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By Valentina Izzo

1 year ago

Check out our latest case study on local SEO and learn how SMA Marketing improved a client’s website ranking on Google with WordLift.

SMA Marketing is a search marketing agency based in Central Florida. It helps technology companies, startups and local businesses increase their visibility in search engines and connect with their audience online.

Ryan Shelley – Chief Growth Officer & Founder at SMA Marketing – will show you how he used structured data to boost the SEO.

In particular, in this SEO case study he explains how he improved the ranking of a client’s website in Google search by getting more qualified traffic.


When competing in a crowded and highly-competitive space, getting even the slightest advance can mean the difference between winning and losing. As an agency, we are always looking for ways to work smarter and gain an edge to help our clients thrive, no matter who they are competing against. When one of our clients wanted to establish themselves as a leader in the IT Coaching industry (in search results), we knew we had to leverage the power of structured data and semantic SEO to make them stand out from the crowd.

To help them establish a solid site structure, we began targeting core topics that needed to be covered. We leveraged search console, SEO research tools, and WordLift SEO Add-on for Google Sheets to help uncover ideas. From there, we grouped the concepts into semantically related clusters and began working on creating the content needed. This gave us the foundation to help establish the client as an authority in the space

Content alone would not give the client or us the results we were looking for. If we wanted to maximize the results of our work, we needed to leverage structured data and linked open data. This is really where WordLift helped us scale our process. 

Starting with the core concepts that our client was trying to rank for, we began to build out a knowledge base that was connected to the linked open web. In doing this, we helped Google better understand the context of our content. Doing this process manually is extremely time-consuming and requires some technical know-how. Thanks to the power of WordLift, this process can now be scaled with just a little bit of training. 

Having a solid knowledge graph that supports the content of the site is extremely powerful. Not only does it help with context, as I mentioned earlier, but it also helps with the site’s structure and indexing. 

The next step was to target rich feature opportunities with schema markup. There is no shortage of SEO plugins and tools today that can help with markup. Unfortunately, many of them send up, creating more of a mess than actually helping.

For this client, we wanted to target products, reviews, FAQs and videos. WordLift’s built in sync with schema allowed us to easily add the correct markup to the necessary pages. I don’t have to worry about someone messing up the JSON or forgetting to add in elements that are critical to proper optimization. 

To recap, the goal was to improve the organic visibility of a client in the IT Coaching industry. We leverage topic clustering and semantic SEO. We used WordLift for research as well as the implementation of the knowledge graph and schema makeup. So you’re probably wondering what has resulted from all this work. 

Over the course of the year, we saw a 289.65% increase in the number of clicks to the site. We also saw a 256.76% increase in impressions. This work also translated into our client earning multiple SERP features and 211.17% increase in the total number of keywords the site ranks for.

While this work took time to implement, WordLift helped to save us hours of additional work. As a result, we have a happy client and a process that is streamlined and very effective

Add structured data to your content without needing technical expertise and without much effort. Try WordLift and start boosting your SEO todayBook a demo!

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