Leveraging Hyperlocal Search to Increase Reach
About Mass Save
Mass Save brings energy savings to businesses and residents of Massachusetts. Working with energy providers, they lead Massachusetts to a clean and energy efficient future through programs, resources, and education.
Challenge
Mass Save expressed interest in expanding their reach to new and existing audiences with their website. The challenge was finding traffic that came to the website and matched their intended audience of people looking for specific energy resources. So, we investigated what would be the most beneficial area of their website to focus on. We suggested capitalizing on their top traffic source, organic search, by optimizing their site’s SEO to achieve their goals. Since Mass Save is hyperlocal, it was important for them to be visible in search engines for people in Massachusetts. Because of that, an additional requirement for improving their site’s SEO was to successfully and naturally use local SEO to expand their reach.
Mass Save’s key challenges were:
- Expanding their reach to new and existing audiences
- Using organic search to increase site traffic
- Ensuring visibility in search for users in Massachusetts
Approach
Velir suggested starting with a technical assessment to uncover specific low-hanging fruit to address. We worked with key stakeholders to better understand Mass Save’s audiences and their search intent. Collaborating with the team helped us to prioritize and remediate issues to help the website rank better with search engines. Mixing this technical and strategic direction, we then started building a plan for achieving success.
A Holistic Approach
We knew that SEO work could be done in tandem to save time. So, we established a timeline to investigate technical changes we could make to Mass Save’s website and formed a prioritized list while we conducted keyword research. These activities then gave us a clear direction on what to fix first and where the opportunities were moving forward.
This holistic approach helped us make more informed decisions about what elements of code, navigation, and content on the website should be updated. After conducting research on how to apply our recommendations to their technology stack, coupled with our increased knowledge about their audiences and goals, led us to make more impactful changes to their website that drove results with search engines.
Velir’s approach included:
- Performing a technical assessment to find low-hanging fruit
- Collaborating to better understand Mass Save’s audiences
- Prioritizing SEO changes while performing keyword research
- Using data to determine the highest impact SEO changes
Solution
Our solution was to execute an SEO strategy derived from our technical SEO assessment, keyword strategy, and conversations with Mass Save. We addressed technical elements such as:
- Mobile optimizations
- Code compliance
- Structured data improvements
- Indexation concerns
- Content enhancements
Over the course of several months, we optimized the website based on our ranking of the potential impact the optimization might have. Copy became more relevant by adding nuanced geo-specific keywords to allow search engines to find it more authoritative. Since Mass Save only caters to Massachusetts residents with its resources and benefits, terms like “Mass Energy Loan” and “Boston Energy Rebates” were very important. Content sharing on popular social networks became more impactful by adding open graph markup, allowing people to find rebates and resources for how to improve their businesses’ heating efficiency. Indexation concerns were alleviated as our indexed pages matched our sitemapped pages, trueing up their actual page count and allowing for more authority to be delivered to their key pages. Optimized content enhanced user click-through-rate and led to a 15% increase in new users along with a decreased bounce rate and a longer average session duration.
The total result of our effort led to a 45% increase in keywords ranking on Page 1 in Google. Most of these terms were non-branded terms that their blog content and resource articles were trying to rank for, such as “hot water heater rebate” and “home energy audit," which they are currently ranking #1 in Massachusetts. This was a massive success for Mass Save. They were more visible in search engines, allowing them to reach more people and further their mission of making Massachusetts more energy efficient.
Results
- 45% Increase in Page 1 keywords over the course of a year (2019)
- 15% increase in new users (April - July YoY 2020/2019)
- 5% decrease in bounce rate (April - July YoY 2020/2019)
- 6% increase in session duration (April - July YoY 2020/2019)