Pelicoin is the Gulf South’s largest, most secure cryptocurrency ATM network, with ATMs across Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, and Tennessee.
While Pelicoin had built an impressive network of ATMs, they needed help with their search engine presence. However, even with best practices on SEO and SEM, it’s difficult to tie physical visits to an ATM back to a Google search. It wasn’t enough to just rank highly on Google—they needed to position Pelicoin in Google’s map pack as well so customers would have a clear path from awareness to direction request (or another action) to a visit to the ATM location.
Google’s new store visit conversions have the potential to be inaccurate due to the ATMs being part of a separate entity (convenience stores). This is where Google’s local action conversions come into play. After interacting with an ad, Google’s local actions can track subsequent actions a user takes, particularly those that show further interest in converting.
Local action conversions track interactions with other Google properties (such as Google My Business or Google Maps listings), or website actions that indicate further interest, such as directions page views, that take place after the user has interacted with an ad.
Combined with SEO efforts to improve Pelicoin’s standing in Google Maps’ results, along with optimizations to business listings, Pelicoin’s paid campaigns were set up to start tracking these local actions.
The goal with Pelicoin’s campaign was to make them appear as high as possible in Google’s search results, organically and with paid ads, and particularly when the ads showed up in map listings. This maximized their visibility and conversion volume. The higher the rank, the more likely a user would be to seek out directions for the nearest ATM.
Our team used a multi-pronged SEO and content strategy to increase the visibility of Pelicoin’s website across all of its markets. First, we created long-form service pages that targeted primary keywords, such as “Bitcoin ATM [City]” for the main cities that housed the most Pelicoin ATMs. Prospective customers could now use common keywords to easily find Pelicoin’s website on Google’s search results, but Pelicoin had yet to crack into the Google Map Pack in major areas.
In order to raise awareness to Pelicoin’s individual ATM locations, and specifically get into the local search Map Packs, we created keyword-targeted location pages for each unit that acted as press releases for new ATM locations. Then, we verified each new ATM location on Google My Business through both offline and online verification, coordinating with each separate gas station owner that rented space to the Pelicoin ATM machines. After each location was verified on Google, we then tied those individual location pages on the website to our Moz Local SEO software, our Yext local SEO software, and custom-built Facebook location pages, to create more verifiable connections that demonstrated the validity of those new locations.
Throughout this entire process, we continually wrote blogs on the Pelicoin website and practiced link building to raise the overall authority of the website. Since the beginning of the campaign, Pelicoin was featured in many reputable outlets, such as HuffPost, CMSWire, and FitSmallBusiness. This boosted Pelicoin’s domain authority, generated press, and brought prospective customers to their website.
For paid ads, our team targeted specific cities across the Gulf South, Texas, and Tennessee for those searching for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency ATMs, with a heavy focus on local-intent keywords (city names, “near me”, etc).
In addition to search ads, we utilized remarketing ads on Google’s Display Network to keep Pelicoin’s brand top of mind for previous visitors of the site. We also targeted built-in Google audiences that had shown previous interest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
After 1 year of running Pelicoin’s search campaign, in addition to site traffic tripling, local action conversions totaled 4793, in addition to 3828 local directions conversions. On average, directions were sought out an average of 10.5 times per day after interactions with our ads.
These results are an encouraging sign for businesses that have a hard time tracking conversions from online campaigns, even more so when their physical locations are inside of another business (often convenience stores in this situation).
Pelicoin also showed in Google’s Map Pack and in the top three organic search results for all locations for the search term “Bitcoin ATM [City]”. They also successfully improved their domain authority with backlinks on well-known sites.
Pelicoin holds a place in Google Map Pack for every location with the search term “Bitcoin ATM [City]”
Pelicoin is in the top 3 on Google’s organic search for every location with the search term “Bitcoin ATM [City]”
Our goal was to ensure users searching for cryptocurrency ATMs in their area could find us immediately and have access to the information they needed—Online Optimism helped us rank higher organically and in paid auctions, increasing our brand awareness in the process.
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