How Zurich Increased Organic Traffic by 52% Since Partnering with Conductor

About Zurich

Headquarters

Schaumburg, IL

Company Size

10,000

Industry

Financial Services

Before leading SEO efforts for the Zurich North America digital marketing team, Kristi Dillman was already an experienced marketer. With a background in both strategic and digital marketing, Kristi took it upon herself to learn SEO best practices and optimize Zurich North America’s website . With plenty of opportunities to win and a cross-functional marketing team, all the Zurich team needed for success was a top-notch organic marketing platform—which they found in Conductor.

The Challenge

Before using Conductor, Zurich relied on various SEO tools and Google Analytics to handle their search engine optimization efforts. While these tools provided a level of basic support, Kristi found that the more she learned and developed her search strategy, the more time she had to spend on manual work to stitch together data due to a lack of holistic support within these tools.

Prior to implementing Conductor, Zurich did not have a technical crawling product within their SEO product set. Tasks—like ensuring all product pages had title tags and meta descriptions—had to be reviewed manually. They had no way of reporting on the performance of keyword groups or page groups without sophisticated excel formulas and data stitching, which meant it was very difficult to get a comprehensive view of their site’s overall health. Since each step of keyword research and content optimization process had to be done manually, Kristi had to dedicate countless hours each week pulling data and had very little time to get out of the weeds to focus on big-picture strategy for search. She also had no visibility of keyword market share.

Kristi knew she had to find a solution that would provide all of the organic marketing insights and functionality she needed. She reached out to an expert at Conductor to learn more about the platform. After participating in a few demos of our Enterprise SEO Platform, Zurich North America knew they were ready to take their search strategy to the next level by investing in Conductor.

With Conductor Workspaces, I can create reports customized for specific audiences. I wouldn’t be able to complete this level of reporting without Workspaces.

How Conductor Helped

As soon as Kristi and the marketing team started using Conductor, they knew they had unlocked a major opportunity to improve their organic marketing strategy at every level. Because Zurich makes sales through brokers rather than directly through their website, the marketing team’s SEO strategy is strongly focused on their product pages and content. These pages are extremely valuable because they help differentiate the business from competitors by showing key aspects of a product and what they do differently. It was, and still is, a top priority for the marketing team to ensure this content is highly visible to searchers.

With Conductor, the team was able to implement an effective data-driven approach to new content creation by conducting keyword research and creating content briefs based on their findings, all within the same platform. Now, many pages on Zurich’s website highlights information their audience is looking for, and it means they can win more Page 1 rankings on Google than ever before.

Thanks to Conductor, the Zurich team now completes tasks that used to take hours or even weeks when done manually in just a few minutes. Recurring tasks, like pulling website analytics, reviewing keyword groups, auditing their website, and ensuring the site follows Google best practices, have all been automated. Zurich’s organic traffic on certain product pages has increased as much as 800% since partnering with Conductor. Even pages on highly niche topics have gone from zero visits per month to 50+. Other product pages with more keyword targets and search volume have also seen significant increases since they were optimized.

These time-saving features have also made significant improvements to Zurich’s SEO reporting efforts. With Conductor, Kristi can review key sections and topics on her website on a regular cadence to see exactly which parts of her strategy are working and where there are opportunities to improve. In the past, Kristi had to pull every piece of data and create reports manually. Now, she can jump into the platform at any time and get a clear picture of her site’s performance with just a few clicks. By using Conductor’s Workspaces, Kristi has created many custom reports and can easily see which keywords have moved in rank, if Zurich’s market share has changed, and so much more by topic and/or business unit. Even better, she can easily share reports from the platform with other internal stakeholders at Zurich. Kristi is able to pull detailed reports to help inform her team on real-time results, while also providing a high-level view of performance data with executives. Conductor’s Workspaces make creating customizable reports a breeze, which means it’s easier than ever for Kristi to prove the value of SEO to each stakeholder at Zurich and get internal buy-in for each new project.

Conductor helps us address how to make our content more visible across search engines. The biggest benefit is how seamlessly it is able to attribute the impact of SEO.

The Results

When considering her biggest win in organic marketing, Kristi immediately identified the Programs product page improvements on the Zurich website. When performing an audit with Conductor, Kristi noticed that Zurich’s Programs pages weren’t showing up on Page 1 of the search results page for many key search phrases. This made it difficult for Zurich’s brokers, agents and customers to find them. With Conductor’s analysis capabilities, Kristi identified the problem quickly: many of the website’s naming conventions were too vague and therefore didn’t match the searchers intent, as well as pages being thin on content.

fThese pages were built around industry jargon like “policies”, “plan” or “coverage” and didn’t include essential terms their audience was searching for, like “insurance.” Through the use of Conductor, Kristi was able to identify title tags and headers that needed updates. In addition, pages were optimized to include FAQ content with targeted search terms and those directly related to customer and broker needs. This SEO work made an immediate and dramatic impact on the section’s performance.

Once the work was completed and high priority Program pages were fully optimized, Zurich saw a 52% increase in traffic, and visibility (Google impressions) on these pages doubled year over year.

While Zurich has achieved success on certain sections of the website, SEO work is never done, and the team continues to work on optimizations to win more Page 1 keywords and drive additional organic traffic.