Who are Systemagic?

Systemagic is an IT support and cloud solutions company who decided to add SEO as an additional revenue stream using the help of Hike to manage their client’s campaigns. In this case study, James Eades (MD) talks to Andy about where the idea for offering SEO came from and how they use Hike to assist them with this.

“Here at Systemagic we’re an IT support and cloud solutions company. We have a diverse client base of over 350 customers ranging from sole traders to 350+ user businesses and we’ve enjoyed 20 years helping people get to grips with the IT within their business. We don’t do “web stuff” other than website hosting – in fact we sold our previous web department way back in 2010 and haven’t touched web development since.”

When we knew SEO was important for our clients

“We launched a posh new website a couple of years ago – we spent a fortune and sat back waiting for the new enquiries to come in when it was launched. They didn’t. We soon realised how daft we’d been – you can’t just put a website online and expect people to find it..even Google needs some help to make sure your pages get in front of the right faces and no matter how pretty or well written your website is, it can always be improved so that search engines can figure it out better.”

What issues we found at first

“Then an idea entered our minds. We aren’t a web agency or a marketing agency, but we have a big list of clients who know and trust us, who will take advice and who all run businesses that would like more clients. We stumbled on to Hike – suddenly we had all the tools to go with our know-how to allow us to provide SEO services to our clients. With its white label functionality Hike allows us to give our clients a dashboard showing their rankings, improvements, analytics and keyword performance. We can demonstrate to our SEO clients what we’re actually achieving for them which is key to winning their trust, and it’s fully branded for our business.”

Hike allowed us to deliver SEO easily and simply

“So we started working with a local SEO provider who charged a fairly high monthly fee, seemed to be doing things each month but could never really quantify what they were doing. We had no way of seeing if we were moving up the search engine rankings and no idea what black magic they were actually performing. After 6 months of taking their word for it but seeing no tangible results, we parted ways, found another local agency who said all the right things and charged much the same and started again. After another 6 months, we found ourselves in the same situation – at which stage we decided to see whether we could do it ourselves. We’re fortunate enough to have an internal full-time marketing person, so we set Becky the task of becoming an SEO expert (sorry Becky!) 6 months later we found that we (ok, she) could actually achieve more than the agencies we’d been paying and enquiries started rolling in.”

How we use Hike

“Hike also suggests SEO improvements to the websites, tips for link building, competitor analysis – making the whole process of looking after SEO for our clients far more structured. This supports Becky in her role, giving her the tools and data to make our client’s campaigns even more successful. Plus, if we have a particularly difficult client, or we just run out of time one month, we can choose to have the Hike team to help us deliver SEO actions. We simply pay for what actions we want them to complete for us that month, so it’s clear and simple (and it’s flexible, so no long term contracts!).”

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