The power of AI rankings!
Putting a local bespoke tailor shop on the ChatGPT map, with style!⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“We are very happy. They are easy to communicate with and always looking for improvements.“
~ Sean H., Sew Generously Bespoke.
Business Summary
Sew Generously Bespoke (SGB) provide what are possibly the finest bespoke suits in Washington State. They guide their customers through a creative, high-touch, styling experience. From the moment we started working with this client, we knew they were on a different level, so we needed to match our services to their ambitions. They’ve shown exellence in their own field, as well as great patience that can be expected from master craftsmen who know from experience that quality work always takes time.
Located in Pioneer Square, Seattle, we invite everyone to step into their shop to experience a creative, collaborative process as unique as each of us is. Their business has access to the most exclusive fabrics in the world from mills in Italy and the UK.
This client put a lot of faith in us and we knew it would take hard work and dilligence to justify that level of trust. So we are proud to create this report detailing what we did to help them succeed and get discovered by as many qualified leads as possible – some of whom found their brand through ChatGPT!
THE CHALLENGES
Sew Generously Bespoke (SGB) is a local business with just one location in Seattle (for now).
SGB comprises of a small team of extremely skilled and dilligent specialists. The designation “specialists” is meant to distinguish them from “generalists”. Make no mistake, as every small business owner knows, it’s often necessary for a specialist to cover many positions (account management, customer service, sales, marketing, website maintenance) but that doesn’t make them apt generalists. In fact, more often than not, it just makes entrepreneurs and business owners exhausted and frustrated.
Luckily, SGB is driven by a higher purpose, and that means a lot because we have come to learn that many of our values are in alignment which removes a lot of friction in communications and work organization. In other words: we were on the same page from the get-go.
As they’re not a large company, they didn’t boast an exceptionally large marketing budget but they are doing more than good work and willing to reinvest their profits in their business when they experience an uptick. That alone is enough for us to feel like our work is valued and trusted!
The campaign started with a focus on examining PPC potential in this niche (Meta Ads and Google Ads), and once those campaigns were thoroughly analyzed and planned out, the main brainpower of our team had almost entirely shifted to SEO and started making quick, small, but significant changes early on.
The challenges we were facing came in several different shades:
The website was relatively new; it was created in 2021.
The owners have been burnt in the past, having bad experiences with some of their previous advertising providers.
The client had 2 separate Google Ads accounts and were paying on both of them. In all, their cost per lead was ~$3000 at the time they were working with their previous provider.
Their ideal customers are few and far between. The worsening economic situation threatens to further thin out their potential lead base, since their high level of work requires a hefty financial investment.
The events that their business depends on have been slashed significantly due to the pandemic.
The pandemic had also affected materials trade and an international price spike in labor, manufacture and transport.
THE PROCESS
In October 2022, at the start of the campaign, we introduced the client to their designated Project Owner to discuss business priorities and timelines for each segment of SEO.
Starting November 2022, our PPC team had finally initiated the new PPC campaigns on the Google Ads account and Meta Ads.
We started with onboarding and setting up all of the necessary conversion tracking.
- Month 1 – October:
- Initial keyword research in month one
- On-Page SEO and updates on top level pages
- Fixing internal linking and navigation + menus
- Tech audit and fixes.
- Google Ads account consolidation and analyses.
- Meta Ads planning.
- Month 2 – November:
- Content optimization (on-page work)
- Local SEO:
- NAP consistency
- Work on optimizing their Google Profile (GBP)
- Submitting to local aggregator
- Link audit and prep for off-page SEO campaign
- PPC Campaigns starting
- Month 3 – December:
- Off-page SEO with a focus on local
- On-page SEO (new pages and tweaking existing pages)
- Optimizing PPC campaigns.
Throughout the first 3 months, conversion optimization was performed along the way (we improved the appointment booking process and make it quick & easy).
Both the Google Ads and Meta Ads campaigns saw multiple breaks throughout the years for the purpose of reducing and redirecting the budget to SEO. Campaigns are easy enough to pause and unpause, so we chose to wait until the client was comfortable continuing.
SOLUTION & STRATEGY
Choosing the correct strategy depends mostly on 3 factors:
- The type of problems uncovered in the site audits
- The client’s business niche
- The available budget
The client needed quick wins so we chose to combine Social and Search PPC ads with SEO, which provided them with enough business relatively early on to warrant continuing investment in long-term SEO.
At the time the client approached us, they were already leveraging Google Ads themselves and they wanted to rank for “seattle custom suits”, “seattle tailor”, “custom tailor”. However, there were problems here.
As stated under “Challenges”: The client had 2 separate Google Ads accounts and were paying on both of them. In all, their cost per lead was ~$3000 at the time they were working with their previous provider.
Consolidating these accounts was a priority for their Google Ads. At the same time, we were having regular meetings asking for feedback to the Facebook Ads creatives and content to be served in the ads.
These were very useful sessions for us, as the client provided all the media we needed and answers to crucial questions during the audience tailoring process.
Pro Tip:
The best way to approach a client who is on their toes and distrustful of marketing companies due to bad past experience is to:
- (1) communicate with absolute clarity and more often – frequently ask for feedback if they are able and have time to provide it,
- (2) set realistic expectations and precise KPI goals (as much as possible), and
- (3) be very granular and specific about your strategy and timeline – respect the timeline, even if you have to be very conservative about it.
Not Everything Went Smoothly!
- We had to test 5-6 different audiences in Meta Ads in order to find out which ones are the golden geese.
- We started off with testing an awareness campaign first because it was cheaper and it got the client a lot of non-qualified leads. This campaign had given us enough data for future campaigns which were more expensive and needed to be of higher quality from the get-go.
- The client hadn’t invested much in SEO before, so there was a lot of fixes to be implemented on the technical and content side. There was also no blog or well-developed informational section at the time to scoop up informational queries.
- More problems piled up on the already long list of challenges mentioned in the Challenges section above.
The Logic Inbound PPC team worked meticulously on researching competitors, keywords, and audiences. We also learned a lot about this niche thanks to the amazing communication with the client.
After tweaking the bidding strategy to match the available budget, the client was patient with seeing the campaign come together and acquiring the necessary data which was crucial for us to stabilize performance for the long-term.
Optimizing For Bing
Once we’ve covered all of the basic SEO stuff, it was time to ensure we’re ranking on Bing as well. Why?
ChatGPT uses Bing by default when searching for answers in real time. So most of our efforts to be omnipresent and consistent across the web have served as a solid foundation for Bing rankings.
Bing search engine factors in almost all of the standard stuff you might think about when talking about Google ranking factors. But how it weighs the importance of each ranking factor – that’s a whole different story.
You can find out more about optimizing for Bing in our blog covering this topic.
RESULTS
Rankings have started to experience a significant uptick by the end of the first 3 months of work. In the graphs below, you can see data for Oragnic Search, Paid Search and Social channels.
Organic Search Channel Data (Google Analytics)
Paid Search Channel Data (Google Analytics)
Social Channel Data (Google Analytics)
Organic Rankings & Link Profile (2-year data)
We have mostly achieved our goals, apart from having to pause the PPC campaigns several times due to the client’s wish to adjust their business practices. After the short breaks, we continued normally and now the client has expanded their offer into a more granular set of services, in order to serve their customers as best as possible.
Link Profile (referring domains)
Organic Search Traffic Data
⚠️ Ranking in ChatGPT ⚠️
On Dec 13th the client reported that one of their customers found them on ChatGPT. Their query included “high end tailor”, and Sew Generously was the first website that appeared in the answer. This particular customer ended up spending 3x more budget than the average customer, with a schedule for a second suit to be tailored in the same price range. All thanks to ChatGPT!
CONCLUSION
The most important takeaway from this campaign is that with enough patience, and never relying on a single channel, it’s very possible to achieve consistent long-term results when there is built-up trust and high quality work being done on both ends.
The point of contact was present each week for the weekly reporting and efficient collaboration on calls – That person was dedicated specifically to marketing projects, so they could achieve high focus on (1) learning from us and (2) delivering everything we needed in a timely manner, whether it was confirmation, access, data, or business and niche details.
OpenAI has created a whole new world of user acquisition and it will be interesting to see all the ways businesses could leverage the tool indirectly. Ranking in ChatGPT is going to be a new and consistent goal for us, whenever it makes sense for the client and their niche.
We’re ecstatic to show you all the ways how we can grow your business! Contact us to obtain a free report.
Call us at: (206) 800-7756 or, email vlad (at) logicinbound.com to get started today!