Party Slate - Events Management Marketplace
Helped PartySlate become an industry leader in the events management space by increasing the organic traffic to their website by 12X, from 30,000 to 370,000 a month in two years.
#1 Position in Google Search Results Keywords
12,000+
Increase in monthly organic traffic
12X
# of local keywords ranking
313,000+
“We brought in Digital Authority Partners (DAP) to help us with a complex set of SEO projects. Their expert team helped us optimize our editorial content strategy to help us rank for thousands of keywords and worked with our technology team to optimize the core platform. Their team also trained us on how to leverage AHREFs and other SEO tools best. DAP's insights were invaluable, and our organic traffic is spiking due to these efforts. The team is transparent about their approach, the expected results, and the required timeline. I highly recommend this cross-discipline team of content, offsite and technical SEO experts. ”
Julie Novack
Chief Executive Officer
Chicago, Illinois
Chicago, Illinois
Project Summary
PartySlate is a Chicago-based events management online platform that inspires people looking to plan their next event and connects them with the leading event professionals and venues. PartySlate gives the event industry an easy way to share their work, build their brand, connect with potential customers and grow their business. DAP created a comprehensive SEO strategy to ensure that PartySlate ranks locally for thousands of keywords across 25 locations, including Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and other metropolitan areas. Within 2 years, PartySlate improved its organic visibility by 12X and tripled its annual revenue.
The Challenge
Lack of a local SEO plan
Before working with Digital Authority Partners, PartySlate primarily acquired new customers by leveraging paid search and social channels. Whereas the company ranked for a variety of keywords in Google, organic search drove fewer clicks to the website than paid search. At the same time, the total addressable SEO market showed considerable potential to dramatically increase web traffic by optimizing the website, creating new content on the PartySlate blog, and launching fully-optimized local pages.
High cost of acquisition
While competing with other large event management marketplaces, the acquisition cost for new customers was cost-prohibitive. With its existing paid ads management strategy, the company struggled to gain market share, in a sustainable way, that aligned with its overall objectives. Whereas the company had previously invested in SEO while working with other agencies, the results were limited. However, the high cost of paid ads pushed the company towards re-evaluating the role SEO could play for the company, and it chose Digital Authority Partners to help right the ship.
Website conversion
As a dual-sided marketplace, the PartySlate business model drives leads to event professionals who pay a monthly subscription to be featured on the platform. Whereas paid search drove a significant amount of traffic to the website, the paid search traffic conversion rate was below industry standards. This, in turn, impacted the company’s ability to attract new paying vendors to the platform.
How we helped PartySlate
We helped PartySlate create a comprehensive Local Search Engine Optimization strategy to reach its growth goals. As a local vendor marketplace (think Yelp for wedding planning purposes), PartySlate needed to drive organic traffic to thousands of location-specific pages (for example: "wedding venues in Chicago," “photographers in Atlanta,” etc.) created across multiple, complex service categories. But creating unique and valuable content across 24 locations and dozens of categories was a complex task. Rolling out a scalable content strategy across the platform required a concentrated effort across development, content production, SEO optimizations, and overall conversion optimization tactics to ultimately achieve PartySlate’s primary objective: more traffic and more sales through organic search.
We analyzed PartySlate's top ten competitors, strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. We built a multi-year local SEO plan to ensure each PartySlate location-specific service page would be at the top of search results. Putting PartySlate on the path to success required multiple changes across 30,000+ pages which had to be deployed at scale. We helped the company implement meta-description changes and URL structure adjustments, create unique content across 24 cities, improve the page speed across thousands of pages, implement a new content delivery network product, and more. DAP created a marketing roadmap that required the involvement of multiple teams and a cohesive alignment within the organization to achieve success from an SEO perspective.
Our fractional CMO worked closely with the PartySlate founders to create a marketing plan for that will drive additional leads and sales to the platform. As part of the engagement, Digital Authority Partners' mission was to train their current resources to become better marketers while creating an overall multi-year marketing strategy. Our Fractional CMO created a comprehensive marketing plan that doubled their organic search traffic within six months, improved the website's overall conversion rate, reduced bounce rates, and resulted in additional vendor sign-ups. And we trained 12 different resources across marketing, content writing, and development departments to help the company grow sustainably over time while having the right SEO know-how.
Digital Authority Partners created and implemented a comprehensive local SEO strategy to help PartySlate rank higher across all 24 regional markets. Within the first six months, the company doubled its market share in Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and Atlanta from organic search ranking improvements.
Within six months of working with DAP, over 40% of all new appointment requests for vendors in Chicago were attributed to our local SEO efforts.
Within six months of working with DAP, over 40% of all new appointment requests for vendors in Chicago were attributed to our local SEO efforts.
— Local SEO Audit
DAP conducted a comprehensive local SEO review of the PartySlate website structure, local landing pages, technical SEO, website design, schema markup, online reputation, and more. Based on our recommendations, the PartySlate development team made over 100,000 changes to ensure that the website ranks higher in search results.
A big part of the strategy recommended by Digital Authority Partners required the PartySlate team to create in-depth content for many of their location-specific listing pages. This involved unique content for pages such as "event planners New York city” versus "event planners Chicago" or "event planners Boston." Based on in-depth SEO research and outlines provided by our team, the PartySlate marketing department created hundreds of unique content pages for their top keywords. Today, these on-site landing pages drive hundreds of thousands of unique visitors to the website.
Our technical SEO experts created structured data schema, improved metadata across the site, and provided recommendations to improve site speed to help PartySlate rank highly in local search results. These technical website optimizations helped boost organic rankings by 20% within a month of making these SEO-friendly website changes.
— Guest Posting
We wrote guest posts & secured high-quality backlinks to PartySlate's location landing pages and supporting content. We published 70+ articles on wedding planning blogs, magazines, and newspapers, which led our client to rank on page 1 of Google search results for each location.
Our analytics consultants worked closely with the PartySlate leadership and development team to develop a comprehensive analytics strategy. Our proposed approach helped the company decide which pages required additional optimizations to improve engagement and conversion metrics.
Our team recommended A/B tests to improve website conversion metrics. For example, we helped the company experiment with multiple content delivery network providers to choose the best option. In addition, we recommended optimizations across pop-ups, modals, call-to-action colors, text, and more. And our analytics experts defined the proper rules, tags, and approach to evaluating which A/B test performed most effectively.
— Conversion Rate Optimization
One of PartySlate's top objectives was to improve the website's overall conversion so that more website visitors request event quotes from vendors on the platform. Our team recommended 40+ website optimizations during our engagement to improve the overall conversion rate. Combined with robust analytics and an A/B testing approach, we helped the PartySlate website double its conversion rate within six months of working together.
What we achieved
12,000
#1 Position in Google Search Results Keywords
Our client started ranking on page one of Google Search Results in less than six months by deploying the most comprehensive location pages for multiple services across 24 cities. The cost associated with running paid ads against these keywords would have cost Geode 20X more per month than the SEO work done to achieve these top search results. When PartySlate started working with Digital Authority Partners, they were in position 1 of search results for 636 keywords. In 2023, they're currently ranking for over 12,000 keywords at the top of search results - an 18X increase.
12X
Increase in organic traffic within two years
PartySlate quickly started ranking for thousands of new keywords across all its locations in record time. These were all new keywords the company had never ranked for before engaging with Digital Authority Partners. Some new landing pages began ranking in the top 3 search results within less than a week of deploying new location pages.
313,000+
Local keywords ranking across the United States
When PartySlate started working with Digital Authority Partners in the summer of 2019, their website received around 30,000 organic visitors per month. In December 2022, PartySlate was slightly shy of 400,000 monthly organic visitors. Most of this traffic is going to location-specific landing pages, which have the highest chance of converting into a lead for vendors and party planners across the US.
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