Meet a Landy Award winner: Edelman takes home Best Overall Search Marketing Initiative award

Todd Silverstein and Alyssa Esker of Edelman accept the Landy Award for Best Overall Search Marketing Initiative.

Historically known as a top-rated PR firm, Edelman proved its digital marketing chops at this year’s Search Engine Land Awards gala by taking home top honors for Best Overall Search Marketing Initiative.

In July of last year, Edelman’s digital team out of Atlanta was tasked with completely overhauling a client’s search presence. The client — a mobile accessory brand — was suffering through its second year of a double-digit drop in online revenue and looked to Edelman to reverse the decline.

“They had an e-commerce program, but were heavily reliant upon retail sales,” says Todd Silverstein, Edelman’s US Head of Paid and Search.

Charged with increasing e-commerce sales by 18 percent and driving a 15-percent growth in organic traffic to the website, Edelman implemented an extensive and holistic campaign that touched on all things SEO- and SEM-related.

Edelman’s SEM initiatives included everything from the creation of an entirely new account structure for 15,000 new keywords to designing new landing pages and exploring deeper optimizations within Google Search Partners. The agency also addressed SEO issues by improving page-load times, eliminating duplicate content and building out a more mobile-friendly website.

Silverstein says that before enlisting Edelman, the client had multiple digital agencies on the roster.

“They engaged us to consolidate under one roof both for the purposes of hopefully improving the program, [and also providing] a cleaner read on performance,” says Silverstein.

Alyssa Esker, Edelman’s Senior SEO Supervisor in Atlanta, added that the company had previously shifted the back-end of its website, as well as its CMS — changes that impacted their opportunity to bring in revenue and affecting their e-commerce conversion rates.

“We were, overall, trying to drive revenue objectively,” says Esker, “But also show that the site was capable of bringing in revenue.”

According to Edelman, the client’s entire SEM program was systematically restructured over the course of four months. The campaign resulted in immediate results and exceeded the client’s revenue goal by 145 percent. Edelman reports that its client’s web revenue continued to grow at a significant pace into 2016.

While Edelman has always been known as a first-rate PR firm, winning this year’s Landy Award for Best Overall Search Marketing Initiative proves the agency’s push into digital marketing services is a move in the right direction.