Case Studies
CrimCheck.
Driving organic traffic that is all about the recognition and results without a blemish on your record!
CrimCheck is the only not-for-profit organisation providing National Criminal History Checks in Australia. They believe in making a difference in our community, and all their profits are donated to South East Volunteers who provide the local community with social support services. As the motto goes, “CrimCheck doesn’t just understand the sector, They are part of it.”
Crimcheck was pretty new to the marketing game when StudioHawk came on board. They had made most of their sales through industry connections and building up a strong brand presence. Because of this, we had to sit down and create clear goals early on.
THE NEED
The Main Strategy Points were as follows:
– Build out service pages for our target audience pages.
– Build out location-specific pages.
– Build out a business police check page.
– Build out blog content.
– Obtain consistent backlink acquisition.
THE PLAN
Here were the goals we set forward and the boxes we’d love to be checkin’:
- Decrease the branded traffic percentage to below 50%.
- Achieve 100 Individual Police checks per month by the end of the year.
- Increase the keyword base by 100% Year On Year.
- Increase organic traffic by 50%.
- Rank on the first page for the following location keywords.
– Police Check QLD
– Police Check Victoria
– Police Check SA
– Police Clearance WA
– Police Check NSW
- Rank top #3 for the keyword “police check for business”.
THE EXECUTION
After the Initial discovery period, it became apparent that we were going to have some challenges to start the campaign. Mainly:
- We weren’t legally allowed to have access to the website. (An SEO’s worst nightmare).
- We needed to create a lot of content without there being a copywriter within the business.
- There were some misconceptions about how people search for police checks.
We set up service pages for target audiences, (aged care, disability support, gig economy, people who need a visa), so they would rank for transactional and longtail informational keywords. Because we offered potential customers quality information, we were able to get plenty of features and rich snippets. This allowed us to compete with others in the space who had higher domain authority. As Crimcheck did not have the content resources available, we had our copywriters compile this content.
We discovered early on how people searched for police checks. Because police checks are generally considered to be ‘national’, it felt unintuitive to build out location pages – but that was exactly what needed to be done as that was how people searched. Our copywriting team wrote these pages and this strategy helped us achieve our goal of non-branded search and getting individual police checks.
We also spent a lot of time doing internal linking. As we didn’t have access to the website we had to make this as simple as possible with a call-to-action internal linking strategy. In order to rank for business-related keywords, we also created a police check page for businesses. This allowed people looking for business-related police checks access to a page on the website to get information about this offering.
A Scratch in the Record
Eight months into a smashing campaign and busting through all of the roadblocks thus far, a sudden slamming of the brakes occurred when looking at a domain overview in Semrush. A developer had deindexed the whole website. This is never good. This is the equivalent of a painted cliff face at the end of a road from a Wile E. Coyote cartoon.
The website was completely deindexed on a Friday. We noticed it on Monday. There were no calls to Acme – we needed to combat the error and action some swift power moves:
- We removed the deindex tags.
- Reinstalled the self-referencing canonicals.
- Submitted each page to Google Search Console.
- Sat down for a few hours with the developer and went through each page to look for internal linking and anchor text opportunities.
Turning the dip back up to a ramp, the campaign was in a really good spot moving forward. The key pages and objectives from our original meeting were all achieved. The next step in the SEO strategy was to redesign the website to improve the conversion process. It is often the case that potential customers drop out of the purchasing process because of a very clunky and poor user experience.
THE RESULTS
- Campaign ROI – 561.33%
- 519.22%+ user increase in organic traffic!
- 596% increase in the top 3 keyword base
- Ranking on the First Page:
- Backlink Acquisition:
CONCLUSIONS
With a change in perspective from a search point of view, to building out well-written pages and a smoother user experience, the results poured in. In fact, the results of this campaign were wonderfully ridiculous. Even with the site being deindexed we were able to achieve a powerful result for the community while driving revenue to the website for individual police checks. SEO success box: checked!