the market for tax services and in the medium in which they would best respond to our messaging.

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Beyond the overarching objectives, our main focus was with undergraduate and postgraduate student recruitment through ongoing campaigns, as well as advertising university courses, open days, postgraduate open evenings and Clearing.

Specific examples of objectives set by Leeds Beckett also included:

1) Supporting the university’s growth plans through targeted and effective campaigns

2) Growing the number of applications

3) Improving efficiencies and reducing costs in all paid channels

The Challenge of of Startup Growth

What’s good for the user is good for search. The biggest challenge of the SEO audit for On One Studios (and all companies) is maintaining a customer-focused approach when optimizing.

Every action in the audit must answer the question: how does this help the user on your website? Each tweak needed to embody the core drive of the company.

We came up with a human-centric SEO strategy to guide my approach. The web audit was designed to address three critical issues:

Understanding the company’s core value proposition and drive.

Great tactics mean nothing without a proper guiding strategy. Before I started any optimization, I spoke with management on what constituted the company’s core drives. By understanding their unique selling proposition, I could write copy that reflected their goals.

Addressing website architecture problems with user-centric best practices.

The website needed to make sense to customers. From URL structure to homepage navigation, I needed to make sure each click on the website made it easy to get to a sale.

Identify competitor SEO strategies to implement off-page SEO tactics.

A key pillar of getting a site to rank is the number of backlinks pointing to it. I needed to create a comprehensive, white hat backlink strategy to boost the site’s domain authority. By looking at who our competitors were linked (and linking to), I got a sense of the types of backlinks I was looking for.

Initially there was no tracking setup to monitor actual conversions, so we had to begin without proper benchmarks and sought a really high goal which we did achieve in the first month.