Content SEO Strategy Yields A Massive Boost in Organic Traffic

Wallace, Welch, and Willingham (W3) is an insurance company specializing in employee benefits coverage and commercial, marine, and life insurance. With offices in St. Petersburg and Sarasota, FL, the company has been a fixture of the Tampa Bay business community for nearly a century.

In 2014, W3 came to Big Sea looking to acquire more requests for marine insurance. Ever since, Big Sea has worked with W3 on content marketing, web development, and advertising strategy and execution.

In April of 2023, in advance of a general website redesign, Big Sea proposed a series of content refreshes to boost site traffic. W3’s site featured a lot of helpful, expert content written in-house by their team. We proposed editing and restructuring that content to optimize it for organic search.

Our specific objectives were to:

• Identify content-rich explainer pages with solid base performance metrics.
• Reorganize, edit and optimize those pages to increase their visibility for search engines.
• Boost the site’s organic traffic in advance of the re-launch.

Identifying Opportunities for Refresh

It’s no secret that Google likes helpful content, or work written by experts and those who have first-hand experience that provides a deeply informative take on a topic. Much to their ranking advantage, W3’s site already had a lot of useful, authoritative content on insurance-related subjects. Their content often focused on products relevant to its broader Tampa Bay area customer base, such as boat insurance and policies covering flood and hurricane damage.

But despite the great content, these pages lacked keyword alignment and other features of search optimization. An SEO audit revealed which keywords existing pages were ranking for and which pages were already performing well in organic search. The strongest pieces were chosen to maximize returns on our SEO efforts and strengthen the overall organic health of the site.

Editing and Optimizing

Organizing Information

Using best practices for keyword alignment and SERP optimization, between April and June Big Sea restructured 10 blog entries on W3’s site. Adding and rewording headers and subheads, and providing a hierarchical structure through those headings, made the information on these pages easier for Google’s web crawlers to understand.

Editing for clarity

While clarity is not a ranking factor, more digestible information provides a better user experience. For W3’s high-level content, adding some additional structure helped with readability as well by giving context to the provided information.

Targeting SERP Features

Big Sea specifically targeted SERP features to increase W3’s visibility in Google’s search engine results. We focused on People Also Ask questions and featured snippet optimization. By editing and rewriting W3’s content to compete with other SERP feature results, we sought to provide better answers to searchers’ important questions about the Florida insurance market, leading to a stronger presence on Google’s result pages.

Internal Linking

W3’s blog built out a lot of pieces with strong conceptual relationships to one another, but these pieces often didn’t directly link to each other. By implementing an internal linking strategy, we not only provided greater visibility to search engines across the blog segment, we also gave users additional resources to explore as they investigated a topic.

Measuring Results

After just a couple months, the site more than doubled the number of pages ranked in the top 3 search results on Google and nearly tripled the number in the top 10. As a consequence, new users were up over 67% and average time on the page was up by 47%.

Our SEO efforts ultimately yielded a number of impressive results:

• 172% increase in top 10 keywords
• 113% increase in top 3 keywords
• 67% increase in all organic traffic
• 76% increase in traffic from Google
• 29% increase in traffic from all sources
• 62% increase in total keywords
• 2883% increase in SERP features

Most strikingly of all, the number of excerpts from W3’s site featured on Google search result pages increased over 28 times over.

With a relatively small investment of time, Big Sea massively boosted W3’s organic web traffic and primed the site for greater exposure when they launch their new homepage.