Bullhorn Dominates SEO and Achieves Paid Search Profitability through Partnership with Synapse SEM
Overview
Company:
Bullhorn, Inc.
www.bullhorn.com
Industry:
Recruitment & Staffing Software
Headquarters:
Boston, MA
Bullhorn is the #1 recruitment software company in the world, handling over one billion transactions each month and over $100 billion in revenue to date. Despite their size and credibility in the industry, Bullhorn had limited organic visibility on non-branded high priority keyword phrases, often ranking on the third page of search results or worse in its three top markets: the US, the UK and Australia. Bullhorn was missing a significant opportunity to drive leads and acquire new customers through SEO and paid search advertising.
Testimonial
“In addition to restoring our SEO rankings and traffic and efficiently growing our paid search presence, Synapse SEM has consistently demonstrated their commitment to our growth strategy by proactively identifying new opportunities and other areas of untapped potential. With exceptional data analysis skills, coupled with a strong foundation in statistics and sound knowledge of the SEM industry, Synapse SEM has proven to be the right partner for our company. Their insights, attention to detail and rapid response times have made them a pleasure to work with. I highly recommend Synapse SEM to any company interested in taking their digital marketing efforts to the next level.”
– Doug Ellinger, Sr. Director Marketing, Bullhorn
Solutions
Keyword Set: Synapse overhauled the client’s targeted SEO keyword set and identified terms that were likely to maximize lead volume based on relevance, search volume, and historical paid search conversion data.
Content and On-Page Factors: Synapse performed a content gap analysis to ensure that all high priority terms were represented with relevant inner pages on a 1:1 basis. Content and on-page recommendations were delivered for each of these pages.
Technical Health: A full technical review of the site was performed which identified a temporary redirect on the homepage, duplicate content issues, site load time issues, and numerous broken links. Synapse collaborated with the Bullhorn technical team to ensure these issues were resolved correctly and promptly.
Link Profile: Synapse examined Bullhorn’s linking profile and determined that previous SEO efforts had led to an abundance of disreputable back links. Based on this analysis it was determined that Bullhorn’s site was likely subject to manual linking penalties. Synapse launched an effort to review all of Bullhorn’s backlinks to identify any links that violated Google Webmaster Guidelines. Synapse worked with Bullhorn to cleanse its linking profile by requesting problematic links be removed and by utilizing Google’s link disavow tool.
SEO Results
Following the completion of our on-page, technical, and link profile optimizations, Bullhorn’s results improved significantly in the following areas:
- Rankings:
- The percentage of targeted keywords ranking on the first page of Google increased by 80%, 53%, and 56% across the US, UK, and Australia, respectively.
- 100% of the client’s top ten highest priority keywords achieved first page visibility across Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
- Traffic: Unique SEO visitors increased by 40%
- Leads: Organic lead volume increased by 134%
Paid Search Solutions
After running several unprofitable attempts at paid search advertising over the last several years, Bullhorn recruited Synapse to restructure and manage their PPC campaigns. Synapse had three months to prove the effort was ROI positive.
Paid Search Solutions:
- Keyword Set: The keyword set was scrubbed to include only top performers based on historical data.
- Ad Copy: Ad copy was optimized to better qualify traffic based on target market (client only sells to recruiting firms and not corporate recruiters). Ads were also differentiated by focusing on key product benefits.
- Targeting: Campaigns were opted out of Partner Networks on Google and Bing due to poor performance. Ads were also suspended on mobile devices based on poor past results.
- Landing Pages: Custom landing pages were designed to improve conversion rate and Quality Score and better funnel users into completing either a demo request or content download.
Paid Search Results
After running several unprofitable attempts at paid search advertising over the last several years, Bullhorn recruited Synapse to restructure and manage their PPC campaigns. Synapse had three months to prove the effort was ROI positive.
Paid Search Solutions:
- Keyword Set: The keyword set was scrubbed to include only top performers based on historical data.
- Ad Copy: Ad copy was optimized to better qualify traffic based on target market (client only sells to recruiting firms and not corporate recruiters). Ads were also differentiated by focusing on key product benefits.
- Targeting: Campaigns were opted out of Partner Networks on Google and Bing due to poor performance. Ads were also suspended on mobile devices based on poor past results.
- Landing Pages: Custom landing pages were designed to improve conversion rate and Quality Score and better funnel users into completing either a demo request or content download.
Upon restructuring the paid search campaigns and optimizing the account for three months, Bullhorn saw the following improvements:
- Lead Volume:
- Leads increased 81% over the first 3 months of our program, and by 125% over the first 6 months of our
CPL:
- CPL fell 58% to $75 over the first three months of our program.
- At $75, CPL was 50% lower than Bullhorn’s goal of $150.
ROI:
- Based on Bullhorn’s 3 month evaluation, the program proved to yield a strongly positive ROI of 1.83.
- Long Term: Based on the positive results of the program, budget was doubled to maximize visibility and leads. While doubling budget, Synapse was able to maintain CPL.
