Professional Services Firm Reinforces Expertise with Site Migration and Wikipedia

Outcome

The website was migrated to new content management platform with an increase in qualified search traffic and expertise marketing earned them a Wikipedia page that boosts perception of them as the leader in their industry.

Background

The company is a business-to-business services firm that provides consulting to a niche global industry with a few dozen major players that service billions of consumers. The company pioneered a framework for providing services to this industry and had operated for two decades without competitors. This changed within the previous five years before working with us.

Several competitors had taken our client’s process and modified it. They launched new businesses that were servicing the same clients and often doing this for much less. Our client saw themselves losing projects to competitors for the first time in their company history.

Our client had two major goals from hiring us:

• Get their website onto a professional platform that could be updated with more content regularly
• Do something that would establish the company as the leader in the industry

Process

We discussed the situation with the client and broke the project out into two phases:

• Migrate the website
• Establish expertise

Migrate the website

The website builder that hosted that client’s site had limited functionality that caused issues such as:

• Broken image sliders
• Steep learning curve for non-technical authors
• Inability to fully control search engine optimization
• Inability to access the file structure of the website
• Slow load times

We agreed to move the client from the web hosting builder to WordPress which was a clear choice due to its blend of ease-of-use and customization.

We led the migration of the website, ensuring the technical steps were followed properly and managed the design, development and content work.

The migration was a copy of their existing website with cleanup of design and a lot of technical optimization work. The design work focused on fixing broken image sliders, formatting text and whitespace properly and making the site easier to use on phones.

They didn’t show up for relevant searches of their services despite being the leader in their industry. This was due to poor optimization of their website and lack of focus on marketing the company.

We researched profitable search phrases and optimized the website during migration to WordPress. This caused search traffic to double over the six months after launch.

Establish expertise

A typical expertise marketing campaign includes the following:

• Develop content that showcases subject matter expertise
• Publish content on website
• Get content in front of target market usually through outreach and targeted advertising

Due to our client’s busy schedule, the client was unable to commit to developing the amount of content that would go into an expertise marketing campaign. In some situations you can take the burden off of the main subject matter expert by having writers create drafts and letting the expert function as an editor. However, the client’s industry was so niche that all content had to be created by a true expert. A writer would not be able to create anything of value and it was impossible finding another expert in the field who was not a competitor.

Since developing on-site content was impossible we decided to focus on developing off-site content. We thought about how we could demonstrate expertise without relying on the client to provide content. This is how we settled on the idea of “creating” a Wikipedia page.

Wikipedia is a heavily moderated website where new pages must be noteworthy enough to be allowed on the site. There must be multiple sources backing up information that’s entered. You can’t create a page that’s all fluff and no substance or it will get rejected.

We weren’t gaming the system or cheating when we created the Wikipedia page. The client we represented did create a first-of-its-kind process in their industry. They won awards and were featured in publications. They are the real deal.

It took about three months to get the client listed on Wikipedia due to Wikipedia’s approval process. Here was the general order of events:

• Gather sources proving the client’s expertise and noteworthiness.
• Identify the most reliable and high authority sources.
• Write a page draft that is heavily referenced by these sources.
• Submit the page draft on Wikipedia
• Make edits to the page when it is rejected
• Resubmit the page
• After approval, notify the client

The Wikipedia page allowed the client to rank highly for industry terms. It increased the perception of them as a leader in the field as their competitors are unable to get Wikipedia pages.

A bonus was getting a large knowledge graph on Google search results for relevant phrases due to the information sync between Wikipedia and Google.

Conclusion

We helped the client migrate to a better foundation for online marketing while improving their relevant search rankings and securing a Wikipedia page to reinforce their expertise in the industry.