I love a case study. And today, I’m going to show you an SEO case study from start to finish on how you could make your website the most findable beautiful site online. When you’re thinking about making a website findable. A lot of it is about strategy. Do this, do that, do this, do that. But it doesn’t really give you a holistic understanding of how to do it from start to finish. So, I’m going to walk you through a real-life SEO example. So, you can get a sense of what does this look like full circle? We’re going to start with the gentleman. This is Aaron.
And Aaron runs a bamboo manufacturing company. So, they make all kinds of manufactured products out of bamboo. Now, this is a fairly interesting client because they have a couple interesting things going on. First of all, their name is Pick On Us. Now, the problem with Pick On Us is that it was also ranking for bullying websites. Pick On You, pick on me, right? Weird, right? And when you’re in that mindset of naming a business, you don’t think about what other things it might mean. You’re just thinking about it from your perspective. Now, another problem with this website was that when we went in there and you type in picks, P- -I-C-K-S.
Now, they were convinced that the word picks was their keyword. Let me show you maybe what’s wrong with that theory. So, we’re going to put picks in here now see what happens. Oops. Let me go to here. When you’re looking at picks, you’ll see that we get NFL picks. Mostly sports picks. Guitar picks. So, all different… So even if they ranked here, there’s nothing about bamboo toothpicks here.
But they were convinced that the word picks was their word. Now, let’s go over to images. You’ll see here that we’ve got hair picks. You’ll see we’ve got all these guitar picks. Guitar picks winds. I am NOT going to kick off guitar picks for bamboo picks. So, when we took a look at how to make them findable, we had to walk away from the word picks and start using the word bamboo toothpick. Go figure. Now, remember. This is not a huge company. They make very specialized bamboo products for the hospitality industry. So, a cruise line by millions of toothpicks from this company. Or a hospitality group is going to buy a bunch for all their catered events, weddings, the big parties that they throw.
So, we’re not talking about selling you know a box of toothpicks two one-off people on the web. We’re talking about big website orders. So, here to see bamboo toothpicks bulk. Bulk is a happy word for us because that means they’re gonna order a lot. Now, we’re in the right happy place. You’ll see here that we’ve got all of the toothpicks that are up for grabs. Now, what’s interesting about this is that how do you make a stack of toothpicks interesting? That’s pretty boring and quite frankly if I look at this, why would I pick one or the other? Well, because Aaron doesn’t just sell toothpicks. He sells perceived value. So, let’s talk about that. Alright. So, here’s our nodded put toothpicks page. Keep coming down, keep looking. We’re looking at all the different ways that people search. So, here’s pick on us right here. So, what’s interesting about Aaron’s problem is that they sell perceived value. Not necessarily just toothpicks. Because if it’s just about toothpicks then I can go to Alibaba, I can go to any place on the planet and buy toothpicks from them.
But that’s not what their end game is. So, let’s just say I’ve got this very expensive mug and I want to make sure that I describe this mug not so much that it’s a green porcelain mug is that if I put… Let’s just say I do those really fancy lattes with the hearts inside. Maybe I sprinkle it with a little bit of color on top. Maybe I call this a venti nonfat mochachino or frappe, Frappuccino. It’s not just a coffee anymore. It’s about perceived value. So, when I hand this over to you, you’re getting a little slice of yourself that has a heart on it and it’s little pink sprinkles.
Now all of a sudden, this cup of coffee that is pretty a dollar at the local 7-eleven has now become a $6 cup of coffee because it has all that fancy jajy, if you will of the cup of coffee. So, this is what pick on us does, is they make regular items look expensive. Which means I can charge a lot more for it. They did a bunch of research which i think is super interesting. So, if you order a cocktail at a bar and it has one of those little bamboo toothpicks in it, the kinds a sell 2 more dollars per glass I can charge.
Now, if I put a sugar rim on it, I light it on fire, right? I’ve maybe there’s a sparkler going off of it. Now, I get charged like $12 for this drink as opposed to just its normal price. So, this is why their products are so powerful is because they make those food items look amazing. So, I can charge more for it. So, as an SEO, we’ve got a little bit of work here. So, let’s go back to Erin. So, as part of our process, we take a look at how people search. And then we start picking those individual keyword phrases. And we use a very fancy high-tech process of sticky notes, sharpies and some kind of keyword tool. It might be SEM rush. It could be a number of different tools. Keywordseverywhere.com will also give you that data but you want to find something, a keyword tool that’s going to give you the data. So you’ll see here we invited the sales team, we invited the customer service team and we invited the marketing team. All of them have a different relationship with the customer.
And they all know different keyword phrases that they might be searching for. So, when we go in there, let me show you an example of this. I’m going to show you a tool called Keywords Everywhere. It’s my new favorite tool. I’m going to click on this and I’m going to turn it on. Now, keywords everywhere is going to then integrate how people search the search volume with the actual phrases. So, take a look at this so I’m gonna type in bamboo toothpicks. Now, what you see on your screen right here is it’s telling me exactly people type bamboo toothpicks in 590 times per month.
If I type in bamboo toothpicks bulk, that’s ten times a month. And you’re like, ♫ Wank, wank, wank ~ ♪ Right? You’re like 10 a month. Why should I care about that? Well, that’s 120 searches a year and bulk means they’re ordering in toothpicks at a time. So, don’t be so stingy about which one you’re going to pick. Think about what is the quality of that keyword phrase versus I want a bigger number is not necessarily the best number here in this situation. And this tool is called keywordseverywhere.com. Follow the prompts.
Install it. It is amazing. And it integrates these searches right inside of your… Right inside of Google search results which is amazing. Now, after we get everyone in the room and we start brainstorming, this is what we come up with. A series of pages that Aaron wants to rank for. So from an SEO example standpoint, this is the process we take all of our clients through. Let’s take a look at what a sitemap really is. So, a sitemap is going to be planning out your keywords by page. Now, Google’s not just going to take one page that’s like a one-trick pony. A one-hit wonder. Just because you wrote one page doesn’t mean you deserve to rank page one under that. So, let’s go back to this this sample sitemap for pick on us and let me walk you through how we really prove to a robot that we deserve to rank under every keyword phrase. Not just one keyword phrase.
So, here you’ll see this is what we call our keyword map. Think about a website is like a book. The cover of the book is the name of the website, right? That’s the homepage. If I open to the table of contents, each one of those chapters has a topic. And if I turn to that chapter, of course I’m going to go deeper into that one topic. So, let’s take a look at the sitemap and see how that measures up from a book standpoint. If I’m an expert in bamboo products, you’ll see here that my home page is optimized for bamboo products.
That’s the highest level concept, that’s where I put you in the library. Now, I’m going to open up to the table of contents, you’ll see chapter 1, bamboo toothpicks. Chapter 2, bamboo skewers. Chapter 3, dinnerware disposables and picks by use. So, google comes here and says, “Oh, so good. I know what your… Your topic is from your home page.” And then now i know all of the chapters in your thought leadership website or your book. Then I can start looking at optimizing. So, you’ll see that every page has the yearly search volume. So, you can see here that bamboo toothpicks has 3,840 searches a year. Then if I turn to the bamboo toothpick chapter, you’ll see I’ve got knotted toothpicks, paddle toothpicks. All of these phrases that are specific to caterers and the restaurant industry. Remember, I’m not interested in selling one-off packs of toothpicks. Now, let me show you the power of this. It’s crazy. I’m going to jump back to SEM rush.
This is one of my favorite tools. I talk about it all the time. It’s search engine marketing. SEO rush. R-U-S-H.com. We pop in here, I’m going to put pic on us. Right here. Now, we’ve launched the website and we’ve obviously wrote content. You’ll have to look at another video in my channel about content. But we’ve gone ahead and launched it with all of these keywords in our sitemap. Let’s take a look and see how we’re doing. When we pull up the organic ranking report in SEM rush, you just go to the very top, you put your website address in and you hit Search. What it does is it pulls all the keywords.
It sees you ranking for and puts it in a nice neat report. So, we’re going to come down here and let’s see how pick on this is doing. So, of course they’re always gonna rank for their website. That’s of their name I should say. That’s 23% of their traffic. Then we’ve got the good stuff. Remember this sitemap. We want to see each page has its own keyword. So, fancy toothpick page, now ranks for fancy toothpicks. Number 1 which is always the best place to be. 720 searches per month for that phrase and it’s 20% of their total traffic to the website.
Boom, One keyword is giving them 20% of traffic to their website and it’s getting a significant amount of searches. 720 a month is a lot. Then we look at… Ironically number two or number three is skull toothpicks. You know everyone has their own sort of theme they want to do for a birthday party or Halloween. So skull toothpicks, they ranked number 1. That’s 4% of their traffic.
Bamboo toothpicks obviously the huge for us. That’s 3% of our traffic. And decorative toothpicks. Now, if I click full report, I’m going to get every single keyword that I currently rank for or pick on us currently ranks for. So, remember, when you’re creating a sitemap it’s so important that you think about not just one page at a time but how do I look like a thought leader with a definitive book and every chapter covers a topic that I would like to be findable for.
Now, inside of the marketing espionage book, there’s a link in this video. Download the book. It’s my gift to you. There’s a whole chapter on how to write and how to organize your sitemap. And I will make those notes in the description below. Do you love a case study? A sample. A little nibble of what it’s like to experience the whole thing from start to finish? How to have a truly findable website? Well, if you love what I showed today, make sure to subscribe. Hit the bell so that you are notified of all my new daily videos. And I am committed to making sure that you get the tips, the tricks, the trade secrets of becoming the most findable business online..
