Agile Collaboration: Learning and Growing Through our Long-Term SEO Partnership with RankSense

Editor’s Note: NewPig is a friendly and leading B2B manufacturer and supplier of all things leak and spill. In October 2016, the company promoted Colby Shoop as its first in-house SEO manager. In collaboration with RankSense, Colby has managed numerous innovation projects with measurable SEO results.

I’ve been with New Pig for twelve years, and, during that time, I’ve had the opportunity to work in several departments. I began in customer service, moved to sales, and finally web merchandising. Currently, I am the SEO manager of this department, and I’ve been able to pull from the skills I learned in my prior roles in order to look through an SEO lens at the customer experience and user intent of our clients.

An SEO partner whose priorities shift with your business needs

Over the years, RankSense has been a critical partner in integrating our company’s diverse needs into our ever-evolving SEO strategy for the business. A few years ago, we tackled a challenging site migration that required us to be extremely data-driven and deliberate in how we approached the project. The main concern was that there would be significant traffic drop-off, but RankSense knew how best to re-platform in order to avoid this potential SEO disaster that could impact revenue. During that time, I learned so much about the nuances and experimentation necessary for implementing agile SEO strategies. I even went to RankSense’s headquarters and trained directly with Hamlet and his team in order to learn as much as I could about the technical process.

Recently, we upgraded the site with meta-descriptions. Improving a page’s meta description can improve its CTR, which can drive more traffic to a page. However, one common problem with changing them is that instead of increasing a page’s CTR, altering the meta-descriptions can potentially have a negative impact on the CTR if the process is not verified with data. We were curious to see if our benefit, our brand, a giveaway, or the reviews would give us the highest click-through rates. My team assumed that the giveaway would be the most successful, but RankSense A/B tested each category and did a statistical analysis with surprising results. They found that our brand benefit and the reviews were driving the most click through rates–not free gifts–so we put our focus on those categories. By verifying that the descriptions correlated with improved CTR, we rolled out those type of descriptions onto more pages in order to increase traffic, which has improved in the double digits.

Learning by doing and collaborating

When I became the SEO Manager in 2016, our department was more focused on keywords than anything else. As I mentioned before, I’ve been able to leverage my previous roles to look at customer experience and user intent from an SEO perspective. Because we collaborate a lot within the company, collaborating with RankSense on the more technical side of SEO allows us to implement a robust strategy and reach data-driven goals from both my side and theirs.

The best part about New Pig’s relationship with RankSense is that we truly collaborate together. While some ideas are from my team and others from theirs, Hamlet always provides a roadmap to guide us throughout each quarter and the year. We have monthly scorecards that allow us to stay on the same page and keep track of our success. I would say that the scorecards usually show improvements above all else.

Setting bigger goals instead of tackling constant obstacles

Going forward, we have a roadmap to tackle mobile in B2B markets. We’d like to focus on mobile because it is a growing way for us to reach customers through various distribution channels (Amazon and Wal-Mart, for example). We need to explore SEO in a mobile context while still telling the same brand story about New Pig across all channels.

I like that SEO is changing all the time. It’s a technical field that moves quickly. If you have the support and teams in place, you can really see dramatic changes that are impactful to sales and customer experience. To do SEO well, you have to constantly be learning, and with RankSense, I feel as though I am always up to speed.