SEO Is An Art > SEO Improves Engagement
How SEO Improved Page Engagement for a Freight Brokerage
How SEO Improved Page Engagement for a Freight Brokerage
In 2025 I completed a number of SEO-related tasks for a freight brokerage that aimed to offer its agents the best service in the industry, with 24/7 financial and legal support.
These SEO tasks resulted in a 17.51% increase in key events, year over year, and a 2.72% increase in engagement rates. Read on to learn what this means for organic search, and how my work translated to better results for this client.
The Basics of a Search Marketing Program
One of the most important things for SEO is accurately tracking and reporting a website's performance in natural search. I'll be the first one to say that organic search is only one part of the search market; other parts include direct search, paid search, email, social, and many more. However, organic search is the backbone of digital marketing. If search engines cannot accurately "see" your website and all of the content it has to offer, your customers won't even be able to type your company's name into Google and find your site. In other words, SEO is important.
One of the main ways digital marketers report on a site's performance is with Google Analytics. This is a free tool developed by Google that tracks, measures, and reports on website and app traffic, user behavior, and marketing performance. This tool can tell you things like:
- Where your search visitors come from (organic search, paid search, email campaigns, etc)
- What your visitors do on the site (how long they stay, what pages they view, how many pages)
- Goal tracking (exactly how many sales / signups / conversions your visitors perform)
- And much more
The SEO Tasks I Performed
Every website is different. This website wanted to get high ranks on Google for search queries that reflected their business goals, such as "best agent brokerage" and "best freight agent program". As you might guess, there is a lot of competition for keywords like this, because every one of their competitors also wanted to reach prospects looking for "best" service. To get the highest ranks, we needed to prove to Google that we were the best. Below are some of of the things I did to improve the site's optimization for their target keywords:
A Full Site Audit
Many software tools exist that will scan your website and tell you about common things that search engines want to find in a website, and what to change, such as pages with missing title tags, and links that are broken.
A Site Crawl
A "Crawl" is when a software tool goes to your website and follows every link it can find. Then it compiles a list of all the pages on your website. This list can tell you important things about your website, and is especially useful if your website has been around for a long time. The site crawl can tell you if there are duplicate pages on your website that confuse search engines, or if there are pages with little or no content that might show up in search engine results.
PageSpeed Review
One of the things that can differentiate your site from your competitors is how fast it loads. Everyone has had the experience of goign to a website and waiting for the page. And waiting for the page. And waiting for the page. And then, suddenly you see the link on the page you want to click, so you click it, but just before your finger touches the screen, an image loads and you click the link you didn't want to click and go somewhere else. Google knows that websites with slow loading issues like this can give a bad experience to visitors, and prefers to give higher ranks to faster sites that load well. I reviewed the website's speed and gave advice on what to change.
Duplicate H1 Tags
H1 tags are a way to give your visitors a "headline" for the page. A headline performs the same task for a webpage as a headline in a newspaper article - it sums up the page's contents and helps visitors decide if they want to read the rest of the page. However, web sites can run into problems if they use the same H1 tag on different pages of the site, or use put multiple H1 tags on a single page. I reviewed the site's content and gave advice on how to deploy their H1 tags.
Optimizing Pages
When I knew what the site's target keywords were, I set about optimizing the pages for those keywords. This is a long process of reviewing the page's content and finding opportunities to not only include the target keywords in the text, but also to think about what the target keywords meant. How do your customers search for your product or service? What do they want to see when they go to a page with information about your target keywords? To optimize for a keyword, I may review competitor pages to see if their landing pages include related sub-topics, and then see how my client site talks about those sub-topics as well. Optimizing a site's landing pages means getting to know the business vertical, and getting to know the informational needs of visitors in that vertical who are interested in buying.
Search Performance Metrics
As I discussed earlier, we need to track the performance of the pages. This means learning how well the pages perform once we've finished optimizing them. Google Analytics is one of the main reporting tools I use. Below, I explain what we measured, and what it meant.
17.51% Improvement in Key Events
A "key event" in Google Analytics is any important user interaction with the site. When we set up Google Analytics for a client, we decide together what the important things are that we want visitors to do when they get to the site. This might mean things like an online purchase, a form submission, or button click. Basically, a key event is anything explicitly designated as valuable to the business success of our clients. Key Events in Google Analytics allow us to provide detailed tracking of critical actions. We can also do things like improve user experience, and optimize the site performance.
The 17.51% improvement in Key Events (from 10,734 to 12,164) meant that more visitors who came to their site through organic search were filling out their contact form and becoming leads for their sales team to convert.
2.72% Improvement YoY in Engagement Rate
Engagement rate in Google Analytics is the percentage of total sessions that were "engaged" sessions. This is a general measurement of how actively visitors interact with a website once they reach it through organic search. An engaged session means a visitor comes to your website from organic search and:
1) Their visit lasts longer than 10 seconds
2) Has a conversion event, or
3) Their visit includes 2 or more page/screen views.
The 2.72% increase in engagement rate (from 69% to 72%) year over year meant that visitors to the site were staying longer, converting more often, and seeing more pages.