Published by olivia.wright@dontpanicprojects.com
Published Date 03.01.2024 
With three awards nods to add to our ever-growing list of achievements, we’re set for a spectacular 2024 at Smart Monkey.
We’re a small team, but we get big results for clients across professional services, b2b, tech and SaaS, and we couldn’t be happier to be shortlisted for awards that not only mean a lot to us but also to our clients. (One of our clients was so excited they told everyone in the business before the CEO!)
Having been established for many years, we’ve had a lot of different looks, but our ethos has stayed true; deliver good work that delivers for clients and makes us proud. Having decided to play into our strengths and focus on the sectors where we can make the biggest difference across SEO, PPC and digital PR, we’ve had one of our most successful years to date when it comes to awards. And it’s set us up for the next 12 months and beyond.
First up, we’re nominated for B2B Website of the Year for our work with a workplace tech company.
Our work for the business started a couple of years ago, and we’ve been working with their internal team since day one to deliver on two main goals:
- improve their website from a technical perspective
- improve their website from a user perspective
Essentially, we needed to help businesses understand how the client could solve a problem they had – quickly and easily.
We devised a strategy based on competitor analysis and a deep understanding of what makes a website great for consumers. Our team:
- conducted a full website audit, including a crawl depth review
- conducted a Google EEAT audit
- conducted a full content gap
- focused on on-page improvements to drive authority and improve user experience
As a result of all our hard work, we, among other things:
- increased users from 95,000 in h2 2022 to 131,000 in h1 2023
- increased engaged sessions by 18,728 (35.72%) in h1 2023, compared to h2 2022
- increased impressions of three key informational pages by 5,260 in h1 2023, compared to h2 2022
What’s more, we’ve managed to establish the client as experts in their field through tailored campaigns that add real value to the business, and set them up for another year of success.
Next, we’re up for Organic Content Campaign of the Year for one of our accounting clients.
After having huge success in Kent, the client came to us wanting to increase their visibility in London. They had tried several tactics, including expensive direct mail campaigns which didn’t deliver, and after migrating to a new CMS with the help of an external agency, they had been told ‘not to bother optimising for London because it is ‘too competitive’. But we knew this was rubbish, so we got to work in the Capital.
We decided to start from the ground up and improve SEO foundations to create a technically clean website , allowing us to ramp up local visibility for the London branches more easily.
From ZERO Google visibility in the top 100 for any of their sector-related search terms in London, we achieved some amazing results, including owning the space for their holy grail keyword ‘accountant London’, taking them to number 3 in the organic results. We also increased their traffic cost by 213%, and achieved a 151% increase in monthly leads.
After being left thinking their ambitions were unachievable, the client is now thriving and looking forward to what the next 12 months brings.
And finally, Best Low-Budget Campaign wraps up the hat trick of nominations for the year.
This one is for our franchise client, and has been a real passion project. The owner came to us as a last resort; he’d spent money on lead generation websites and paid ads that didn’t give him ROI, and he was at a crossroads – not only were no franchise leads coming into the business, but the existing franchises were starting to complain they had no work. So our goal was to help the owner rebuild his business with an online campaign focused on two-pronged lead generation – franchise ownership enquiries and oven cleaning quote requests.
We decided to look into what had worked in the past to drive forward our strategy, whilst using our expertise to understand what additional work needed to be done. This included improving the content on franchise lead generation sites (as these had worked well in the past), and working on site improvements to make it easier for customers – and potential franchise owners – to navigate.
Once the site was in a good place, we carried out a small outreach campaign that resulted in links from key relevant sites, including allrecipes.com and express.co.uk, in order to build authority and brand awareness.
Our work resulted in 11 new franchises being onboarded, as well as:
- 423% increase in page 1 organic keywords
- 218% increase in organic traffic
- Over 220 quote requests every month
And much like our other clients, the owner is excited about the coming year and looking forward to growing his business through SEO.
As for us, we’re much the same. Over the last couple of months, we’ve made new hires to support growth and have started working on a new brand that will better reflect Smart Monkey and our offering. With loyal clients continuing to trust us with their business, and new clients coming on board, the future looks bright for us. And another award win or two would be the icing on the cake.
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