Online Search Strategy

How a combined SEO & SEM strategy drove a 21% increase in revenue.

The Highlights

LimeLight Marketing Featured Work Creative Candles SEO SEM Increase Graphic

The Goal: Increase Website Traffic by 10%

Following a successful rebrand including a new e-commerce website, Creative Candles wanted to take their digital marketing to the next level. The goal was to increase organic traffic to their website by 10% over the previous year and optimize traffic sources for the best-performing and lowest-cost paths to conversion. Competition is high in the luxury candle space, so we created a strategy that would increase traffic using SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing.

A Dual Approach: SEO & SEM

SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) are often used interchangeably, but they are quite different. SEO is all about driving organic traffic to your site, while SEM is using paid advertising such as Google Ads to drive traffic. You can get great results when combining the two approaches, as long as the strategy and implementation are working together. Implementing the two strategies in isolation won’t generate the big results you’re looking for.

LimeLight Marketing Featured Work for Creative Candles SEO SEM Dual Approach

"I like that we’re seeing sales go up also. From the time we started working with LimeLight Marketing, we’ve had an average 30% increase and in some months we’ve actually had double the sales. It is fantastic to have a group that we can work with that feels like we are all one company…that people are just as dedicated to our company as we are."

Keith Espelien

Owner - Creative Candles

The Execution

Our SEO and SEM teams worked hand-in-hand on an SEO audit to understand Creative Candles’ organic search results and defined the tactics we would use to improve them. This guided our SEM strategy, which could then cover the bases that SEO couldn’t reach.

Over a period of six months, we implemented various SEO improvements such as:

• Enhancing content on all product pages
• Optimized alt tags and meta descriptions site-wide
• Lengthening blog posts
• Removing low performing posts
• Implemented schema markup
• Canonicalized product pages
• Strengthened the SEO value of onsite images

In tandem, we increased monthly paid search ad spend, regularly analyzed ad results, and tweaked our approach to maximize overall campaign effectiveness.

The Results

Our combined SEO and SEM approach has exceeded every metric and all of our KPI’s. In addition to growing organic traffic by more than 10%, the strategy has increased sales and average order value. But what we’re most proud of is that we’re helping Creative Candles succeed. We uncovered opportunities, identified possibilities, and ultimately created a strategy that is delivering the results they’re looking for – and then some.

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