In the world of SEO, there are thousands of people blogging about what affects your website's standing in Google results page. Being a boutique Columbus web design firm, we read a handful of these SEO blogs every month, since we offer this service to our clients.

So when we read one recently that was a case study done by a small insurance agency. Here's the lowdown:

The problem

The Murray Group, a small insurance agency in Albany NY, had a small, 4-page website, with flat traffic on their website for 6-7 months. What they admittedly didn't know at the time, was they were setting up a case study in small business SEO. Those 6-7 months of flat traffic had been establishing a baseline to work from, and measure against.

When the marketing person, who had been frustrated by the lack of marketing budget, finally got some marketing dollars, the test began.

He had established that their website received about 90 visits a week. However, most of those visits were from customers looking for their address, directions to their office, or their contact information. They were able to determine what pages were visited by looking at their Google Analytics.

During the 7-month time period, they determined they received no new business from their website.

The plan

In the marketing person's enthusiasm, they decided to post 100 blogs in 100 days, with the theme being "Answering 100 Questions in 100 Days." Their approach was to do YouTube videos, opposed to written blog posts.

All the questions were asked by their clients, with a tweet, posted on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, asking:  “If you could only have one insurance question answered what would it be?”

With well over 100 responses, they had their list of questions to work from.

You can see one of their video posts below answering one of those questions. They're definitely nothing fancy, but evidently they worked well.

Once the video was done and embedded on their website (like it is above), he shared it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

Promoting the videos

Once the videos were in the works, they went about promoting them.

Of course, it's impossible for The Murray Group, or any small business, to compete with the behemoths of their respective industries. In their case, AllState, Nationwide, etc. spend hundreds of millions on marketing across the United States. So even folks in Albany N.Y., are subject to see search results from the big insurance companies if they tried to compete head-to-head.

How keywords work into the equation

This is where The Murray Group differentiated themselves from the big boys: long tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are phrases instead of single terms. For example, since The Murray Group wouldn't come up high in a search for "insurance" (especially compared to the big insurance companies), they opted for search terms like “When do I drop collision coverage?”

One would have to assume that the long-tail keywords they used we're pretty much the questions the videos answered.

There might not be the 100,000 searches a month for that phrase like there is for "car insurance," but it is the only way to compete in a crowded SEO landscape.

Bottom line numbers

As the author of the case study reports, the amount of business able to be tracked from this 100-day SEO effort was about $5,000 net revenue.

And of course, if those people who brought their new business stay with The Murray Group, those profits will obviously add up to much more over time.