Growing SQLs by 50% YoY for a Life Sciences Client
Case Study
Overview
This was for a tech client in the life sciences space.
Before working with me, this client was working with a larger marketing agency.
Despite that larger marketing agency offering more services, they weren’t actually working on this site’s SEO.
They worked on other marketing channels, but their SEO was almost entirely ignored.
This client came to me looking for consulting services to help them shift their focus to SEO.
In 6 months, we completely turned around their MQL and SQL pipeline.
50%
Increase in SQLs YoY
33
First Page Rankings for Commercial Intent Keywords
143%
Increase in MQLs
The Problem
This website had plenty of problems.
Their content strategy was almost nonexistent, and the site was filled with technical errors.
Their service pages were dynamically loaded (creating new URLs each time, with each one having a self-referencing canonical tag.
Their service pages were combined into one page without actually explaining what they do. The same is true of their solutions pages.
So not only was it unhelpful for their potential clients, but they were completely missing out on a whole source of qualified traffic.
Their blog was hosted on a subdomain, and their content mainly targeted the same keyword.
Widespread cannibalization was happening across the site.
Not only this but their CTA options were completely buried throughout their site.
It was almost impossible to contact them, especially if you were coming from the blog subdomain.
The Solution
As for solutions, we had to reverse everything and fix everything wrong with the site.
Firstly, we had to work on fixing those technical issues. It mostly came down to improving how they used dynamic URLs and canonical tags. This almost doubled the number of URLs Google had to crawl.
After that, we made sure the website was more accessible to drive conversions, with better-placed CTAs, different lead generation methods (MQLs), demo options, etc.
We then migrated their entire blog subdomain back to the website. I’m personally very against blog subdomains; if a blog receives any backlinks, which it usually does, it won’t transfer over to your root domain.
So when we migrated the subdomain back to the root, we brought hundreds of quality backlinks with us.
So that was the technical, then we had the full content audit we had to take care of. There were dozens of articles, all targeting the same intent/keyword.
They were all short and missing usable info, so I had to audit their full content profile.
This meant finding pages that needed to be consolidated and then creating a plan for realigning their content with search intent.
After the content audit was completed, I helped build them a roadmap based on topics that would drive leads for them—actual qualified leads.
This mostly started with us targeting BoFu topics like competitor alternatives and comparison content.
After that, we were free to target MoFu topics that were mainly aligned with their target audience and how they would benefit from their software.
Since this was a highly niche space, we spent a good amount of time building out thought leadership, too. Content meant to establish them as a prominent voice in the industry while also building backlinks. It was like an inbound digital PR strategy.
The Result
From this, we got 33 high-value keywords on the first page and increased SQLs by 50% Year over Year from organic.
They also held a large industry event that we heavily promoted; this led to an increase of 143% in actual marketing-qualified leads.
