Gorillas, More Red Wine and An Ecommerce Tip You Can’t Afford to Miss

We’re covering three topics today:

1. Gorillas: How one small accounting firm in Bolton (UK) is driving £405,000 ($484,000) in organic search traffic every year.
2. Part two of my evil plan to take over the e-commerce wine industry.
3. A tip that every e-commerce store owner needs to read.

I love seeing great SEO in boring industries.

And what can be more boring than accounting? By the way, I’m allowed to say that because I have an accounting degree.

The folks at Gorilla—a firm for small businesses and contractors—have done a great job.

This traffic spike isn’t an accident. Let’s take a closer look at some of the high-value terms Gorilla ranks for.

These terms are so strong for intent.

They’ve worked out that there is a huge labour force of contractors and small businesses that do have a clue about accounting and are turning to search engines for answers.

The salary vs dividend calculator is a brilliant term. It answers a direct and important question:

How shall I pay myself?

There are various factors to consider and it makes sense to speak with an accountant.

I’m sure many users landing on this page think “I don’t want to deal with this” and get in touch with Gorilla.

Here is the calculator:

I love how they’re converting leads here:

✅   It clearly explains who the service helps.

✅   There are different calls to action depending on where the user is in their journey.

✅   Pricing information

At Kalium, we use SEO tools a lot to help our clients rank and it’s a winner for the search engines.

Let’s look at some of Gorilla’s other pages:

They are deliberately targeting two types of users:

⭐ Specific industries looking for accounting support (freelancers, landlords) .

⭐ Questions that lead naturally to an inquiry (taxes, payment).

The company also converts aggressively through:

• Case studies.
• CTAs.
• Social proof.
• Nice design.
• Simple language.

If I ran an accounting firm, I’d be using this as a template on how to win!

Last week we wrote about importing South African wine 🍷 to the UK. You can read the original here.

We came up with three ideas to drive huge value with content:

1. From grape to glass.
2. A history of winemaking in South Africa.
3. Comparison pages.

Please cut me some slack here—I have no idea about winemaking so the details are probably nonsense.

My bet is that consumers love to know the origin story of their wine so let’s create some content around it.

We can cover all the steps of how you go from 🍇 to 🍷 and this content can be really interesting.

First let’s outline the steps: growing, picking, maturing, bottling etc. Then, build the story into a timeline of different assets:

• Video.
• Infographics.
• Images.

I’d love to see some content and images of the wine being enjoyed in venues across South Africa and the UK.

To build a ton of links, we can build a best-in-class guide on South African winemaking.

We could cover:

• Types of wines.
• Areas.
• When it started.
• How the industry has evolved.

To make it punchier, we could create something along the lines of, “21 of the Best Wine Regions in South Africa.”

I think international publications will lap this content up so we could build a really solid base of links.

I love the idea of comparing our wine to more mass-produced brands—showing buyers they are buying something more high quality and less mass market.

This can be done by highlighting:

✅   Different production methods.

✅   Rarity.

✅   Grapes used.

✅   Other ingredients.

I think that cool images of a huge bottling plant versus a small wine farm would be great.

So, am I talking myself into a wine importing business? Definitely not.

I know there will be a world of logistical hurt that I haven’t even considered, but it’s fun to think about the marketing bit.

There is a nice piece from Australian SEO consultant Brodie Clark on Google Image Thumbnails (read the piece in full here or see the headlines below).

• If an ecommerce store wants to rank with images on the SERPs they need to follow a structure
• Images fail to rank for three main reasons:
  • Ranking factors – your images can rank from a technical perspective they’re not ranking
  • Preview issues – your site isn’t set up to preview images in the SERPs.
  • Indexing – Google can’t index the page (red alert 🚨🚨🚨).

The article goes on to provide helpful 8 tips on how to ensure images are ranking:

• Disable JavaScript.
• Image relevance.
• Image quality.
• Alt text.
• Product title.
• >8 relevant images.
• Sequence of appearance.
• Transparent backgrounds.

Brodie acknowledges this isn’t definitive but it’s a starting point of sorts.

So, what do Gorillas, wine and ecommerce all have in common?

A lot of search intent.

Whether you’re an accounting firm or an ecommerce wine business—the value of organic search can’t be ignored.

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Have a great day!