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CASE STUDY. US TRANS CORP / UST EDUCATION. TRADE ASSOCIATION · MERCHANT SERVICES

Trained. Indexed.Ranked.

A trade association sitting on years of transportation-industry webinars and podcasts — unindexed, uncategorized, invisible. iExcel put the library to work and launched a paid-search engine on top.

Engagement
SEO + paid search + tracking
Industry
Transportation education · merchant services
Scope
184 pages · 275 content pieces
Paid launch
Payment Worksuite · Google + Bing
Semi-truck on an open highway at dusk — the transportation-industry buyer
// Transportation · Trade education · Merchant services
// The squint test · 3 receipts
3.8×
Search index footprint
Technical SEO interventions multiplied the active indexed-page count against the program's pre-launch baseline.
1.8×
Paid search CTR vs. B2B average
4.47% against the published 2.41% WordStream B2B search average.
Paid search conversion vs. B2B average
9.29% against the published 3.04% WordStream B2B search conversion average.
Chapter 01 · The Setup

A trade association sitting on a library nobody could find.

US Trans Corp runs UST Education — the educational arm serving transportation operators, fleet owners, brokers, and back-office teams across the U.S. trucking and logistics industry. Years of programming had produced a serious content library: 164 recorded webinars, 111 podcast episodes, and hundreds of supporting resource pages on usteducation.org.

The problem was the shelf. The webinars were archived. The podcasts were embedded. The pages sat in the CMS without titles, without descriptions, without a keyword logic connecting them. A prospect Googling a specific compliance topic didn't land on UST — they landed somewhere else. The library was there. It just wasn't indexed.

Meanwhile the business had a second problem the SEO track couldn't touch: Payment Worksuite, the merchant-services offering, was launching into a market that didn't know it existed yet. That one needed paid search — fast, high-intent, keyword-first.

A logistics fleet lined up at a distribution yard
// Trade association · Transportation · Educational programming
Chapter 02 · The SEO Sprint

184 pages, rewritten to be findable.

The original SOW was SEO. iExcel audited the WorkerBee-hosted setup, mapped the existing content taxonomy against the queries the transportation industry actually types, and started at the shelf: every webinar, every podcast, every resource page categorized by topic, audience, and search intent.

Then the rewrite. Page titles, meta descriptions, H1s, URLs — 184 pages edited across usteducation.org, cross-linked into the new taxonomy. Keyword research targeted the actual language a fleet manager or trucking-industry compliance lead uses. Internal links were rebuilt so the library pulled its own weight in the site's crawl budget. The UST team was trained alongside the work so the discipline outlives the engagement.

184
Pages edited across usteducation.org
Titles, meta descriptions, H1s, URLs — the on-page layer rewritten against a keyword map the industry actually searches.
Two operators mapping content taxonomy across notebooks and a laptop
// SEO audit · Keyword mapping · On-page rewrite · Internal linking
// Audit

WorkerBee SEO baseline

Full crawl audit against the platform's constraints — what was fixable, what was inherited.

// Taxonomy

Content categorization

164 webinars + 111 podcasts sorted by topic, audience, and search intent — the shelf, rebuilt.

// Research

Keyword mapping

Queries the transportation industry actually types — fleet, compliance, back-office, brokerage.

// On-page

Titles · Descriptions · H1s · URLs

184 pages rewritten to match the keyword map — the on-page layer done at library scale.

// Structure

Internal linking

Cross-links rebuilt so the library funnels crawl budget into the pages that earn the traffic.

// Enablement

UST team SEO training

Rank Math workflows, editorial checklists, and the vocabulary to keep it going after handoff.

Chapter 03 · The Reset

The content library, put back to work.

Three parallel streams, one sprint. Webinars categorized and optimized. Podcasts indexed with real metadata. Resource pages rewritten against the keyword map. This is what the library looked like when we were done — the shelf a search engine could actually read.

The indexing barriers were the real blocker, not the content quality. Once the sitemap, indexing directives, and metadata layer were fixed, the search-indexed page footprint nearly quadrupled against the program's pre-launch baseline — the clearest proof the technical reset, not just the rewrite, is what unlocked the library.

3.8×
Search-indexed page footprint vs. pre-launch baseline
Technical SEO interventions — sitemap, indexing directives, metadata — multiplied the active indexed-page count against the program's own starting point.
// Content Library Sprint · usteducation.org Handoff · Complete
Stream 01
164webinars

Webinars, categorized

Every recorded webinar sorted by topic, audience, and search intent. Titles + descriptions rewritten against the keyword map.

Categorized · Optimized · Indexed
Stream 02
111podcasts

Podcasts, metadata-clean

Episodes tagged, described, and cross-linked. The library that used to live inside an embed now has a search surface.

Tagged · Described · Cross-linked
Stream 03
184pages

Pages, on-page rewritten

Titles, meta descriptions, H1s, and URLs edited across usteducation.org — the on-page layer done at library scale.

Titles · Meta · H1 · URL
// Scope: 275 content pieces · 184 pages edited Platform: WorkerBee · Rank Math
Aerial view of trucks moving through a highway interchange at dusk
// The library reset

"The webinars, the podcasts, the resource pages — indexed, categorized, and rewritten against the queries the transportation industry actually types."

Chapter 04 · Payment Worksuite Launch

The paid-search engine for a merchant-services rebrand.

Payment Worksuite was the second workstream: the merchant-services product needed a demand engine for a category the market wasn't Googling by name yet. iExcel built the Google Ads program from the keyword sheet up — Payment Worksuite terms, merchant-services terms, 3Delta competitor queries, and the long-tail language a transportation back-office team uses when it's shopping for a processor.

Responsive search ads, tight ad-group structure, tracking templates, negative-keyword hygiene. Microsoft/Bing tested alongside Google in the same architecture. The campaign wasn't spun up as a spray — it was built as a system: high-intent queries into landing pages into a lead form iExcel would then rebuild in Chapter 06. Google's click-through rate landed at 4.47% — nearly 1.8× the published 2.41% WordStream B2B search average — on a keyword set built around a rebrand the market wasn't Googling by name yet.

9.29%
Payment Worksuite · Google Ads conversion rate
By end of December 2023 — roughly 3× the published 3.04% WordStream B2B search conversion average. A strong rate for a merchant-services product still building name recognition.
A laptop showing paid-search dashboards and keyword performance
// Google Ads · Bing · Payment Worksuite · 3Delta transition
// KEYWORDS
Payment Worksuite · Merchant services · 3Delta · Competitor + long-tail transportation-processor queries. A keyword sheet built for a rebrand, not a brand.
// AD GROUPS
Tight ad-group structure so each query bucket lands on copy it actually matches. Responsive search ads tested against every ad group.
// PLATFORMS
Google Ads as the primary engine. Microsoft / Bing tested alongside — same structure, same tracking, cheaper CPCs on the long tail.
// TRACKING
Tracking templates on every URL. UTM discipline so the paid channel could be pulled apart from the SEO channel in reporting.
// HYGIENE
Negative-keyword lists, search-term audits, quality-score watchlist. A weekly rhythm — not a set-and-forget campaign.
// Payment Worksuite · Google Ads conversion rate · Dec 2023
9.29%

Roughly 3× the published 3.04% WordStream B2B search conversion average — a strong paid-search conversion rate for a merchant-services product still building name recognition in the transportation vertical.

Chapter 05 · Tracking Rebuild

The measurement layer underneath the launch.

None of the paid-search numbers hold up without conversion tracking that works. iExcel rebuilt the measurement layer in parallel with the campaign: Google Ads conversion setup, GTM form triggers on Payment Worksuite lead forms, Bing conversion tracking wired through the same GTM container, and access coordination across GA, GTM, and HubSpot so every team was looking at the same funnel.

The HubSpot lead pipeline was audited against paid-search source data — where were the leads landing, which forms were converting, and which ones were leaking. Reporting was pulled together so a paid dollar could be traced from click to submit to CRM record without a spreadsheet stitching it manually.

275
Content pieces categorized · 164 webinars + 111 podcasts
The full UST Education library, now searchable — and now instrumented, so every organic and paid lead the library produces can be counted.
Two operators reviewing analytics dashboards on a laptop
// GTM · Google Analytics · Bing tracking · HubSpot lead audit
Chapter 06 · The Landing Page

The conversion audit that made the paid dollars work harder.

Once traffic was landing, the Payment Worksuite page had to earn it. iExcel ran a CRO audit on the landing page and delivered a concrete rebuild list — not a design opinion, a conversion opinion. Above-the-fold headline reset, CTA contrast pushed up, the form moved higher on mobile, mobile responsiveness tightened, and the form itself simplified to the three fields a merchant-services lead actually has to give up.

The pattern was the same discipline as the paid campaign: strip friction, match the query, make the next step obvious. Small edits, compounding effect on the 9.29% conversion rate.

A payment card being used at a merchant terminal
// Payment Worksuite · Landing page · CRO audit
// Before

What was in the way

  • Headline buried below the fold on the first paint
  • CTA button contrast blended into the background
  • Lead form pushed below the fold on mobile
  • Full field-set — every optional field required
  • Mobile layout inheriting desktop spacing
// After

What we changed

  • Above-the-fold headline reset to the paid-query language
  • High-contrast CTA — the button visible on the first scroll
  • Form pulled higher on mobile, no scroll-to-convert
  • Three fields only — Full Name · Email · Company
  • Mobile spacing rebuilt for thumb reach and readability
Chapter 07 · The Read

Why this story matters.

For a trade association or industry-education arm sitting on years of content that isn't earning its keep, US Trans Corp is the template. It's not a rebrand story. It's not a paid-media story. It's the story of two workstreams held together by the same discipline — a library rewritten to be findable, and a paid-search engine built on top of it.

The technical execution stayed inside the constraints of the platform. The paid-search launch stayed inside the CFO's tolerance. And the tracking rebuild made both workstreams defensible — not in a dashboard screenshot, but in a source-of-truth funnel a HubSpot admin can audit tomorrow.

For merchant services, education content, or any B2B category where the buyer is Googling a specific problem and reading before they book — this is what tactical looks like when it's done on the shelf and the shopfront at the same time.

A professional signing a certification document at a desk
// SEO · Paid search · Conversion tracking · CRO
The Stack

Tools we ran it on.

Google Ads
Payment Worksuite · Responsive search
Microsoft Ads
Bing · Long-tail test
Google Tag Manager
Form triggers · Cross-platform tracking
Google Analytics
Traffic + funnel spine
HubSpot
Lead audit · Source attribution
Rank Math
On-page SEO · Titles + meta
WorkerBee CMS
usteducation.org platform
Bing Webmaster
Conversion tracking via GTM
Search Console
Coverage · Query monitoring

The shelf. The shopfront. One operator.

iExcel runs SEO at library scale, launches paid-search engines under real platform constraints, and rebuilds the tracking underneath so every lead can be defended.

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