With over 20 years of expertise, Arbour Group is a trusted provider of regulatory compliance products and services for the life sciences industry. Wanting to build organic visibility around solution-based keywords that drive qualified leads from the life sciences industry, they worked with the SEO experts at Marcel Digital to create highly targeted service pages and conduct massive backlink cleanup.
Why Did We Start the Project?
The Challenge
Arbour Group wanted to get in front of the right decision-makers by improving organic visibility for high-intent, solution-based keywords. As a compliance and validation solutions provider for enterprise platforms, they needed stronger search rankings for key services like SAP compliance solutions and FDA compliance and validation services.
With a broad customer base spanning pharmaceuticals, medical devices, biotechnology, and diagnostics, Arbour Group faced tough competition from industry giants like Oracle, SAP, FDA, and Parasoft. Marcel Digital quickly saw that a complete content revamp was needed, along with deep SEO audits to improve both technical and off-page SEO - essential for boosting organic search visibility and driving more qualified leads.
What’s Going On?
The Analysis
Marcel Digital’s SEO team tapped into top-tier tools to uncover insights into Arbour Group’s search performance:
- Google Analytics - Traffic and conversion data analysis
- SEMRush - Competitive keyword research and rankings
- Moz Pro - On-page SEO and backlink quality assessment
- Majestic - Comprehensive backlink analysis
We started by lining up Arbour Group’s organic traffic and rankings with Google algorithm updates. What we found in our analysis was that Arbour Group had decreases in rankings and traffic around the time of an earlier Penguin algorithm update. We compiled their backlinks and found malicious, spammy backlinks sending negative quality signals to Google and lowering overall trust with search engines, lowering rankings in the process.
We also analyzed the user intent behind searches Arbour Group was trying to rank for and found that they did not have an optimized, unique copy to sufficiently target these terms. Pages had been built out for each enterprise system/platform that Arbour Group wanted to work with but this was following a “cookie cutter” model where text was duplicated across all these pages, leaving little differentiation.
How Did Marcel Digital Help?
The Solution
Armed with these insights, Marcel Digital crafted a custom SEO strategy focused on lead generation, content optimization, and backlink quality improvement:
- Comprehensive Backlink Audit & Cleanup:
- Identified and removed toxic backlinks dragging down search rankings
- Updated outdated but valuable backlinks to ensure strong, relevant traffic
- High-Impact Content Optimization:
- Created unique, search-intent-driven service pages tailored to each compliance solution
- Optimized on-page SEO elements like title tags, headers, schema markup, and internal linking to improve discoverability
- Strategic Content Expansion:
- Developed industry-specific blog content to position Arbour Group as a thought leader
- Strengthened internal linking to boost keyword authority and sales enablement
- Targeted Link-Building Campaign:
- Secured high-quality backlinks to service pages and blog content
- Increased domain authority and organic rankings for key search terms
What Happened After Launch?
The Results
By shifting the focus to high-intent keyword targeting and optimized content strategies, Marcel Digital helped Arbour Group significantly improve organic lead generation and digital authority:
- 22% increase in organic traffic (2019 vs. 2018)
- 149% increase in organic traffic (2019 vs. 2016)
- 120% increase in goal completions
On top of that, Marcel Digital secured first-page rankings for key industry search terms, like ‘FDA Compliance and Validation’, driving even more inbound leads and engagement from life sciences professionals.
With a solid foundation in place, Marcel Digital continues to refine Arbour Group’s digital strategy through conversion rate optimization (CRO) and paid media enhancements, pushing lead generation and sales enablement to the next level.
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