During the last five weeks, Search Engine Land has conducted a number of interviews with last year’s Search Engine Land Award Winners. In this week’s series, we are featuring Brainlabs and TriMark Digital.

Brainlabs was awarded two trophies at last year’s event: Best Retail Search Marketing Initiative for SEM and the Best B2C SEM Initiative for Enterprise award. TriMark Digital’s SEO campaign for the Fairview Garden Center helped it win Best Overall SEO Initiative for Small Business award.

“We’ve long been known as a lead generation agency from a paid search perspective,” says TriMark Digital lead digital strategist, Dani Roberts. In today’s spotlight interview, Roberts shares how the team focused on a client’s organic digital performance to take home the award — proving her agency’s ability in SEO as well as paid search.

If you’re considering whether or not to submit an entry for this year’s Search Engine Land Awards, be sure to check out interviews with last year’s winners: iCrossing, Precis Digital and SapientRazorfish.

This year’s Search Engine Land Awards will be hosted on June 12 in Seattle, Washington as part of the SMX Advanced Conference after hours events. There’s still time to submit your entries, but the deadline is looming with early entry deadline on March 31, and a final deadline on April 13.

Best Retail Search Marketing Initiative for SEM & Best B2C SEM Initiative for Enterprise: Brainlabs

Brainlabs’ Sophie Newton representing her agency at the 2017 Search Engine Land Awards.

With offices in London and New York, Brainlabs took home two trophies from last year’s Search Engine Land Awards event — Best Retail Search Marketing Initiative and Best B2C SEM Initiative for Enterprise.

“Finding recognition for our work at a huge awards ceremony in the US, for US clients, was crucial for us,” says Brainlabs’ Rory Jones, “We wanted to show how proud we are to work with these businesses, and the Search Engine Land Awards was a great opportunity.”

Brainlabs winning entries went through a rigorous process, starting with the agency’s client account teams doing the ground work and getting client sign-offs, before moving on to marketing.

“The marketing department took over, making it interesting to read, improving the flow, and adding any creative aspects from there.”

Jones said, overall, each submission took a good few hours to complete. The agency focused on campaigns that showcased its innovation in connection to great results.

“At Brainlabs, we have a serious emphasis on innovation and creating innovative solutions to clients’ projects — often with a bespoke piece of tech made just for them,” says Jones. He believes it was this combination of innovation and remarkable client results that helped Brainlabs submission capture the attention of awards committee.

“As you’re told at school before exams: the examiners (or judges) have to go through a lot of these, so if we can make their job easier — and stand out at the same time — then all the better for us.”

While they haven’t been able to measure exactly how winning the award has impacted their business, Jones says it let his team know they’re doing the right things.

“It spurs us on to improve and do better next time. We’re constantly growing and innovating, making more awards possible in the future,” says Jones.

Best Overall SEO Initiative for Small Business: TriMark Digital

TriMark Digital’s team accepts the award for Best Overall SEO Initiative for Small Business.

TriMark Digital’s lead digital strategist, Dani Roberts, says her team realized just how strong their SEO strategy for Fairview Garden Center was when they began writing up the submission.

“It’s different than anything we’ve ever done before and we’ve taken a lot of risks with this client,” says Roberts, “But, we’ve also seen huge rewards.”

Built around a mix of technical SEO elements and outside-of-the-box creative SEO thinking, TriMark Digital’s campaign landed the agency a Search Engine Land Award for Best Overall SEO Initiative for Small Business at last year’s event.

“Aside from our outstanding SEO department finally getting some of the public praise and recognition that they so rightfully deserve, this win has really helped us focus in more of our small business division and be more confident in talking with our small business clients about more outside-of-the-box strategies.”

Roberts says SEO can be a difficult strategy to communicate to clients, but being named a Search Engine Land Award winner helps the agency prove its has the knowledge and tools to succeed in this arena.

For the Fairview Garden Center SEO campaign, Roberts says the agency worked hard to stay on top of SEO trends and updates.

“We jumped on new features offered by search engines, like Google Posts, and we heavily utilized schema markup throughout the site and worked to keep it as updated and robust as possible. We prepped for major algorithm updates like mobile-first indexing and site speed as soon soon as we caught wind that these updates might be a possibility.”

Roberts believes her agency’s cutting-edge strategy helped land the team its award.

“I think it has added to the level of trust that our clients place in us with their organic strategies,” says Roberts, “We’ve truly been able to take some of our small business clients to the next level with their added trust in us as a result of this win.”

According to Roberts, the team’s winning entry practically wrote itself.

“We’ve had such a great relationship with Fairview Garden Center over the past couple of years and they’ve always treated us as a true partner in their business, so it was easy to summarize all the work we’ve put in for them and the results we’ve seen from it.”

Roberts says the team had been tracking the campaign’s digital performance and overall business growth as a single effort from the beginning — aiming to see things from a big picture perspective, and finding areas where they could help the business grow.

“The submission process was easy,” says Roberts since the agency had already done so much leg work, “It was just a matter of compiling data.”

Roberts says the award has been a tremendous honor for TriMark Digital’s small SEO department — and a huge recognition for the organic team that is often overshadowed by the paid campaign strategies the agency is known for.

“It’s a true testament to a creative and ongoing, cutting-edge approach to organic search that really works,” says Roberts, “To be honored in this way — amongst some of the best in the business — really proves to us and our clients that we are doing something right, and that there’s a very bright future ahead for all involved.”

If you want to join the esteemed list of Search Engine Land Award winners, please submit your entry before the early entry deadline of March 31, 2018. Submissions will be accepted through the final deadline of April 13. The Search Engine Land Awards team has added several new categories this year, including Best Search & Social Media Marketing Initiative, Best Research Initiative by an Agency or Individual and Best Boutique Agency for SEO and SEM.

You can learn more about the upcoming awards event and how to submit your entry at 2018 Search Engine Land Awards.