Case Study: SEO and Analytics For Onica


Increase in Sessions

Increase in Pages Per Session

Improvement in Bounce Rate
Onica, a Rackspace Technology company, is a cloud native computing services company with offices across North America. As an Amazon Web Services (AWS) APN Premier Consulting Partner and audited Managed Services Provider, they help their customers solve the most complex and transformative cloud projects in the world to build new revenue streams, increase efficiency, and deliver incredible experiences.
Context
In September 2019, Onica began a website redesign project and asked Flywheel to support the SEO and Analytics setup. Creating a new website is the perfect time to create an SEO and Analytics strategy. They already needed to make content updates to match the new design, and the analytics enables them to fully see the ROI of their work.
We were ready to enhance visibility to searchers who were interested in Onica’s products, as well as providing Onica with visibility into their website data.
Process
Part 1: Analytics
First, we offered a new level of insight and analytics tooling through a four-step implementation process:
- Create a Goals/Metrics Matrix to establish metrics from Onica’s primary objectives
- Recommend insight opportunities based on the created metrics
- Perform a data integrity analysis to see that all metrics are properly configured in analytics
- Implement our findings and recommendations on Onica’s website
Goals/Metrics Matrix
Our initial step was to devise a goals versus metrics matrix to measure Onica’s performance objectives. This is our process for translating real-world business goals into measurable online metrics.
Onica’s website goals included an increase in sales requests, lead conversions, and new employees. With these goals in mind, we translated the goals into three specific types of metrics: conversions, engagement, and channel.
Each of our metric buckets contained detailed information about each of Onica’s goals, the metrics we would measure, and how we would measure the metrics through analytics. Here is an example of how we transformed one of Onica’s goals into measurable metrics:
Insight Opportunities
Second, we found a number of opportunities for Onica to drive performance for their primary goal. These insights included methods for content optimization and flagging site errors. With this in mind, we recommended the best tracking platforms to use, as well as how to implement the strategies on Onica’s website.
We found a number of issues including the absence of GTM, the User metric, and cohesion across subdomains. We offered data integrity recommendations to solve for these issues, ensuring data provided an accurate depiction of their site’s performance. Our audit also included Onica’s tracking tags, property & view settings, and filters.
After reviewing all these findings with the client, we implemented them all on the new site and aggregated them in a single dashboard.
Part 2: SEO
Since Onica was already updating their website content, it was the ideal time to strategize on SEO: they save on costs by avoiding to update content twice and ensure they got the most out of their new content.
We developed a three-step strategy to improve their new site’s SEO:
- Create a service-page keyword strategy by analyzing search opportunities and user intent
- Reduce any on-page obstacles to ranking, including URLs and image issues, through a technical consult.
- Improve Onica’s existing content strategy by proposing a series of optimizations
Keyword Optimization Strategy
To start, we reviewed Onica’s site traffic, brand, and competition. It was clear that Onica had a high domain authority compared to their competitors. However, approximately 81% of Onica’s searches were branded. This high percentage of branded search terms indicated an opportunity to grow unbranded keyword searches. Our goal was to improve their organic traffic by implementing a focused strategy around the best unbranded keywords.
In order to identify the best keywords, we had to create a keyword opportunity analysis. By doing this, Onica would be able to fully understand their site needs. Our SEO specialist inspected each of the site’s pages to understand user intent, and research over 100 keywords in total. These keywords were then placed in a technical keyword tool that pulled volume and keyword difficulty, as well as Onica’s existing SERP rankings in the US and Canada. Once completed, we created a detailed report on our recommended primary and secondary keywords per page.
Technical SEO Consult
Additionally, we provided insights on updating Onica’s HTML structure. Google reads different elements of HTML with different levels of priority. So we recommended the best practices for how to use each element, and how to place keywords with a specific naming convention. To support this consultation, we created a detailed 4-page document for Onica to use for future implementation.
Content Optimization Strategy
Last, we supported Onica by optimizing their blog content. We analyzed Onica’s current blog categories and broke them down into four main category hubs. In each of these hubs, we provided insight on the types of blogs to write about and opportunities to update existing blogs. These insights include the number of words per blog, snippet opportunities, and off-page recommendations such as a proposed URL and blog title.
Result
Onica had an in-depth experience on how their goals-turned-metrics improved overtime through our implemented analytics and SEO. We provided Onica with a customized website dashboard including a performance snapshot of their sessions, pages per session, and conversions, as well as key graphs to view audience trends.
Once Onica implemented the strategies suggested by Flywheel, their SEO improved over time. There was an increase in sessions by over 31%. With the improvements in keyword and backlinking opportunities, Onica’s pages per session grew over 35%, with a decrease in bounce rate by 46%. The following data is from September 15, 2019 to May 31, 2020 compared to the previous period.


Snapshots of Our Work





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