Tools are the new Traffic Magnet: A case study presenting our site’s results from creating online marketing tools.

THE RESULT

There’s no question that online tools take effort to design and deploy. But, fast-forward one-year post-launch and that marketing effort will provide dramatic results that drive a continuing stream of high-quality visitors at no additional cost: year after year.

What is an Online Tool?

An online tool is an interactive web page that allows site visitors to enter data and receive a calculation based on that data. Many tools do a great job of showing – rather than telling – the need for their services.

Examples

• Campaign Tracking URL Tool: Use to create tracking URLs for marketing campaigns
• Search Engine Spider Simulator: See the text content that GoogleBot indexes on your web page.
• Another great example is Ensighten’s tag management tool to show how their software can improve page speed.
• A simple Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator should be fairly straight-forward for many companies to create.

GETTING STARTED

Step 1 | Identify the Customer Need

• We began by evaluating the keywords in Google Webmaster Tools that were driving impressions for our website and identified the keywords that had high impressions where we weren’t seeing clicks.
• We built a list of search queries and checked it against our keyword reference guide.
• Next, we considered what content would be most useful to our clients as they optimize their own websites.

Step 2 | Review Existing High-Value Web Content

• We reviewed Google Analytics data to understand what existing site content was highly-accessed. This helped us identify the gaps.

Step 3 | Select and Deploy Online Tools

• We got to work expanding existing tools, creating and licensing new tools and developing other search-related teaching content and templates. The results speak for themselves!

MEASURABLE RESULTS

What happened after exploring all the data surprised even us. The tools and educational content outperformed all other content on the site.

One tool generated 53% more traffic than our homepage – a surprise given that a homepage typically generates the highest number of page views on a site.

Online tools and educational content out-performed most blog posts. In the screenshot shown below of our top 10 web pages, 6 pages contain tools and educational content.

Visitor Growth for All Tools Pages

BIG OUTCOMES

Organic Search

123 % Increase in Google Impressions for pages containing our top tools

Traffic Sources

• 300% Increase from Social Sources
• 134% Increase in Organic Traffic
• 170% Increase in Direct Traffic
• 20% Increase in Referral Visitors

Site Behavior

• 120% Increase in Visitor Sessions
• 73% Increase in Page Views

Popular Online Tools Drive Social Sharing (example)

KEY TAKEAWAYS

High-Value Site Visitors | The Kind You Want

LeadLander.com — awesome software for site visitor identification — gave us insight into the identify the visitors coming to our pages.

We were able to see a wide range of enterprises, governments and universities coming to the site.

Examples of Companies Visiting Our Tools Page in One Month:

• Bank of the West
• Cisco Systems
• Government Telecommunications And Informatics Services
• Hewlett-Packard Company
• Honeywell
• IBM
• iProspect
• NFL Players Association
• NTT DATA CORPORATION
• Ogilvy & Mather SAS
• Opera Software Americas LLC
• Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company
• Philips
• Salesforce
• State Farm
• Telecom New Zealand
• The Clorox Company
• Thomson Reuters
• Ticketmaster UK
• Toyota
• Trinity & All Saints College
• Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.

Evergreen Content | The Gift that Keeps on Giving

Every time any site’s pages — including yours! — appear in a Google search results page and a visitor clicks that link, it sends a signal to Google that the page is a good result for the search query and should be offered again. In this way, your search rankings improve for that search query.

Tools do require regular testing to ensure that they continue to work. If your tools are based on pulling information Google’s database as shown in this tool, Google’s updates can sometimes break the tool.

The number of keyword phrases the site is ranking for in Google has jumped by 40% driving continued organic growth.

→ Try it yourself and send us your results!