July 20th, 2010

The SEO Effect

This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising. It all kicks off here.

One of the benefits that we factored in when we considered doing a campaign of this sort is search engine optimization. Doing the Naked Campaign meant that we could write about a lot of the things that we talk about internally in a public-facing way. Naturally that means that words that we care about would show up related to us in search engines.

There is, of course, no guarantee that we will show up high enough in any particular search to make it worth the effort from that point of view alone (and certainly there’s more to ranking high than just having particular words in your content), but the potential side effect was definitely worth factoring in.

So, is it working?

In short, yes. Since the Naked Campaign started, keywords that show up exclusively in articles related to the campaign have accounted for 20% of our organic search traffic.

Here are the phrases that have sent us traffic so far:
Adwords
madebyfight.com/naked
invalid http response code adwords
free $250 dollar google adwords
keyword suggestion tool
linkedin directads coupon

Especially interesting is the fact that the most popular keyword (AdWords) also had the lowest bounce rate at 40%. This means that 6 out of every 10 visitors from this search term went on to read further into the site, which is extraordinary for our site generally speaking, much less for search terms. This isn’t particularly surprising as our program is built around AdWords (and the lesser-searched-for DirectAds), but it is encouraging to know that the targeting appears to be effective.

Perhaps you’ve come to this page via a search? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. What caught your interest enough to click, and did you find what you expected to find?