SEO case: how a travel blogger managed to increase traffic to a post by 450 per day%
Now I will tell you about how I managed to help a travel blogger increase the volume of constant traffic to posts on blog pages by starting with 9 daily views and increasing this figure to 50.
It is noteworthy that this was the most ordinary post that was published quite a long time ago and for a long time it was almost no one was interested in it.
I managed to increase the volume of traffic to this post without holding promising promotions, without expensive advertising campaigns, and the increase in traffic volumes occurred almost instantly.
And now I will show you in detail and step by step how it was done.
So, please love and favor - Nora Dunn is a professional traveler.
She was a financial planner. At the same time, I started to blog and travel all my working day and display my adventures in a blog on my personal website, the Professional Hobo. In this capacity, its activities began in 2007.
And now, as of 2018, she has received mountains of content to publish on the pages of her blog.
The blog posts themselves, or rather their volume, allowed her to attract the lion's share of traffic to her site through organic search, but Nora saw much more potential in it.
She also knew that she had a lot of unique content in store. She published it in her posts, but they, unfortunately, were not found by the target users.
Therefore, Nora asked for help from a fellow travel blogger, who advised her to seek help from me.
RESULTS…
First of all, I started creating a comprehensive strategy that includes a lot of methods and manipulations designed to increase the volume of traffic to all pages of her site.
And one of the operations gave a mega fast effect for a specific page. Results like:
The average volume of visits per post is 50, although until this moment almost no one has read it for years!
it is used for an average of 9 sessions per day.
SEO Case Study-results for travel blogger
Traffic volume increased by 450%!
450% growth in the SEO promotion case
Users began to stay longer on the page with content, studying its contents in more detail (an increase of 87.4%!)
The speed and number of rejections and users roaming on neighboring pages decreased by almost 4.5%!).
In addition, advertising revenue, along with partner sales, showed significant growth!
And this trend will not stop. As of September 2018, this page alone had 1,558 views.
more organic traffic from Google
Five-fold increase in traffic in one day: new publication of old posts
You may already know that in order to increase traffic volume, you should first start "updating old content", and you may have already been told that this helps a lot with search engines.
However, we did not just edit our posts in a hurry, but also made sure that the information contained in them was up-to-date, as well as that all the links in them were working properly.
By the time I finished working on these posts, their volume was almost doubled, and they received strategic formatting based on two keywords.
And now I suggest you step by step to go with me a simple 5-step path that I used to turn this post from a gray misunderstanding into the second post on the customer's site in terms of traffic generated.
STEP #1: Look for old ineffective publications with decent potential
Given that there were more than enough such posts on her blog, I first narrowed the search to those that were already monetized, in order to start from something.
seo case study for travel blog post
Original version of the post
I chose this:
Financial Travel Tips #109: Virtual Mail Services
It was a series of publications she had made earlier. But we were going to change it. It was also one of her top 10 best posts, but it only attracted just over 3% of the total traffic to the blog. And I understood that we could increase this indicator.
But regarding keywords, Nora told me that her posts were never written with a focus on SEO. And the most she had to do before was insert random terms in Yoast and try to get the green light.
I checked the terms that were used by her for posts in ahrefs and unfortunately found that they give from 0 to 10 monthly search queries. Because it was extremely bad, from the point of view of SEO promotion of the blog. All the while, the Yoast plugin was flashing green lights in all sorts of ways.
Posts sometimes occupied places in the search results within the first 11 pages for 384 keywords. But this is not enough. In addition, most of them were not so high. And only 13 of all the keywords in this post were included in the search results on the first page. However,these were the keywords that users searched for very, very rare.
However…
I was aware that this post had a huge hidden potential.
This topic was very useful, and in addition, it had no competitors in the face of other traveling bloggers, because I had an understanding that its audience will benefit from publications in the blog a lot.
In addition, we had a basic explanation of the algorithm of virtual mail services, but it was superficial. And so, in this regard, it was possible to improve the content indefinitely, in terms of its deepening.
It also contained a list of URLS for a lot of companies that provide services of this kind, but all of them were not related to the text. This allowed us to increase the volume of content and compete for keywords such as" review "and"best of".
And there were no images in the post at all. This circumstance made it possible to optimize on the table, on the spot. Therefore, it was decided to insert a lot of relevant photos that would be provided with header tags and alt tags.
STEP #2: Explore and select two main keywords
Next, we started searching and researching suitable keywords in order to optimize posts around.
This would allow me to make an optimization plan on the spot, and would give me an understanding of what additional sub-themes should be diluted in order to give them more depth.
Often when I do research on keywords for parts of content, I choose two keywords: one that is strong but definitely accessible, and the other that is slightly stretchy but more desirable.
This gives the post a chance to get a boost and traffic flow to a greater extent directly from the keyword within reach, and in fact then it gets SEO promotion as time passes and a chance for continued growth and traffic flow when it goes up for the desired keyword.
For this post landing on the above two keywords was made:
"Virtual mailbox" as a desirable keyword, received 4200 monthly search queries and a fairly high keyword difficulty score of 45.
"Best virtual mailbox service", as a keyword within reach, received 500 monthly search queries and a rating of 6 keyword difficulty level.
Based on statistical data on a number of other keywords that received an excellent rating from a professional hobo, the "best virtual mail services" keyword became a tasty morsel and offered an impressive number of monthly search queries in comparison with other long keywords.
The "virtual mailbox" might have taken longer and become a more complex keyword, but it was actually possible to execute it. I understood that it can compete in search results with a result of 45 KD, because by and large the site itself has already gained a decent weight of backlinks (which is quite normal, given the long period of non-placement on this site). And this search volume was worth a lot!
The wait was well worth it to get these 4,200 search engines.
STEP #3: Evaluate the level of competition for both keywords
This measure will be the main one in the process of creating content that is competitive in SERPs.
To increase the level of competitiveness of your content in SERPs, you must make it better than the content that has already managed to break into the lead.
According to the term "virtual mailbox", almost all the links that appeared on the first page were addresses of organizations that provide such services. And it would be difficult to get higher positions than they held.
However...
This did not particularly upset me, because users who need content published by a professional hobo will temporarily not be interested in clicking on the links of the above-mentioned companies. They will be interested in more objective information on the type of reviews.
Therefore, I was more concerned about competitors in the face of travel bloggers writing posts similar to ours.
Only one fragment of similar content made its way to the first page of the search query "virtual mailbox". So I focused on analyzing it as a competitor.
For the keyword "Best virtual mailbox service“, the lion's share of links in SERP shifted in favor of ads, and then the displayed fragment from the same competing post that was shown for the query "virtual mailbox". But, in General, with the exception of ads, there was content by the type of reviews and only a couple of firms that provide virtual mailbox services.
Next, I started analyzing the content of a different type of reviews, these are posts by traveling bloggers similar to the one I worked with, and a number of forum pages.
In General, their meaning was very similar to the original posts, but it was deeper than those posts that I had to update. In addition, most of them had very few backlinks, and the domain authority (DA), although I understood that this problem can be solved, relative to Nora's posts, because Her blog already had a DA 54 and a fairly authoritative backlink profile in General.
Therefore, I had an understanding that in case of increasing the volume of a post, in order to maintain its depth and increase it, it was necessary to make the blog pages overtake their competitors.
In addition, the post that held the leading position for the "virtual mailbox" query was at the top of the first page and the first for the “best virtual mailbox service" query.
BORROWING IDEAS FROM THE COMPETITION
By examining the content of the competition I drew up a list of subtopics and ideas that would provide posts, for example, the procedure of notarization of the application in the list of topics to strengthen and points, in order to see that the issue occurs in the right way.
I marked the entire list of virtual mail companies mentioned on other sites, and which were found in Nora's posts. I made a list of them.
In addition, it was decided to comment on each business, indicating its strengths and weaknesses, the main functions that could be found on the company's websites, because our competitors wrote reviews and prepared content for ranking (although not very) for keywords that were related to the brand.
STEP #4: Update and expand the content
And this is the most interesting point. From the moment I came up with what topics and sections should be added or/and expanded, it was time to create really this new content.
The increase in different sections:
To begin with, I decided to change the Basics section. It began with a concise explanation of the services provided by virtual mailbox services. Therefore, it was decided to focus on a more detailed analysis in this section.
In addition, I took a section of fees, analyzing in detail the changes in pricing policy, and the circumstances affecting it.
In the list of the mass of firms that provide the virtual mailbox service, the original just had a price range specified and a link. Therefore, it was decided to analyze the most popular of them in more detail, indicating their advantages and disadvantages, as well as key features.
It was unrealistic to do this for each individual company, because the information on the sites of most of them was very sparse. But I made sure to process those that had competitor pages.
In addition, I have made a number of small additions to the section defining user needs, in order to highlight the array of more modern features that now offer a number of services that probably did not have access to at the time of the initial publication of the post (for example, software integration).
A number of new sub-themes were added:
There was also one topic that I found in the deepest competing posts. This post was about authorizing virtual mail services with an online notary. This niche was popular among us readers, but it was no less important for the legal subscription of this demographic to them. In addition, it was an important addition to increase competitiveness in the fight for a high rating. They were also offered a new version of the affiliate program.
STEP #5: Optimize in place
The next step after updating and organizing the content was to perform some sort of basic optimization in place.
Nora mentioned earlier that she still didn't consider the CEO when creating her articles, so it was clear to me that I had a lot of opportunities ahead of me.
OPTIMIZATION OF THE HEADERS
First of all, the headers were optimized. I just love the header creation tool - the CoSchedule header content analyzer. It is free and creates catchy headlines. He doesn't care about the CEO, but by adding my CEO invention to it, I've made it a mega-efficient and extremely convenient tool.
And to increase its effectiveness for the stretch goal keyword, I placed it at the beginning of the title, providing a colon and putting related and emotional elements related to the journey at the end.
It took a number of manipulations to get the desired result and a fairly high (+70) score from the header Analyzer, but the work with the keyword "virtual mailbox: an easy way to get mail while traveling" was completed.
OPTIMIZATION OF SUBHEADINGS
Regarding the mass of sections from the first half, and then the list of a number of companies from different countries, there were different possibilities for creating subheadings with the introduction of keywords in them.
I had to rename the Basics section with the question " What is a virtual mailbox service?", in order to attract targeted visitors asking for a SERP feature or recommended result boxes.
The lion's share of headers contained a number of direct links to these services, so most of them were changed to “virtual mailbox service”, not “virtual mail service”, because the search volume received by the latter was zero. But I tried to adjust the exact wording or grammar in most of them, so as not to fall under excessive optimization.
I changed the subtitle preceding the list of companies to" virtual mailbox comparison " because it was a long keyword that I found in the course of analysis, and I knew that since my list is quite long and it is larger than a number of my competitors, this content will get a high level of relevance.
ADDING AND OPTIMIZING IMAGES
The original version of this post was completely devoid of images that gave for dull eye candy.
I had to add some themed post stock photos and realized that before uploading them, it's worth compressing them using ShortPixel. Then I added the description tags title and alt. They simultaneously contained keywords and described the content of the photo.
I also added logos for all the companies mentioned in this post.
This made it possible to perform a large-scale optimization of the title and alt tags and make them clickable, if possible simultaneously linking them to partner links. This allowed them to have a positive impact on SEO promotion and, if possible, increase revenue from partner companies.
DATE OF PUBLICATION
Based on the fact that the post was published quite a long time ago, I wanted to update its content for users who find it in SERPs. Therefore, it was decided to update the date of its publication in the WordPress database.
I think that "stale" post placement dates can interfere with traffic, which will negatively affect your traffic volume and reduce the click rate, and this will gradually reduce your SEO rating significantly after a while.
In addition, I made a note in the edited posts that read " current as of 2018: current prices and features are listed below!"This was done to confirm the quality of the content and to prove its relevance and regular updates (or at least it should be from now on!).
URL SLUG
The lion's share of the time, for new posts, I always optimize the slug near the keyword, trying to keep it short.
But now, it has been decided to save the url in its original form. As a rule, these were only copies of the original headers in the form of URLs, but the SEO advantages of the new slug do not compensate for the loss of redirection of the old url, and the loss of weight that it already had.
updated content in seo case study
CONCLUSIONS
Thus, we managed to increase the volume of traffic to Nora's email by 450%! (with a direct positive impact on the level of partner income!)
Therefore, the best option for you is to repeat our success! To do this, just repeat our steps step by step on the example of your blog and get ready for the rally.
Did our research inspire you? I will be immensely grateful to everyone who shares it on Facebook!
Have you tried it on your blog? Write about your results in the comments at the end of this case!
