And just like that, another month passes us by. As summers go, it’s been a damp one. To awaken us from our damp stupor then, let’s shake things up with a slightly different look at this month’s Microsoft Partner Top 50 Movers and Shakers: the SEO Leaders.
We use a number of factors to determine the standings of our Microsoft Partner Top 50 – from content quality to social engagement. It all adds up to give a better understanding of how successful a company’s approach to marketing is. One of the key metrics taken into account is search engine optimisation (SEO). Everything that helps your website rank more highly on search engines is included in here.
But what makes for a good SEO performance? How do you boost your rankings? And is SEO worth it? We spoke to some of the partners with the best SEO scores in the Microsoft Partner Top 50 to find out.
How QorusDocs built their SEO foundation
QorusDocs is a proposal management software company, intent on streamlining the proposal process for businesses around the world. They’re currently in a solid 22nd place in our Top 50 and have the second highest SEO score of any of the partners.
We spoke to Jennifer Tomlinson, EVP of Marketing at QorusDocs and asked for the best search engine optimisation techniques. She responded:
I’m a big believer in SEO and PPC in general, so we invested in a specialized performance marketing function that helps us navigate the ever-changing rules.
Qorus rebranded to QorusDocs in April 2021. The company domain had always been Qorusdocs.com, so making the move to a standardised name and domain helped solidify the brand. This meant building a new website that is kept to current navigation and UX best practices.
This really helped us set a new foundation for growth in SEO and with our PPC efforts…standardising on brand really helps everything function better.
Jennifer emphasised the importance of taking a holistic approach, not just focussing on traffic or conversion rates on the website, but the number of conversations and conversions across all digital and social advertising.
We closely monitor our SEO reports and advertising data to optimise, not just for great traffic but also for valuable conversions… This is how we gauge whether we are doing a good job each month with our investment in these areas.
Consistency is key for LS Retail
LS Retail currently sit 41st in the Top 50 rankings, and with a solid 81.1 score in SEO, they’re in the higher echelons when it comes to search engine optimisation techniques. We reached out to Eloise Freygang, CMO at LS Retail to hear how they are improving their search performance and driving leads:
During the past years, we have consistently worked on our website, with beautiful webpages and a clean, effective user experience that is easily discoverable in search. Also, we have put a lot of effort into driving traffic to our website, and the results are mostly due to the quality of the content that we produce.
As Eloise also mentions, it isn’t possible to build a brand’s trust and credibility overnight. In the world of SEO, just like in real life, building a solid base of reliability takes time and effort, there aren’t any shortcuts.
We have been steadily increasing organic traffic thanks to improvements and optimisation techniques applied to our own website, and other initiatives to improve our site’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness and authority.
This improvement in SEO also goes hand in hand with PPC. LS Retail continues to steadily increase paid search year after year, with a large effort going into creating and optimizing campaigns to increase lead generation. Eloise also spoke about the importance of content SEO:
Content marketing is a cornerstone of our SEO efforts. We focus on quality and value rather than quantity, but we still produce and release a steady amount of new content in the form of blogs, product videos, white papers, customer stories and videos, web pages, and campaigns with third party thought leaders.
Beyond this, social media marketing has proved to be an invaluable tool in LS Retail’s growth, reach, and brand recognition strategy. Paid campaigns on LinkedIn and Facebook have been key to some of the impressive results they’ve seen.
How Chorus stay ahead with SEO
Chorus are also at the head of the course when it comes to SEO. Lisa Treasure, Head of Marketing, talks us through their approach and what benefits the team has seen as a result of their search engine optimisation techniques.
SEO is a significant component of our digital marketing strategy. A few key ways we ensure good SEO performance is to focus on great content, continuous optimisation and technical SEO.
Lisa and the team know that keyword research and the right meta titles and descriptions are all vital, but what it all boils down to is creating content that people find valuable and engaging.
We focus on creating articles and webpages that answer our audience’s questions and link to relevant resources, which naturally leads to increased backlinks, conversions and a higher domain authority.
Although great content is a crucial to achieving good SEO, continual input and other ‘On-Page’ SEO work is still required. Lisa expressed the importance of technical SEO practices:
We have a range of analytics and SEO tools in place (e.g. Google Analytics, Moz) to track performance and optimise pages, using SEO best practices such as optimised page titles and meta descriptions, compressed images with alt tags, and good internal/external linking.
Getting the basics right is crucial for any SEO expert. It’s important to continually check to make sure theses benchmarks are being met. This ensures that all the hard work you put into your content is worthwhile.
We make sure we review and optimise areas such as our site structure, XML sitemap, site speed, mobile usability, and we crawl for errors and fix them so that our site remains optimised.
Check out the Microsoft Partner Top 50 and see how you compare
How does your search engine performance compare to these SEO leaders? Need help making your pages rank more highly? Looking for a hand with SEO optimised content? Get in touch and we’ll see how we can help.
Keep checking our continuously updated Top 50 Microsoft Partners to see how you and other partners are doing. To be one of the top-ranking Microsoft partners our list, you just need a good plan of action – a thoughtful strategy, a fool-proof schedule, and the resources (i.e. people with the right skills) to carry it out consistently. If you need help with any of your digital marketing, get in contact and we’ll be happy to help.