A Brief History

Marble‌ ‌is‌ ‌a‌ direct-to-consumer ‌business‌ ‌that‌ ‌fabricates‌ ‌and‌ ‌installs‌ ‌natural‌ ‌stone‌ ‌countertops and has been serving customers since 1996.

It has grown to have the ‌biggest‌ ‌stone‌ ‌selection‌ ‌on‌ ‌the‌ ‌East‌ ‌Coast‌ ‌and‌ ‌most‌ ‌likely‌ ‌in‌ ‌the‌ ‌whole‌ ‌USA.‌ They import stone from quarries all across the globe.

They currently have fabrication locations in states like:

New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New York State.

Marketing History

The company’s digital marketing strategy had come a long way, thanks mainly, to their efforts with SEM (search engine marketing) and more specifically PPC (pay-per-click marketing) but they were spending in excess of 7 figures annually on PPC.

They were at a point now where they wanted to rank in the SERPS effectively, generate organic traffic and overtake their competitors.

They were confident in all the other aspects of their business and were ready to receive and manage an increase in organic traffic and the leads that would accompany it.

Up to this point, there had been minimal work carried out in terms of SEO. At some stage, they had realized that diverting investment & resources into organic traffic would allow them to decrease their CPA (cost per acquisition) medium & long term. Possibly even short-term.

Taking a closer look at the goals I had to achieve I figured the following:

• I would be able to decrease CPA via ranking for the ‘right’ keywords (discussed in detail later).
• The process of ranking for keywords would require quality content that delivers more value than the competitors and entices links from other sites.
• This high-quality content would need to educate buyers throughout the various stages of buyers’ life cycle.

I hypothesized the following.

Creating individual content aimed at new buyers and existing owners. This would lead to a greater LTV as buyers would clearly determine that marble.com was the authority.

I also foresaw that we would be able to retarget buyers with new articles and ads on stone countertops for other areas of the house. Such as providing a past buyer of kitchen countertops with well-timed articles and add’s positioning our other products such as bathroom vanity counters.

KPI’s – The Long Game

Before getting to work recruiting a team. I decided to layout our KPI’s (key performance indicators).

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a long game, bearing fruit in some cases, only after 6 months.

Marble.com was going up against big names like Homedepot and Lowe’s. So I knew based on my research of their presence in the SERPs. This would take long term planning.

I took my top-level primary objectives, namely, reducing CPA and increasing LTV. I then broke them down into KPIs that would hold our course steady and allow me to find bottlenecks, as well as give myself and the team manageable micro targets to hit.

Sub-Metrics

Traffic was the initial primary metric we were concerned with. The other sub-metrics that made up the primary initial goal of traffic were:

• Bounce Rate
• Unique website visitors
• Pages viewed per session
• Average time on page
• Top landing pages
• Top exit pages.

Measuring all these metrics would allow me to see how the content our writers were producing was being received.

Local Leads

The 2nd primary metric was ‘Leads’. What percentage of our ‘traffic’ was converting to leads.

• Inbound calls
• Appointments booked
• Conversion rate performance between PPC and Organic leads

Were some of the metrics we started with.

Because stone countertops are a ‘high-ticket’ item the sale is done at the yard where the customer is immersed & surrounded in raw, huge, beautiful stone slabs.

The sales team was already experienced and good at closing. I made sure to set up a meeting with the head of sales and pick his brains for a good 90 minutes.

I knew there would be something to learn and boy was I right.

He provided me with a wealth of information about the types of customers they dealt with.

Identifying who to target

Having our primary and secondary KPI’s all mapped out. I set to work understanding which personas were buying natural stone countertops.

This was a straightforward task…

Marble already had a database of customer info I could tap into and draw out some personas.

We‌ ‌use‌d ‌data‌ ‌from‌ the Google‌ ‌PPC‌ ‌campaigns‌ ‌such‌ ‌as‌ ‌age,‌ ‌gender,‌ ‌location‌ ‌, and‌ ‌interest‌ ‌to‌ ‌get‌ ‌more‌ ‌familiar‌ ‌with‌ ‌our‌ ‌audience‌ ‌and‌ start formulating our ‌content‌ ‌strategy.

Stone countertops are generally a once-in-a-lifetime purchase. Of course, people move houses and then install stone countertops again, but in general, it is a big decision, and in some cases, stone countertops cost more than the kitchen itself.

Marble even featured gemstone and onyx countertops, some countertops went into the 4 figures per square foot so the personas did vary.

But overall there were similarities, for example, homeowners with an interest in interior design and art.

Upselling

One of the ideas that I and the head of sales came up with was to feature content on all the extras that a buyer would need to consider. For example, the design detail on the countertop edge.

This was an area where we could push up the AOV (average order value). The sales team was already upselling.

But I was now in charge of selling the brand online. I needed to ensure that we created relevant content and delivered it to the potential buyers at the correct stage of their buying journey.

The last thing you want to be doing is selling specialized edge finishes when the customer is not even sure what type of stone they want.

Buying stone countertops involves various stages of complexity for the buyer.

How to choose a contractor? How to choose a stone type, Which edging profile to choose?

‘Choosing a contractor’… I discovered, from customer research, was a big problem for buyers.

If we had already removed this problem by providing them with a completed job they are happy with.

Upselling them on countertops for another area of the house or perhaps a 2nd holiday home?

Made logical sense and would go a long way towards helping me solve my goal of increasing LTV.

One Man Band?

I was the 1st and only full-time person running the SEO.

But that wouldn’t be for long. I had been given a budget to build a team in order to achieve my objectives.

I was excited about building a team, it would allow me to ‘gain a higher view’ and ‘see the forest from the trees.’

But i also was under no illusion as to how hard it would be to find hardworking and trustworthy, honest people.

I had been given clear goals. Decrease CPA, increase LTV and do this inline with the profit and loss sheet.

I wanted to make Marble.com an authority when it came to countertops and natural stone.

I had the responsibility of finding, hiring, and supporting a new team to help me hit our goals.

Building out the team was tough, finding people who are willing to invest their energy, stick around and grow with a company is not easy.

I have very high expectations from people and I made that clear which scared a lot of people away.

This was slightly worrying, but in the end, it worked out for the best as I found a team who were willing to get the job done and who believed in the brand and the products enough to show up consistently and perform.

Responsibilities

So by the time the 12 month strategy was mapped out my responsibilities would involve: Finding, hiring and managing a team of 5+ staff, plus overseeing the following:

• SEM strategy
• SEO strategy
• Content Strategy
• Social Media Management
• Youtube Strategy
• Managing the budget and making sure we were hitting out KPI’s.

Challenges to Overcome

Here are some of the challenges we had to overcome.

Local Search

Another area I was shocked to discover that had been neglected was the ‘local’ search listing optimizations. People searching in their area for ‘granite fabricators in nj’ for example represented low hanging fruit. These customers lived close by!

Keywords…Rather a Lack off

Marble‌ ‌was‌ ‌not‌ ‌ranking‌ ‌for‌ ‌any‌ ‌related‌ ‌keywords‌ ‌for‌ ‌their‌ ‌business‌ ‌which‌ ‌would‌ ‌ ‌drive‌ people‌ ‌to‌ ‌their‌ ‌site‌ ‌and‌ ‌convert‌ ‌them‌ ‌to‌ ‌leads.‌ ‌

The‌ ‌content‌ ‌was not initially created with SEO in mind. Things like keyword research were hastily done or simply ignored altogether.

I had already completed extensive keyword research:

• Analyzing competitors best-performing pages
• Seed keyword to branch keyword analysis
• Keyword trend prediction analyses

And all the other possible methods for keyword research even down to obtaining obscure keywords from forums.

Content cannibalization

Content cannibalization was also another issue. Some pages were so similar they were effectively competing against one another on the SERP.

We had to effectively combine pages into one, this was another task I would delegate for our writers. 

The Roadmap to Becoming a Recognized Authority

The bulk of the work would fall into 2 categories on-page and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO would be all the changes possible on-page (on the site) and off-page would be our link-building campaign.

This is not an exhaustive list of all the areas we addressed for on-site changes, only a small selection of some big ones. 

Before‌ ‌and‌ ‌After‌ ‌Design

The existing web design I had to work with was too busy and had far too many options for people to work with.

There was also a lack of a clear path through the site that would lead to our desired goal:

A showroom visit booked.

New Look

Here you can see a cleaner, more modern, and simplified homepage with emphasis on the categories we wish to rank for.

A Beautiful Experience and a Slippery Slide

My ultimate goal was to collect more leads.

So this always took a front seat when I was in discussion with the developers on how to make the funnel so slippery, people would slide down the funnel, and book a call with our showroom with minimal friction.

Clicking that big juicy orange button and committing to the lead submission or call always had to be in the corner of the reader’s eye.

The site would need some development to make the experience of using it more seamless and intuitive.

I had already identified some areas where we needed to streamline and simplify the experience.

Nothing hurts your conversion rate more than a poor user experience and/or a slow site.

If a person finds your site unwieldy and difficult to navigate they will not expend the brain energy to figure it out.

They will simply click back to the SERP’s and find a site that makes their life easier.

Video

I had to produce a content strategy for Youtube.

Professional video editors would take the raw footage our sales team was producing and produce something that was ready to publish to youtube prior to vetting from our SEO experts.

I would then strategically place these videos within our articles and on the site in order to increase conversion rates.

These videos would also be used in email to bring visitors back to the site and entertain them as well as sparking their imagination.

Nobody Likes a Slow Site

Google takes page speed seriously and that’s because their research has shown them their users do too.

A single-second delay can reduce conversions by 7% and 40% of people will abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Some of the changes we made were as follows:

• Enabling caching
• Use of a CDN
• Removing unnecessary code
• Compressing images
• Combine background images into CSS sprites
• Minify JavaScript and CSS 

Seamless & Solid Site Architecture‌

We implemented changes to the site architecture that improved both functionalities and improved the UX (user experience).

We also had to make some changes to the informational architecture of the site so that it would be easier to read data in google analytics.

The pyramidal structure depicted above would allow us to pass SEO ‘juice’ to our ‘single stone’ pages which were our most valuable pages inside the category.

There is a fine balance in satisfying both UX and search engines, it requires extra care and attention.

On-Page SEO

Because of the diversity of the team and the other macro responsibilities I had such as managing the budget allocation and the team itself.

I hired some SEO experts to help plan and execute the huge list of on-page and off-page SEO requirements we had.

Here are some of the areas we worked on.

Scratching the Surface

‌EAT‌  (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)

We took specific measures to ensure that Google would see us as experts in the field of natural stone countertops.

We highlighted areas that proved the team at marble were indeed experts, such as our huge collection of natural stones, our fabricating premises, advanced machinery and over 24 years of experience.

The team at marble knew they were experts, but it was my job to prove to readers online AND Google…

That there could be no question that when it came to natural stone countertops the sourcing, machining, etching, and installing… Marble.com was the place to go.

Schema mark-up

I instructed my SEO team to add schema markup data to the site HTML so search engines could easily understand what types of stone, pseudo stone, etc we were selling.

This would allow the possibility of enriched search results.

The above examples are just scratching the surface (pun intended) of the monumental changes we made to the on-page SEO.

Content Planning for desired Keywords

Secondary Keywords

With the keyword research done and a solid list of keywords of both commercial and informational intent, I wanted to target.

I set meetings with the team of content writers so we could brainstorm types of content that would help potential customers with their queries as well as allow us to rank for said keywords.

One of the first problems I noticed was that people were searching for various types of stone and their aesthetics but the site currently did not have specific category pages or even individual pages that focused on these specific stone types.

By adding new categories we captured new keywords and thus new traffic.

Getting the ‘Edge’…

I also identified that many of our competitors were not taking measures to capitalize on search terms around ‘countertop edges’.

Marble.com had sophisticated machinery allowing them to craft various beautiful types of edges.

If we could create content around helping people choose the right ‘edging’ we could do 2 things.

1) Capture traffic around these search terms.

2) Start them thinking about adding a beautiful ‘edge’ detail to their countertops so that the sales team could add that to the order and increase AOV (average order value) once a lead was captured.

Content and the Buyer’s Journey

When I and the team were brainstorming content ideas around the keywords we wanted to rank for we always ensured that the content matched the buyers stage of awareness.

The top of funnel and middle of funnel content not only educated the reader on the query.

It also unhurriedly introduced the brand and positioned marble.com as a trusted expert with huge stone yards filled with beautiful and diverse stone with rapid turnaround times and top-level installation teams.

We also made sure that content towards the bottom of the funnel had a strong calls to action geared towards customers scheduling a visit to inspect the natural stone slabs.

For example queries such as ‘brown granite’ indicated a buyer as nearing the final stages of research and demonstrating an interest in buying vs learning.

Articles around this topic would push readers to come to our physical locations so we could demonstrate why marble.com would provide them with the best product.

Staying in trend

Different types of the natural stone cycle in and out of fashion.

Seeing as we were buying and selling natural stone we were well ahead of the curve for these cycles and got pretty good at predicting when a certain type of stone would come back into fashion.

We were able to capitalize on this with well-timed video content and blog posts.

Youtube

Natural stone is very visual. Each slab is quarried from a specific place and each slab is unique and different.

People like to buy stone countertops with their senses. Touch and sight, namely.

Creating high-quality detailed videos that praised and emphasized the beauty of natural stone helped us to get people from the site into the showroom.

All Kinds of Different Tools

I wanted marble.com to be a 1 stop shop and hub of resources.

A place where people would come back time and again whenever they needed access to the information around stone countertops.

Marble.com already had some impressive online tools that they had invested heavily in. Such as the 3D ‘edge’ viewer and room designer.

We just needed to maximize traffic to these tools by creating content around search phrases that indicate to a reader, they would benefit from using one of these tools.

Once a reader had invested time and energy using the tool they were more likely to invest more time in our other resources, gradually moving down the funnel.

We managed to get to position 2 for the granite countertops which as you can imagine is a competitive query.

Email Capture

We searched for more inventive ways of capturing email on the site by creating lead magnets that compelled people to exchange their email for content.

We then created email flows to nurture prospects and segmented users to ensure a clean and active list.

Backlinks…

With an interesting and informative content hub with articles ranging from buyers guides and trending news on the stone to youtube videos showing home transformations.

We were ready to start our link-building outreach campaign.

We filtered out websites in the home niche and made contact with the webmasters using compelling copy demonstrating that by linking to marble.com they would be linking to natural stone specialists.

We also searched for PR opportunities wherever possible and reached out to industry publications in the home niche offering our expertise.

The Results

I started working at marble.com in Q1 2017. It took me a few months to get the right team in place.

By the middle-end of Q2, we were actively working through our plan.

I started working at marble.com in Q1 2017. You can visibly see the impact above.

The above chart depicts how marble.com organic search volume went from 12,000 visitors per month to almost 400,00k visitors per month.

This was a culmination of everything mentioned above and more.

Thank You

For reading my story at marble.com and for putting up with my sneakily inserted puns.

I hope I have triggered some ideas for you to act upon within your own business or a business you help. If you have any questions at all. Please feel free to reach out to me.