SEO Case Study: how I managed to get a 600% increase in SEO traffic over two years
Until recently, it seemed to me that cases on SEO promotion written under similar titles are written by snake oil implementers. After all, by and large, a person bragging about the growth of organic traffic on a particular site is worthy of creating a sensation for the new York times, but how can he raise traffic by 600%? This can't be happening, can it?
I didn't think it happened a couple of years ago.
At that time, I rushed headlong to apply any SEO strategies that people could come up with, melting the hope that I would finally find at least one effective one among them.
And what have I not tried:
sending heaps of links in outreach mailings for weeks on end;
he wrote mega-valuable articles with an incredibly deep meaning, often about 2,500 words;
accelerated loading of the website;
eliminated all technical errors on the site that only I came across;
monotonously wrote posts providing them with internal links;
Familiar sad experience? But, the bulk of my attempts did not give any result at all.
However, this did not dampen my ardor, and my efforts were rewarded. I saw a couple of specific tactics and strategies that really helped me. I have achieved a doubling of their number. Do you anticipate what happened next?
Yes, Yes. These simple manipulations gave me an understanding of the insignificance of the results. And now I want to tell you about four key areas in which I began to move in order to achieve explosive results and show my key customer significant progress in SEO promotion, and so that you can use these methods in the future.
Don't forget that this is just a special case of the CEO case
A small but important note before we dive in: I don't want to get lost in speculation, but I just want to open up to people the only effective way to achieve the goal in SEO. In every niche, every campaign has a lot of features, and those tactics that worked perfectly in my case, can be absolutely useless to you.
However, this case study contains a couple of postulates that are applicable to almost any case, any running SEO project.
Point of departure
At the time I started working on this project, it had approximately 20,000 clicks from search engines every month. Quite well.
He compiled a checklist for a selection of keywords that have 1000-5000 search volume per month, and he had several hundred subscribers to a monthly mailing list with CEOS.
Nevertheless, this project had enormous potential.
It had really explosive content and could produce unique content of any subject from its niche. And all this is due to a huge long-term experience and achievements, so it is clear that the rapid growth of its rating for almost any key player in its niche after a certain time.
But it had one huge headache: unoptimized content combined with a small number of high-quality backlinks.
And 4 ways helped me to rapidly increase traffic:
A thorough analysis of the content.
To begin with, I have identified the top best content sources for this blog from the position of traffic growth (using Google Search Console as well as Google Analytics). He had a bunch of blog posts, but only a dozen of them were a source of constant traffic.
Consequently, 90% of the material in your blog was unpublished.
What was I supposed to do? I decided to put each pole in one of the two buckets.
Bucket #1
Updating, optimizing, and re-publishing: this bucket stored any existing content that had hidden potential. This included materials from which:
there were huge opportunities for keywords (huge search volume with little organic competition, for them it was not well ranked (if at all);
there were practical steps and unique ideas for readers, and there was a growth prospect.
Only five items were assigned to this category. At my request, the author created mountains of content for each post, and provided the blog with new sections focused on long keywords.
Well, after that, we updated the date of placement in WordPress, and issued it under the guise of a new post (while saving the old URL).
Create a post as a draft and
make a redirect: in this bucket there was content without a huge SEO potential, if at all it had one.
Most of these publications were either narrowly thematic with no significant search volume, or had content associated with one of the content resources that we stored.
If the content did not have SEO potential, it would not have been published by me, the 301st redirect would have been set up for it, either to the home page or to another site. We saved them as drafts in WordPress without publishing them, because we planned to use them in the future. Well, if a post dubbed some of our content resource, we added the content to the content resource and redirected the post to this resource with the 301st redirect.
At the end of the content analysis, only about three dozen blog posts were left (and this is taking into account the updated ones). However, for a couple of months, these publications gave more traffic than before, because now the weight of each publication in the blog has increased significantly and has gained SEO orientation.
Naturally, content analysis alone did not result in a 600% increase in traffic.
We needed more connections.
2. Continuation of information and propaganda work aimed at strengthening ties.
You already know that in order to survive and compete in organic search, you need to get high-quality links. So did I, but it didn't help me actually get those links first. I made a huge outreach mailing list, but the conversion rate according to the most optimal forecasts was only about 1% of the conversion rate. This was the case until I had to rethink my coverage strategy.
At first, I listened to the advice of expert bloggers. I adopted the cliches they suggested. And when I didn't see the results, I started looking for new chips.
I started giving free access to my author's websites and courses to everyone who didn't even add my link.
And it gradually dawned on me that if you own unique content, listen to those who have the same content and give them unique value. And you are waiting for a monstrous conversion race.
Constantly write new SEO-oriented content.
Constantly creating links in parallel, I worked with the author in the direction of creating new SEO-oriented content.
In the concept of SEO-drive, I put content written based on the best features of keywords from my niche. As a rule, authors first create articles, and then select keywords in order to "optimize"it. Here it's the opposite, if you want to achieve ranking of your material. Instead of using the huge potential of keywords that will be ranked on your site, in fact, you choose keywords with different levels of competitiveness, blindly.
You can pull out the "Golden share" several times in a row, and you will be lucky to find a low-competitive keyword that is perfectly ranked with your already created material. However, as a rule, you will not be able to do this, but you will have a problem with ranking in all planes.
So, before the new material was written, I made a detailed analysis of keywords to find the best opportunities in the niche chosen by the author (we are talking about A Google Sheet containing more than 5000 keywords). Next, I sorted the list by competitors and selected keywords with medium and high traffic and low competition (because this characterizes the ability of its site to rank by this keyword) in order to surround it with content.
Please note that I said keywords instead of keywords.
The next huge array of traffic creation and SEO content is aimed at a group of related keywords, not just one.
Since the Hummingbird algorithm was updated in 2013, it has been possible to rank a single piece of content for a variety of keywords. As a result, 25 pieces of content were created in two years. And after a few months after their publication, they all ranked a lot of keywords.
There are even some that are ranked by 12,000 keywords...
And despite the fact that at the moment the blog contains only 72 publications (whereas before there were more than 100), it can generate more than 140,000 targeted visitors per month from search results:
Google Analytics view for SEO case study
This is probably the most important point that you can't miss when we talk about content: it doesn't really matter how often you write. What is really important is the optimization and value of your content that is written regularly (at least once a day, at least once a month).
Implementation of internal linking tactics.
This may seem ridiculous, but linking can help SEO promote your site. It's about doing it in a minute, but it really works (especially on a global scale).
When I started working on this project, I noticed that many of the pages of his blog had a lot of internal links that were placed randomly, haphazardly.
We have eliminated this oversight.
After completing the initial analysis of the site's materials, I put new internal links on all its pages, and also optimized the anchor text of the old internal links.
I adopted a simple tactic. Added a dozen internal links to each blog post, using anchor text that includes or:
target keyword for other posts;
options for target keywords;
secondary long key.
It's very simple, isn't it?
After completing this, I figured out how to speed up this work in two ways (after all, it is worth recognizing that this is a routine activity for many hours in front of the monitor, if you need to process more than 50 posts):
in the admin panel, add internal links to each post.
If you like this way, then create a table containing all internal links to all blog posts, which will simplify the process of setting internal links during content scanning. Just open each blog post using the excellent anchor text features, which will always help you customize the content, and then paste the copied links as you like. If you don't use the anchor text mega features, you can customize the content whenever you want;
use the search in the WordPress admin panel to find the right phrases and put internal links to posts with these keywords.
Here you can search for target keywords, long tail keywords, and LSI keywords in your WordPress admin panel in order to find posts that already contain these keywords.
How to search in WordPress
Next, you only need to open these posts by providing them with internal links (and these manipulations are done with each post in the blog).
This is not a SEO tactic, but a SEO strategy that allows you to increase traffic. Perhaps you have already met the information collected in this case, as well as me.
I managed to implement a lot of strategies, but they did not give tangible results.
What did I do:
I sent General templates of an information and propaganda type that were extremely hackneyed and therefore had no value;
created invalid, unconvincing, non-unique material;
I was thinking about the frequency of writing content, not its SEO value;
I researched keywords after the author wrote articles (and Vice versa).
So it turns out that the tactic was correct, but it was not used for its intended purpose.
I didn't think about helping the author create mega - valuable content based on his unique ideas-this is what makes the content different from others. I did not think about giving site owners a unique value in their work in the field of creating links. And I did not think about contacting the owners who linked their similar sites to mine or made content of similar subjects.
This evolution has allowed me to make a breakthrough in SEO promotion not only with this project, but also with all my other customers, and they, in turn, are also willing to lend you a helping hand.
