Alton Materials is a scrap metal recycling business located in Alton, IL. They serve both the general public and businesses in industries like construction, demolition and manufacturing.
We began an inbound marketing initiative for Alton Materials in March of 2013 after developing their online marketing strategy and completing a website rebuild. One year after we began the engagement, we can report growth in website traffic by more than 1000 percent (from roughly 28 visits/day to more than 300 visits/day).
Here’s how we did it
Our goal was to generate awareness. More qualified visitors means more business leads. More business leads means more revenue. In the online marketing world, awareness comes in the form of website traffic generation. And our best venue for generating traffic was that place where most people go to find information: Google.
We started with a thorough keyword research process, examining data around what keywords real people actually search in the scrap metal business and how difficult it would be to show up in Google searches for those keywords. We identified a variety of these best keyword opportunities and developed a business blogging strategy around them. Our goal was to both target these keywords in search engines like Google and provide useful, educational content on our client’s website to satisfy those searchers when they arrived. Blog posts included topics like the following:
What can be recycled? Common summer items that can make you money
Why construction recycling is important
Within the first month of our blogging initiative, we struck gold. Although a simple, common topic, very little content existed anywhere explaining the differences between ferrous and non ferrous metals. Who cares about this topic? It turns out their audience does. A lot. Our solution was to write a blog post answering that commonly asked question:
The differences between ferrous and non-ferrous scrap metal
Google quickly discovered and indexed the page and verified the topic was relevant to the content on the Alton Materials site. That single page has contributed to more than 60 percent of entry points to the Alton Materials website (more than 34,000 visits over the past year).
So… there IS an asterisk
Although this sounds like an absolutely overwhelming success, there is an asterisk. Alton Materials only serves companies within a 50-to-100-mile radius of their home in Alton. Sadly, that means those visits from London, Mumbai and even Chicago don’t do them much good when it comes to attracting paying customers. But here’s why this traffic growth still matters. Even though their website has attracted thousands of visitors from across the world, the concentration of visitors looks like this over the past year:
And the concentration of visitors within the United States during that same time period look like this:
Where is Alton Materials located? Smack in the middle of those two dark blue states (on the border of Missouri and Illinois).
Here’s your takeaway
If your customers demonstrate an overwhelming demand for something, you make sure they can get it from you, right? The same mindset applies in content marketing. Do the research, learn what information your audience craves and build content that demonstrates your expertise on the subject. This helps a qualified audience discover you, establishes trust in your expertise and creates opportunity to convert more potential customers into real leads on your website.
