Sabre Limited engaged Jason Pittock between 2021 and 2023; he was instrumental in their SEO growth, but more importantly, he played a fundamental role in enabling both leadership and the marketing team to win long-term with their organic visibility. This case study, along with the video testimonial is an example of why knowledge for unlocking growth and success.
Jump in and enjoy this in-depth case study.
Sabre Limited SEO Project At a Glance:
Problems:
1. Sabre had never successfully acquired leads via organic search on its website.
2. Sabre had low time on site and a low engagement rate.
3. Sabre struggled to increase domain authority.
4. The marketing team struggled with scaling content processes.
Key outcomes:
1. Sabre grew their organic visibility to acquire 5 high-ticket leads per month from SEO.
2. 400% increase in search traffic in less than 9 months.
3. Identified key areas on the website to optimize and improve loading speed, time on site doubled, and 150% increase in the volume of pages viewed by the same user.
4. Sabre understood what key drivers affected their Domain Authority and how to grow this critical metric month-on-month.
5. Implementation of SEO and content production training and coaching to accelerate the content output by 300%.
6. Sabre Limited acquired more than 300 non-branded keywords and placed them in top positions in Search.
About The Customer:
Sabre Limited https://www.sabrelimited.com/ is a trusted Microsoft Dynamics Partner specializing in the seamless implementation of Microsoft Dynamics solutions for the heavy manufacturing sector across the United States and Canada. With a strong focus on industries like paint manufacturing, steel production, and related heavy industrial fabrication, Sabre Limited provides tailored integration services that drive operational efficiency and business growth for its clients.
Sabre Limited Engaged With Jason Pittock in 2022 With a Problem: Organic Visibility
The Sabre Limited website in 2022 had limited organic search, with less than 1000 searches per month and low time on site, leads from Organic Search were unheard of. Branded traffic was 90% of the organic search, nobody was finding Sabre for non-branded keywords. And if they did, they didn’t convert.
In addition, Sabre Limited had limited organic visibility with extremely low domain authority and no plan or map to grow its authority score. Their limited organic visibility contributed to a stagnant DA and this loop continued until Jason Pittock stepped in to demystify these concepts, expose areas to rapidly improve, and gain organic visibility that contributes to brand awareness and building pipeline.
Technology: The Vehicle Has To Work
When Sabre engaged with Jason Pittock, the website had perilous website loading time, pages had endless 401 loops, no proper URL framework, and many broken paths and links. This meant that the website was rendered unable to convert traffic.
The website is a foundational component and is the vehicle between the brand and the audience. It has to work, at 100% performance and 100% of the time.
What did we do?
We conducted an in-depth comprehensive SEO audit to expose all areas that needed attention and built a rigorous execution program, task list, and website health framework for the customer to work towards beyond the initial fix. Provide immediate remedy to the fundamental SEO problems and an ongoing support system and key parameters for the website to adhere to. This includes setting technical SEO KPIs for the website and onboarding the team to understand these metrics and execute accordingly.
Key implementations of the SEO Progam:
- Built out a 2-year SEO roadmap.
- Implemented a schema audit.
- Moved from old WordPress builder to state-of-the-art builder: Oxygen coupled with Gutenberg.
- Audited all sitemaps.
- Verified and cleaned all URL paths.
- Shortened permalinks.
- Established pillar pages archive pages and implemented the right page schema types.
- Implemented powerful CDN’s.
- Migrated site to AWS optimized environment.
- Documented and implemented SEO DevOps process for managing updates and migrations from staging to production.
- Scheduled weekly and monthly health check-ins using AI performance monitoring.
- Clear, well-structured sitemaps were implemented, and indexing schedules were facilitated.
- Sitemaps were routinely indexed via Google Search Console.
- Achieved grade A (GTMetrix) and 95% performance score (Google Page Speed Insights).
- Optimized and cleaned up all metadata and tags on the site and content.
- Alt tag optimization: all media was optimized to load correctly in image search with the right tags.
The result?
The website loaded rapidly on all devices. The migrations went from hazardous to calm procedures with next to no downtimes or broken pages. The sitemaps indexed successfully all content to be displayed successfully on all devices. URLs became managable and a URL builder was implemented for ongoing scalability of the sitemaps and new pages.
Breakdown of Intent: Mapping Content To Buyer’s Needs
The second phase of the SEO program was unlocking organic visibility with their content, but we had a challenge.
Sabre Limited has never delved into their Google Search Console data, and their content wasn’t informed by data or SEO insights, not to mention the funnel or buyer journey.
Through strategic advisory, we aligned content to match 3 conditional logics:
1. It should have an SEO opportunity (this metric was devised based on volume, search intent, and keyword difficulty)
2. The content should align with the right stage of the buyer journey we are targetting, moving the reader further down the “funnel.”
3. The content has to be mapped to the buyer’s needs: this means that the content has to actually serve a purpose in influencing key stakeholders or buying committees at the right time with the right message.
We staged this phase into 3 key activities:
Optimization of existing pages and content, including articles
We identified “low-hanging fruit” in the existing archive of articles that had CTR (click-through rate) potential and optimized content accordingly, implementing a step-by-step checklist for optimizing each page.
Focusing on adding additional value to the articles by researching the topics, identifying content gaps in the search results, and implementing these findings on the articles. This also included breaking down the content into structured headings following an SEO hierarchy of headings.
On-page optimization was conducted on all blogs, service pages, pillar pages, and case studies to maximize the organic visibility of the content. We focused on identifying organic visibility opportunities and updating the content accordingly.
Keyword Research: not just a database of words
Applying keyword research in theory sounds easy: research the target keyword list and create content that targets it. For Sabre Limited we realized this wasn’t going to work based on the niche solution and market they were operating in.
This called for elaborating a content strategy that focused on long-tail variations that were all semantically linked but most importantly aligned with the stage of the journey that the buyer was at.
We identified that at different stages of the journey, the user would make specific types of queries and conduct research sensitive to their “process” to making a decision or “converting”.
What we observed:
- Problem aware: top-of-the-funnel queries focused on problem-related searches.
- Solution aware: middle-of-the-funnel queries surrounding key outcome drive searches.
- Market/Brand awareness: comparison of technologies and searches related to costs, implementations, and integrations.
By implementing strategically mapped content and performing LSI ( ) content program, visibility grew, time on site tripled abd most importantly the leads started to flow in, ready to have informed conversations.
Content Production and Optimization Frameworks
All of this work was conducted with supporting evidence and clear SOPs and frameworks for the team to implement and scale as they progressed through their journey to organic visibility.
We conducted a series of content production and optimization workshops, inviting key stakeholders to engage and apply these techniques to the content process.
These frameworks and SOPs became integrated into the content efforts to maximize visibility and reach.
12 Months To Organic Visibility and 5x Leads Per Month
During the SEO program, Sabre Limited went from invisible to visible. The organic search became a key channel for bringing in qualified leads with high intent to purchase. SEO contributed to brand awareness and building a solid pipeline.
Sabre Limited had the advantage that the market for Microsoft Dynamics Manufacturing integrators wasn’t saturated with highly optimized content or websites, which gave them a competitive edge to stay ahead and win key organic real estate.
But more importantly, than supply leads and revenue ops, we focused on driving SEO awareness to the team, fostering the adoption of SEO best practices, and enabling SEO to become a long-term opportunity vs a short hack. The team's SEO “know-how” soared, providing a better understanding of key drivers to organic visibility and long-term sustainable success.
As the CEO points out in the video testimonial, rather than just doing the work or optimizations on the site.
“Jason didn’t just help us and do the work, he taught us how to fish”
The Team To Achieve SEO Success for Sabre Limited
This SEO program wasn’t achieved in a silo. There was an integrated high-performance SEO team behind the project to deliver at each stage.
Ranging from key strategic SEO oversight to website development and updates, SEO training for the team, and On-Page optimizations.
The key roles we filled in this project were:
- SEO Oversight and Strategist
- On-page SEO Specialist
- SEO Coach
- Backend Developer for WordPress, Schema, AWS and Cloudways.
- Frontend Designer for Oxygen
The Process: How To Win Long-Term
All in all, the Sabre project was again an example of SEO's long-term wins vs. short-term hacks. An increase of 400% of organic search sounds great on paper and is good for a headline, but achieving this long-term visibility and, most importantly, getting SEO buy-in from leadership and key stakeholders is a way more important achievement than just focusing on traffic vanity metrics.
The awareness and adoption process is the secret to long-term SEO success.
May every organization have the opportunity to embrace SEO with the right expectations, framework, leadership, and discipline to execute. As it can have tremendous value in establishing authority, increasing brand awareness, and driving revenue opportunities to the funnel.
The Time Frame
- Phase #1 Kickoff Discovery: 1 month
- Phase #2 Audit and Alignment to Business Strategy: 1 month
- Phase #3 Implementation of optimizations: 2-3 months.
- Phase #4 Team Training and Adoption: 2 months
- Phase #5 Attribution, Measurement, and SEO Coaching: 2 months.
- Ongoing SEO support for content strategy and key performance indicators such as domain authority, content production, and website design/development.
