increase awareness and inbound tourism from the US and Europe to Panama

The Challenge of of Startup Growth

What’s good for the user is good for search. The biggest challenge of the SEO audit for On One Studios (and all companies) is maintaining a customer-focused approach when optimizing.

Every action in the audit must answer the question: how does this help the user on your website? Each tweak needed to embody the core drive of the company.

We came up with a human-centric SEO strategy to guide my approach. The web audit was designed to address three critical issues:

Understanding the company’s core value proposition and drive.

Great tactics mean nothing without a proper guiding strategy. Before I started any optimization, I spoke with management on what constituted the company’s core drives. By understanding their unique selling proposition, I could write copy that reflected their goals.

Addressing website architecture problems with user-centric best practices.

The website needed to make sense to customers. From URL structure to homepage navigation, I needed to make sure each click on the website made it easy to get to a sale.

Identify competitor SEO strategies to implement off-page SEO tactics.

A key pillar of getting a site to rank is the number of backlinks pointing to it. I needed to create a comprehensive, white hat backlink strategy to boost the site’s domain authority. By looking at who our competitors were linked (and linking to), I got a sense of the types of backlinks I was looking for.

The Canadian tax industry is very competitive. TurboTax and H&R Block are the giants in the space. SimpleTax came along with any innovatively easy product and fun product that challenged the status quo. The brought fun to a stale space. My job was to efficiently bring in new customers to simpletax.ca through primarily paid search, and assisted with paid social activities. It was very important the message was 'on brand' which had a more 'fun' approach than the competitors. We also had tight CPA requirements as the payment model was a 'pay what you want' or donation model.

Imperial Tea is a premium tea company started almost 30 years ago, and family run. As a family run business, Imperial Tea has acquired a very loyal community of fans and customers. True tea connoisseurs shop at Imperial Tea, in part for the premium quality they offer, but also to continue connecting with the founders that lead tea tasting sessions and education. The entire Imperial Tea experience is unique. While the majority of their sales have been generated by their tea house in San Francisco, they have been trying to expand their online stores sales.

When Imperial Tea reached out to us, they were looking for a team of marketers that truly understand the boutique nature of their business. Unlike mainstream tea companies, Imperial Tea’s social media content had to lead with education in order to continue offering the same quality of service to their existing audience, while growing their community of premium tea lovers.