For businesses in PPC-restricted industries, organic marketing is usually the only avenue for gaining new business.

It can be expensive and it involves no small commitment in time or resources, but then again, organic marketing, like SEO, often returns the biggest gains, not only in terms of actual dollar value, but also in customer loyalty.

Naturally, some of our businesses are in these restricted spheres. 

Fortunately for them, we have a proven history of making things work, especially with SEO. 

The Challenges of Digital Marketing for PPC-Restricted Businesses

For our clients that are in PPC-restricted industries, the main challenge is that platforms like Google and Facebook won’t allow them to pay to advertise. 

That shuts doors not only for them but also for us. After all, we do also offer PPC management services. 

It also tends to make these industries extremely competitive with respect to SEO. 

The reason for this is that all of the other contenders must also engage in SEO (and organic social media marketing) in order to survive.

Since one of the cornerstones of SEO is content, the challenge becomes even bigger. To write for these clients, we need to become industry experts ourselves. 

More often than not, this requires close collaboration, and coordination, with the client in order to determine a cogent content schedule.

That way we can move in lockstep. As you’re about to see, it works. 

Select Findings

A picture tells a story. They also say a picture tells a thousand words. So, I combed through Google Search Console and Google Analytics to find real data that illustrates the performance of our SEO services for some of our clients in PPC-restricted industries. 

The data you’re about to see covers 4 separate clients, each of them in slightly different industries. All are PPC-restricted.

Let’s take a look at blog growth for one of our clients that has been around several years. 

Growth has been slow but steady. If you’re wondering, we were starting out with absolutely nothing. The blog was bare when we started the campaign and had 0 visits. We were working with plenty of days at the beginning that had no visits, but as you can see we’ve picked it up. 

Growth has been particularly strong in the last year, and domain authority and sessions are both growing. In this particular case, remember – we’re not in this to grow our clients’ blogs, but to get them visits to their product and category pages in order to increase conversions. Blog growth only sweetens the deal and serves as a validator, for us. 

Here’s overall traffic to the same client’s website, basically from the start of the campaign to the present time: 

You don’t even need to see actual numbers to see how strong growth has been. It’s up almost double, on average, since the campaign began. 

Let’s take a look at blog growth of another client’s blog.

The situation is the same as it was for the last client. We were working with nothing at the outset but have seen huge gains in the last year. Blog growth and time on page are very strong (nearly 3 minutes time on page is impressive in its own right) and the fact that there’s even a little bit of page value is even more impressive. We do eCommerce SEO, remember, and the fact that people are reading our blogs and then buying from our client’s website is extremely gratifying for us (and them). 

Here’s traffic to the same client’s website, showing growth during the first half and latter half of the current campaign by breaking it up into roughly two components. 

Again, you don’t really need numbers to see how dramatic growth has been. Still, figures tell a pretty powerful story. Pageviews are up almost double. Page value has more than doubled since we started the campaign. I won’t belabor this. The image and the figures tell you as much as I possibly could.

As impressive as these metrics are, sometimes it’s visibility and clicks that show how effective our efforts are. 

Check out these results through Google Search Console for another client. 

The weird spike in the middle makes it a little hard to see just how dramatic the positive movements were for this client, but the metrical increases are clear. 

Clicks increased by almost 5,000 during the second half of the period, and impressions nearly doubled. Nearly twice as many searchers saw our client’s website in the organic search results as had seen it during the immediately preceding period. 

These results tell an even more pointed story, for a different client, and the image is far more compelling. 

Clicks, impressions, average position, and even click-through rate all increased for this client during this period. Impressions didn’t quite double but increased substantially, and the same could be said for clicks. 

What’s really impressive about this is that, as impressions increase, click-through rate usually drops. It’s very hard to get both more impressions and a higher share of clicks from them, but we did. This is likely due to the fact that we were targeting highly relevant keywords for this client. 

That doesn’t just mean more people saw our client’s listings; it means more of the people that saw them were looking for what they sell, and clicked. 

The Proof Is In the…Results

These figures span a period of more than 3 years – in two cases nearly 4 – and for 4 separate clients with unique models. 

All of them operate in PPC-restricted industries, and for all of them, the keys to growth have been in a strategic partnership that entailed the delivery of highly targeted, highly, effective SEO services. The rest of our case studies tell similar tales. 

If you’re reading this and are responsible for the success of an eCommerce business in a restricted vertical, an SEO strategy might just be the missing piece.

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