Background
Victorious is a top-ranked, award-winning SEO agency in the U.S. Though originally begun as a full-service digital marketing agency, they shifted to an SEO focus in 2016. With clients including Wayfair, Groupon and GE, Victorious came to Solid Digital to build a website worthy of their top-tier status.
Goals
With the added offerings of digital marketing services, such as PPC and content, along with an imminent software launch for their clientele, Victorious needed to ensure their website represented their expertise and methodology and that it could expand with them. To that end, they wanted their site to:
- Accurately represent their brand;
- Be easy to manage and update;
- Better showcase their process for each client; and
- Differentiate their culture for future hires.
With the old site, Victorious was consistently optimizing the site for SEO, and the complex backend slowed down their changes and lost out on flexibility. And with a highly methodical and customized approach to each of their clients, the new site had to reflect their biggest value: “Give A Sh*t.” Showing off their tailored processes and a company culture of diligence and care with a website that was future-proofed and expandable was the best step forward for the SEO giants at Victorious.
Approach
With a mind set on expansion for implementation, Victorious eyed Solid Digital’s own user-centered sales process, customer journeys, and marketing pathways. Solid approached each of Victorious’ objectives starting from the ground up.
By leveraging Elementor as the page builder (rather than WordPress’ Gutenberg editor), they allowed Victorious to streamline updates through global changes. This future-proofing and expandability was designed to allow Victorious to confidently offer more services to accommodate additional traffic.
Together, working closely with their designer to make the most of their existing branding and still make the site fresh, we updated the look and feel of the website to better match Victorious’ brand and differentiate them from other SEO competitors through highlighting the culture, staff, and services. In addition, we implemented more fitting photography throughout the site to show their culture and included real testimonials / reviews that speak to their values
In tandem with the look and feel of the new site, Solid worked on improving the failing mobile page speed scores as well as the user experience to increase engagement and lead them down the right user pathway.
Because Victorious produces content in a consistent (read: prolific) manner, the SEO they have set up on the site is incredible. In addition, their numerous U.S. Search awards and Clutch awards have them sitting in high-ranking positions beyond SERPs.
Next, Solid Digital’s team had to ensure these proof points were highlighted immediately at the top of the page—and needed to clearly set Victorious apart from competition through their culture and success.
Process
Since both Solid Digital and Victorious are agencies, the partnership was highly collaborative. Solid Digital and Victorious had plenty of cross-over and traded knowledge and experience of both the SEO and the digital marketing landscapes. This knowledge-sharing required flexibility and a steady building of trust. For example, Victorious was allotted additional time to write their own content and complete their SEO in-house. Throughout the website redesign, Solid Digital kept Victorious’ SEO standings in mind. In order to maintain the SEO rankings that Victorious had carved out, Solid’s team minimized the number of redirects and didn’t disrupt the relative URLs. Another piece that Solid paid attention to was the validators on the page—the proof that Victorious successfully does what they say they’re going to. From stats to case studies to reviews, Solid highlighted exactly why they are Victorious.
Look and Feel
Victorious needed to refresh their brand while keeping the general aesthetic they’ve developed, including their core colors and typography. In close collaboration with Victorious’ visual designer, Solid Digital created base templates for Victorious’ team to expand upon. Creating a transformative style guided the focus toward stats, results, and awards. The logo mark (a V-shaped flame) became part of the background elements. Additionally, buttons were changed to yellow for all the primary CTAs and internal links were red, (using subliminal linking techniques to help steer users where they need to go).
"I've found Solid Digital easy to work with and responsive to feedback. Diana is always extremely prompt in responding to our requests and transparent on timelines."
Challenges
With a well-established client that came with a large amount of content, every one of Victorious’ blog posts needed to remain intact. Though the backend was filled with custom code, styles, and elements within the content, Solid Digital managed to accommodate all of their customizations post-migration, so the new look and feel could have the same (but better) functionality. For example, the Recommended Reading sections or tables and equations within custom blocks created by Victorious still fit within the new style the teams mapped out together. Victorious’ team was highly visual, so the teams worked together on the site in real time. Training for the website management began earlier so Victorious’ team could feel more comfortable working in the backend. Because both teams had a strong background in SEO and digital marketing, they both learned efficiencies from the other and ultimately learned that they would be stronger together when they built a working relationship on trust.
"Collaboration with Derek and the rest of the team contributed to the project's success and provided a highly rewarding experience!"
Results
Victorious is not a one-off keyword research or competitive analysis company. Rather, they look for the bigger picture and determine the best steps for a company to take to improve its SEO with search-first strategies and exceptional results. Now, with the new site, users can see what it’s like to work with Victorious. The page visualizations were workshopped together to better portray the story of Victorious and why they are such an awarded company. Victorious loves the new website and before launch had already begun making lists of all they can do with the new scalable site—particularly around their expansion of service offerings and audiences. Solid Digital knew Victorious needed a site that could keep up with their pace—and focused much of their energies on its complicated taxonomies through pre-built templates and interconnected (global) changes through Elementor. The increased functionality of the backend also allows Victorious to implement even more KPI tracking for leads, conversion rates, organic traffic and far more. With the new site, there are virtually unlimited possibilities for tracking. The Solid Digital team also kept a focus on page speed and brought failing mobile scores to an average closer to 80 – a huge and impactful feat. Both teams came to the table with plenty of expertise—which will now allow Victorious to level up their marketing website with better usability and clearer user pathways. The tricky algorithm of success in this project stemmed from developing trust, first with partners and next, with clients.
