How we helped MTD Products cut down the competition
Background
MTD Products manufactures and sells high performance lawn care products across the US and internationally. In anticipation of demand peaks in Spring / Summer 2020, MTD approached Tangible Value to help maximize visibility for their web properties in the Organic Search Channel.
This project was following a successful link building pilot, which MTD scaled to a full year link building campaign.
Challenge
MTD Products’ sub brands, Cub Cadet and Troy Bilt had decent visibility, ranking lower page 1 to page 2 for priority keywords, but didn’t dominate the top of page 1 as the brand deserved.
The challenge set forth was twofold:
- Achieve high page 1 rankings for a specific set of high-priority keywords
- Achieve this in a way that earned and maintained these rankings through Q2 and Q3, the peak seasonality of the year
Solution
To meet the challenge, Tangible Value employed a 12 month link building campaign, preceded by an On Page Audit for the pages we were charged with pushing further up page 1.
Results
In the screenshots below, you can see the position ranking trend for the priority keyword, “zero turn mowers,” which was pushed from lower page 1 of Google to high/middle page 1, where search listings are significantly more visible to users.
Content updates
We applied our standard On Page Audit to make sure the ranking URLs were at least optimized to meet that of top ranking competitors before moving on to the link building program.
The product category pages already ranking on MTD domains were optimized well by the MTD team, but we determined that many competitors had additional optimized content below the common product grid page layout. In collaboration with the MTD SEO team, our copywriters created original, SEO optimized content and implemented it to the product category page to match or exceed the presence of specific keywords seen in the ranking pages of top competitors.
Link building
With on-page optimization fine-tuned, we were cleared to start influencing page authority through the creation of high-quality, external backlinks to the priority pages we updated.
Tangible Value creates unique, relevant content and works with a network of publishers and webmasters to publish content that contains a backlink to the MTD pages we aimed to improve.
We scheduled our link building efforts to be front loaded in the beginning of 2020, allowing plenty of time for links to go live and search engines to appreciate the new links and improve rankings in time for peak seasonality in the spring.
We planned our campaign to place additional, but fewer links through the seasonal peaks to make sure we could not only push rankings up past the competition, but maintain those high rankings through the period of peak demand.
Tangible Value was an integral part of our SEO strategy for Cub Cadet in 2020. We were able to increase the visibility of our pages in highly competitive categories at peak seasonality, outranking competitors and accruing record-breaking organic traffic and revenue. We look forward to working with Tangible Value to implement an even more aggressive backlink strategy over the next year.
Michael Duncan
SEO Specialist, MTD Products Inc
Closing thoughts
MTD Products was an exceptional but not uncommon case of winning SEO results with On Page optimization followed by targeted high quality link building.
The specific win and differentiating feature of this case study is Tangible Value’s ability to craft a program that meets the specific needs of the business, in this case the need to increase rankings for specific keywords on a specific timeline.
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