HMD TRUCKING
We received a request from HMD Trucking to attract organic traffic of truck drivers with at least one year of experience. The task was to draw drivers to the website for subsequent employment at HMD. The company had a landing page, which is where we started.
After some time, the principle and strategy of HMD Trucking changed. We were presented with a new, global task. The company’s request expanded from needing drivers to attracting clients for all their businesses – trucking, brokerage services, and factoring. For all these directions, organic leads were needed. All of this led to plans to become a major logistics company in the United States.
We had another task – to create a strategy for promoting the vast array of the company’s services. Together with the client we decided to develop a single website for all services, as SEO of one website is more profitable than SEO of separate websites for each area.
From the landing page, we were to grow into a multilingual, multi-brand site with a large service structure and a blog for all these directions. The challenge was to attract different target audiences to one site.
Solution
The work was divided into two directions: maintaining the original goal of driving truck driver traffic to the landing page while simultaneously creating a strategy for the global task of consolidating the company’s directions.
Before the emergence of the global task, we focused on the landing page and blog management. Our plan was to add driver job pages and reach the top of Google for “truck driver jobs” in the US.
We planned a website structure that includes individual vacancy pages and regional job pages to gather traffic across all search query clusters. We conducted research to identify topics of interest to experienced transportation drivers. We started writing blog posts on these topics, creating videos to attract traffic from YouTube, and distributed content on social networks.
We also tried Google Ads and Bing Ads to attract traffic through “trucking job” and “truck driving jobs” queries to the landing page. The cost was high on Google Ads and quite low on Bing Ads; our goal was to test the quality of the leads.
Due to the fact that we had already done a lot of promotion and strategy planning work for the project, the company realized that they could delegate management tasks to us. We were likewise delegated the SEO of a factoring company and a restaurant, which were also owned by HMD.
After the company’s strategy and goals changed, our task significantly expanded. Of course, such a large project started with research. For the future global site with multiple service types, we needed to collect search queries, think through the structure, and how the interaction of all directions would work and how several types of businesses would coexist on one site. We started to calculate how such a project would be technically implemented. We conducted an analysis from the perspective of user convenience and their movement between sections. Also understanding that several service directions could be of interest to the same site audience, we had to think about how to clearly link all sections for the user. We have scheduled writing for all pages and directions.
From an SEO perspective, we needed to think about what budget we needed for links and how to distribute it properly. Our goal was to effectively distribute the amount allocated for SEO of all areas and get an even result for them.
While the site, technical specifications and texts were being developed, we started to improve the link metrics of the current site in advance. We also started collecting topics and preparing a content plan for the blog, which would include articles on all services for the new site.
Crucial Moment
The first key moment was conducting detailed research to build the project’s strategy and structure of the new site. This involved drafting a plan for management, marketing, SEO, and content creation.
The second point was our decision to proactively start building links for a strong launch of the new global site.
Result
Before the emergence of the global task, we tested running advertisements. The results from Google Ads were poor. We found that a very high budget was needed to appear for all the job queries. Most of those who came from the ads did not meet the company’s requirements regarding work experience. And from Bing Ads, the leads were of low quality.
In the early stages, we achieved good results through the blog. All articles rank well and are at the top. The site brings in more than 10,000 unique visitors a month thanks to the blog, and these visitors convert into drivers.
Regarding the work on the global project — a new site was launched. Thanks to good link metrics, within two months, it started generating conversions from the job pages. The site also began generating leads for transportation, factoring, and brokerage services. The company reached the TOP10 in search results for highly competitive queries. The site’s traffic doubled.
The growth process in organic search continues. The case will be updated.