Summary
At a time when Tata Communications was changing its positioning to a Digital Ecosystem Enabler, in-person business meetings with sales were no longer a norm and search became the new hero of the purchase cycle, we made the way people search for us as the hero. The success of our strategy not only generated a whooping $19 MN of business but also increased the number of people seeing our propositions by a significant 65%.
Challenge
Tata Communications is a Digital Ecosystem Enabler, providing solutions across the digital infrastructure of an organisation. To establish this position in an industry landscape where Tata Communications is seen as a core network solution provider, was our main business objective. In the new normal, where 66% of the users start their journey for a solution by search (Gartner), search becomes the most relevant and important first step for this goal. Secondly, to target the user right at the start of their journey and building the confidence and trust that what we provide and how reliable our solutions are content played a crucial role. To drive and influence the user right from awareness into decision making, hitting the right search keywords according to the user intent, not only would help us target the correct segment but would also help us lead with better conversions and controlled user engagement.
Objective
Increasing discoverability and association as a Digital Ecosystem Enabler across our portfolio, ranking ahead of our global competition, building authority on Google as a website, building trust and confidence among the users and leading the users through the three stages of user journey with content were the 5 main pillars of our campaign. 1. Awareness: To build contextual awareness about our positioning for users according to their intent, was our main objective in the awareness stage. 2. Consideration: Users coming on our website had a higher conversion rate if they interacted with the resources/assets with content on our website. To make this content discoverable to the target user, was the main engagement metric that was focused for consideration. 3. Decision making: To target high intent users which lead to quality conversions was our main objective in this stage.
Strategy
The focus of our SEO strategy was gaining even more topical authority for the website with the ‘Pillar - Cluster' strategy. The idea was to create content which aimed at making the users aware about our solutions and how they fit in their problem eventually converting them. Technical SEO: With a strong strategy in place, we set up a strong technical foundation for the crawlers to visit the website and index our priority pages. For this, we primarily focussed on page load time, indexing of the page, spammy links and backlinks, interlinking, caching of the website and schemas. Another important implementation was the backlink implementation to improve authority and discoverability. Content Strategy: Next we aimed at the content strategy based on what we want to achieve with our website and what our competition is doing. Our content strategy was as follow: 1. Website Content: We created new pages called Pillar Pages targeting our portfolios (exhaustive and long-form content) for several user intent search terms related to our solutions. These pillar pages were built across portfolios and for each portfolio a keyword strategy to target the user across the funnel. The website content was also optimised to increase our discoverability to the right user and improve UI/UX on the website. 2. Keyword Strategy: Our keyword strategy was two pronged: Firstly, as a quick win strategy, we have targeted ‘low hanging keywords' (rankings between - position 6 to 30) and then optimized nonperforming potential pages/blogs to rank for keywords in striking distance. Secondly, to target keywords which were important to us, but we were not ranking for them, we started the knowledge base section to improve our rankings on these keywords. The aim of this exercise was to eventually rank for high search volume keywords and get discovered for numerous new keywords.
Data
95% of traffic coming to our website was brand related keywords like "Tata Communications Network". This along with the fact that 85% of our organic traffic was exploring our core network services only, made us realise the need to come up with a strategy which would build the awareness of Tata Communications as a Digital Ecosystem Enabler. According to Gartner, 70% of the traffic coming to a B2B website if organic and this was true for us also as 65% of our traffic was coming in through organic search. But the quality of the traffic was not significant in terms of their engagement with the page (65% bounce rate and 02:56 minutes average time on page) and conversions (xx% of the organic traffic converting into leads). With this, we were confident of the fact that it is our organic traffic that we need to cash upon, specially given the longer buying cycles and intensive research required during the discovery and consideration stages.
Solution
Technical SEO Execution: We ensured that our website is discoverable and ranked high in terms of authority, UI/UX and getting quality users. For this we implemented the following technical solutions: 1. Webpages Deindexing and Caching: Indexed and cached our website properly for crawling and better rankings. 2. We improved our Site speed optimization to enhance user experience and allow easy crawling on the website. Apart from the core web vitals recommendations, we optimised the metadata for all the pages, section-wise 3. Sitemaps Creation: Dynamic sitemap was created for the website to improve the website indexing issues. 4. Spammy Backlinks: Backlinks from low quality and irrelevant sites were interfering in increasing the overall website domain authority. This was solved by filtering out spam links and then disavowing the same. 5. Broken links: The audit helped us to find out all the links in the site that are leading users to 404 pages. These are fixed by either re-interlinking to the correct URLs or 301 redirecting old pages to relevant new pages. 6. Internal linking: We interlinked all pages section-wise to make sure the link juice is easily passed throughout the site. Content Implementations: To target the right user and improve rankings amongst competitors, the following solutions were implemented: 1. Knowledge Base Section Creation: We created the knowledge base section with informative blogs to target query-based keywords. 2. To tackle low hanging keywords, on-page content on our key money pages was optimised along with cluster blogs creation on frequently Googled queries related to our solutions. These blogs were written and vetted by professionals to gain trustworthiness. 3. Duplicate Content: Multiple URLs featuring the same content mislead the search and resulted in keyword cannibalization. This issue was resolved by providing 301 redirects from duplicated/similar content pages to the primary page. 4. Schema Implementation:
Results
Our SEO strategy gave us results across the three stages of the funnel. From generating a whooping $19 MN of business, we also achieved the following results: 1. We achieved our goal to increase awareness among users which reflects in the increase of our branded queries by xx%. 2. Page speed which was another important technical SEO goal that was a key pillar of our strategy also showed a significant improvement from 21 and 24 to 97 and 100 for mobile and desktop respectively. 3. The number of keywords ranking in the Top 3 and Top 10 increased from just 1 to 100 and 345. This is a significant increase and strengthens the effectiveness of our keyword strategy. Keyword visibility has improved and for 500 keywords, we are ranking in top 3. For 11-20 we are ranking in top 20. 4. We achieved our primary goal of positioning ourselves as a Digital Ecosystem Enabler which is strengthened by the traffic on all our portfolio pages increasing by 65%. This is observed across the funnel with our security portfolio achieving a 100% increase in the number of leads generated through organic traffic. 5. Not only quantitatively, but qualitatively ( a function of time spent on page, number of page visits in a session) also the organic traffic to the website improved significantly by 26%, indicating that we were able to target the right users with our keywords and content. 6. The aim of our strategy was to have a waterfall effect across the user funnel – right from awareness to decision making. With a significant 120% increase in the number of users making an enquiry with the sales team through organic traffic and 26% of the total organic traffic converting into leads, our strategy achieved 360-degree results.
