SEO On The Fly: Argopoint’s Story

If your company isn’t doing something about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) right now, you’re falling behind. It doesn’t matter if you are B2B or B2C, there are people out there searching for the services or products you offer on Google and if your company isn’t on the first page, you are literally mailing a neatly gift-wrapped package filled with pre-qualified leads to your more Internet-savvy competitors every day. Let’s be honest, how many times do you go past the first results page in any search engine? The algorithms in search engines present results to you in order of website relevance, and relevance means SEO. This is especially important if you operate within a small, niche market, as people looking for you will be typing very industry-specific keywords into whatever search engine they are using. Many companies have realized the importance of SEO and are scrambling to get the most out of specific organic search. Such is the case of Argopoint, a small, boutique-style legal management consulting firm based in Boston, MA.

             Argopoint focuses on helping Fortune 500 companies overcome the challenges of managing corporate legal departments efficiently. Argopoint fills the profile of a very successful company within their industry who realized that, when searching for the specific services they offer, they weren’t coming up on Google’s first results page. Search engines aren’t smart enough to know how good your company’s services and products actually are in relation to your competitors, at least not yet. So, when Argopoint realized that they were giving up valuable results-page real estate to their competitors, they went straight to the root of the problem to fix it.

            “I was literally handed a book called SEO for Dummies and told to read it and implement.” These were the words from a good friend of mine from Tufts, Josh Youner, who had just gotten a summer internship at Argopoint and was immediately assigned the task of boosting their website’s SEO, along with another intern. Youner and his team were put in charge of improving SEO from scratch, a pretty daunting challenge for anyone, intern or not. No pressure, guys! No pressure whatsoever. So when I recently spoke to Youner about his work at Argopoint, I was impressed with the work they had done and how much they had learned in so little time.

            Youner and his team are still hard at work improving and implementing Argopoint’s SEO strategy, but they have made significant progress. They started out by focusing on keywords, title tags, and meta descriptions. They quickly realized the site was not optimized for any keywords besides the firm’s name, so keyword density was put as one of the top priorities. In order to change this, the intern team went through the front end of the site and eliminated superfluous language and inserted hard-hitting keywords. They found significant progress in their Services section, where they get the most hits. According to Youner, the page that benefited the most was their High Impact Legal Benchmarking page, which prior to their work had very little focus in the content. By focusing on keywords such as ‘legal’, ‘benchmarking’, and ‘corporate legal departments’, they optimized the page’s content and now have keyword densities of 3-6% across the site, according to their Google Analytics.

            URL names were also a priority. They realized they had many random URLs, since the platform the company was using to create URLs created them based directly from the page names they used to edit the site. As such, they had URLs called /Services-2.html and /Benchmarking.html. These URLs helped them figure out what each page was, but did not help when someone was searching for them. To fix this, they inserted keywords into their URLs and made them more intuitive. For example, now their URLs include:

http://argopoint.com/legal_management_consultants/OurExpertise/Services/LegalServicesStrategicSourcing.html

This was a simple fix with a significant impact. In combination with other strategies, this moved the site up from the bottom of page 3 to the middle of page 2 on Google when searching for ‘legal management consulting’. A page and a half? That’s one big jump in SEO.

            Of course, I cannot publish the entirety of Argopoint’s SEO strategy, but this is a small sample of the work they are currently doing to optimize their website. When asked for tips his team would give to someone new to search engine optimization, however, Youner did give me some advice that I’m sure many would appreciate. “The most important thing is to be tenacious. There are so many ways to improve your site’s SEO, it’s just about finding out how to do this and implementing the right changes”, he said. One of their biggest roadblocks was agreeing on which keywords to optimize for and editing the site page-by page, one at a time, which is definitely not an easy task. Another important piece of advice the Argopoint SEO team told me was to be wary about buying services that claim to improve SEO. Based on their research, most of these are apparently scams. Youner said it takes intimate knowledge of the firm and its services to vastly improve SEO, particularly for a boutique firm in a niche market like Argopoint, so you are probably best suited doing it yourself.

            Argopoint is a great example of a company implementing SEO on the fly, and although their work is not done, they are an exemplar to follow for those companies who have yet to realize the potential of SEO. It’s definitely a race to the top (of Google’s search results, that is), and the earlier you start, the greater advantage you will have. You can check out more information on Argopoint and the services they offer at their website below:

http://www.argopoint.com/

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