Creative SEO Strategies Lead to Ringing Results
Impact Dialing, a company that offers auto dialer software, was built out of frustration, according to founder and CEO Michael Kaiser-Nyman. After struggling to find an affordable and efficient auto dialing system to help Equality California campaigners call voters, Kaiser-Nyman, a former political campaign volunteer, decided to build his own software.
He teamed up with an experienced Web coder, Brian Levine, and within five weeks, Impact Dialing was up and running. Boosting the San Francisco–based company's ranking on Google's search engine was the next challenge.
"Google doesn't want you to know how to make your site appear higher on its search rankings, so SEO is a bit of a black art," Kaiser-Nyman says. "We wanted to do it the right way and not waste time with companies that use "black hat" tricks, like spamming sites with low-cost links."
Kaiser-Nyman made a few attempts on his own, such as starting a blog for the site, but the readership was low and he was running out of ideas.
He hired an SEO consulting firm, Distilled, to analyze ImpactDialing.com, examine its competitors, and suggest strategies.
"Since Michael is a major player in his company, he needed solutions that wouldn't require a lot of man hours and had low barriers," recalls Benjamin Estes, an SEO consultant at Distilled. "We suggested that Michael capitalize on his skill set. He's a good writer and has a lot of knowledge about how to run a campaign. Providing valuable information will get people to come back to the site again and again."
Taking Distilled's advice, Kaiser-Nyman applied his knowledge of outbound marketing and fundraising to writing guest posts for other blogs as well as reaching out to publications to provide expert information about telemarketing systems and other topics.
He also used OpenSiteExplorer.com, a link analysis tool, to help him identify high-traffic Web sites and blogs that are likely to send readers to his site in return.
Within one month, Kaiser-Nyman started to see results. ImpactDialing.com jumped from page four to page two on Google under the keywords "power dialer" and "hosted predictive dialer." The Web site also appeared on page one for "outbound IVR system." In addition, the number of domains that link to ImpactDialing.com increased from 12 to 40.
ImpactDialing.com does not hold the same rankings on other search engines such as Yahoo! and Bing, but Kaiser-Nyman says he has only focused on Google's search results.
"It will take about six months before we can see the full effect, but we're really happy with the results so far," Kaiser-Nyman says.
The company does have accounts on both Twitter and Facebook, but it is a low priority for now.
"Our user base is small, so the chances of getting our tweets re-tweeted are low, but I'll eventually spend more time on it," he says.
Kaiser-Nyman also plans to continue working with Distilled on generating more traffic for his site.
"We're holding off…until we have a larger budget, but I'm interested in working with their PR specialists, who would look for opportunities to get stories written about our products and promote our Web site," he says.
Impact Dialing has even started to expand beyond politics.
"We've had a few dozen campaigns in the course of our one-year history, but it's hard to stay busy all year, so we're turning to the small business world as well," Kaiser-Nyman says. "It will be a slightly different world but very exciting."
The Payoff
Since partnering with Distilled, Impact Dialing has:
- shot up from page four to page one on Google under the keyword "outbound IVR system";
- jumped from page four to page two on Google with the keywords "power dialer" and "hosted predictive dialer";
- increased the number of domains that link to ImpactDialing.com from 12 to 40.