Since I ventured into the world of digital marketing I have tried every technique SEO optimization “known” by man in the hope of finally finding something that worked.
I continued testing and soon found some specific SEO strategies and tactics that worked great for my and my clients' sites.
And now I’m here to share my latest SEO case study that helped my client achieve huge results, even increasing traffic to the 400% website.
Disclaimer: This is a single SEO case study and is not the only way to achieve SEO success. Every SEO campaign and every niche will have different nuances, and some strategies that might work well for some sites may not work for you.
That said, there are several principles in this SEO case study that you can apply to any SEO campaign you plan to start.
The starting point
The site optimizes for a specific niche and was already ranking for a few competitive keywords with a monthly search volume between 1,000 and 2,000.
But there was potential for much more.
The site had mediocre multilingual content on the niche topic but many years of experience and results, so it was clear that it had a chance of ranking for almost any keyword in its niche.
The biggest problem was its non-search engine optimized content and lack of a quality backlink profile.
Curious to find out how I achieved the results for this SEO case study? Read on, and I'll get into the details without further ado.
5 SEO Strategies That Blew Up Traffic
1. In-depth content audit
I started by identifying all the site's content, pages, and articles. To do this, I used Screaming Frog. I then extracted the main things that interested me for the On Page SEO such as:
- URL
- SEO Title, SEO Title Length
- Meta Description, Meta Description Length
- H1
- H2-1, H2-2, H2-3, H2-4, etc.
- Word count
Now that I have a clearer picture of the site's pages and posts, I've analyzed each article and inserted it into Ahrefs to identify the main keywords it ranks for.
As SEO consultant I am of the opinion that if an article/page does not rank in the first three pages of Google search, it is useless to use backlinks to gain positions, it makes no sense because Google has already decided that the content is not relevant to users.
Then there are factors that can influence it, and a technical SEO audit must be performed for each site to rule out potential errors. However, once ranking factors such as website speed, usability on mobile devices, internal links, etc. have been eliminated or improved, it becomes all about On-Page SEO, since Google RankBrain's main goal is to understand user search intent and provide them with relevant results.
But is Google REALLY good at understanding user intent, also called “search intent”?
Let's find out below.
2. Research, Renew, Optimize, and Republish
Most of the pages weren't written with SEO in mind and didn't follow comprehensive keyword research that included the main keyword, secondary keywords, variational keywords, and LSI keywords. This is where I started and began to:
Search for keywords
For each article/page I researched the relevant keywords with my own method. keyword research for SEO. Obviously I tried to understand the search intent to choose the right keywords.
As?
Simply go to Google and type in the primary keyword and, in some cases, secondary keywords. To better understand, let's take the article in question as an example. I'm trying to rank for the keyword "SEO optimization" by creating a case study.
Have you noticed how featured snippets are flooding Google's top results? Google is changing, and we need to optimize our SEO accordingly. Learn how to optimize featured snippets to rank high on Google's results.
Back to us. What I did in this case was to put the first competitor's link on Ahrefs and extract the keywords it ranks for, breaking them down by type. I did the same for my case study.
Summarizing this passage I have identified:
- The likely main keyword for each article
- From which I identified the useful competitor for the next step
- Thanks to one of the best keyword tools I identified and organized the keywords by their type
In the next step I edited and optimized the content, let's take a look.
Refresh, Optimize, and Republish Content
Most of these posts were written on very specific topics without much search volume and contained content related to one of the digital services they offered.
If there was no SEO potential for a post, I would delete it and set up a 301 redirect to a relevant content resource or the homepage.
By the end of the content review, there were only about 30 blog posts left to revamp and optimize.
I reworked the content where necessary, taking into account search intent and trying to keep blog posts to around 1,300-1,500 words. This is where on-page SEO optimization comes into play, so I've prepared this guide:
On-Page SEO: A Beginner's Guide to Optimization
Below I just summarize the parts to optimize:
- Include keyword in SEO title, H1, text
- Use short URLs
- Optimize the title tag
- Write a CTA meta description
- Optimize images
- Fix internal links
Obviously, renewing and optimizing the content did not lead to an increase in traffic on the 400%.
I also needed backlinks, so I started doing outreach.
3. Link building
To climb the rankings, you already know you need to build high-quality links. So, avoid buying PBNs and links in droves just to be able to say you've built backlinks for your site. It doesn't work or is counterproductive.
First, you need to understand what stage the site is in. If it's new, there will certainly be a sandbox period during which, even if you build backlinks, you won't see any impact on your SEO rankings. Read my recipe for reducing the sandbox.
The building blocks for building backlinks
Relevance
Google uses backlinks to determine what your website is about.
So, let's say I have a backlink to the article in question that talks about SEO optimization, Google's algorithm will assume that my site is related to SEO.
Additionally, if the backlinked website is also SEO-related, the algorithm will have even more “proof” that my site is related to that topic.
Trust
Trust plays a huge role in link building. Google's goal is to provide useful and authoritative content to its users, and as a result, it likes to reward reliable sources. But with thousands of websites popping up every day (and not all of them providing accurate information), how does a search engine decide which website is more trustworthy than another?
There are several theories, but I'll give you one: trust is determined by Google's algorithm and is earned through backlinks from websites that already rank well. Now, this isn't a proven theory, but it makes sense logistically.
Power
There's an old algorithm called “PageRank,” which is a formula Google uses to determine how important and authoritative a page is based on the number and strength of links pointing to it.
When you get PageRank from a backlink, that's what we like to call "link juice" in the industry. More valuable backlinks = more link juice = higher rankings.
You need all three (power, trust, relevance) to succeed.
A website has three phases, and each of them corresponds to a certain type of backlink. Let's briefly look at the three phases:
The 3 phases of a website
Sandbox
The first stage of any website is the Google Sandbox. At this point, your website is completely new, and your main priority should be building trust with Google, so no shady schemes to quickly gain rankings that could get you penalized.
How do you know when you've built enough confidence and jumped out of the Sandbox Stage?
Don't worry, you'll know. The traffic graphs will appear vertical that day.
Reliability
Stage 2 is the trustworthy stage because you've already established that your website is credible, relevant, and useful to your audience. At this stage, it's important to continue building trust by building more links through guest posts.
At this stage, there is a new type of backlink: link insertions or links that are added to existing pages or posts.
Authority
The final stage of the process, Authority Mode, takes everything you've done so far and turns it up to 11.
How do you know when you're in authority mode? When you start ranking instantly when you publish new articles.
Then there are the 3 phases of link building that we will quickly look at.
I've gone on a bit too long, but it was a necessary description to help you understand the stage your website is in and what kind of backlinks to build. If you'd like to learn more, read What is link building and how should it be done?
The site in question is in the "reliability" phase. Therefore, I had to build links through guest posting and inserting links into existing articles.
How did I choose the sites to guest post on?
I analyzed the following metrics for each site:
- DR – Domain Rating of Ahrefs > 30
- Site traffic – tracked with Ahrefs > 3000
- DA – Domain Authority (Detected with Moz or Website SEO Checker) > 30
- CF – Citation Flow (Detected with Majestic or Linkody) > 10
- TF – Trust Flow (Measured with Majestic or Linkody) > 10
- SS – Spam Score (Detected with Moz or Websiteseochecker) ≤ 1
Read my guide on how to publish your first guest post.
In the meantime I continued with SEO optimization by creating new content
4. New SEO-oriented content
While I was doing outreach and building backlinks, I also worked on new SEO-optimized content.
By SEO-optimized content, I mean content created based on keyword research and the process I outlined above. Many people write content and then find a keyword to "optimize" it for. This approach doesn't take many SEO factors into account; I don't recommend it.
So, before creating any new content, I did thorough keyword research in several languages, organized my spreadsheet, and created new content.
Notice how I said keywords instead of keyword?
Another huge part of creating SEO content that drives traffic is targeting a group of related keywords instead of just one.
Since the Hummingbird algorithm update in 2013, a single piece of content has been able to rank for multiple keywords. Within days of publishing each piece, they all began ranking for multiple keywords, often within the top three pages of Google.
Here's the important thing to remember when it comes to content: it doesn't matter how much content you produce or how often. What really matters is how relevant and SEO-optimized it is.
5. Internal linking for SEO
Something simple that helps your site's SEO optimization is adding internal links between your site's pages. It literally takes five seconds and really helps (especially on a large scale).
When I first started working on the site in question, there were some internal links on most of its pages and posts, but there was no clear strategy behind them.
After completing the initial content audit, I went through the entire site, adding new internal links and optimizing the anchor text of old ones.
The strategy I used was simple. Add at least five internal links to each blog post using anchor text that includes:
- The target keyword of other posts
- A variation of the target keyword or
- A long-tail secondary keyword
Simple enough, right?
So, all you have to do is review the posts and add internal links.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed this SEO case study and that it can help you with your project and your’SEO optimization.
SEO is not about how big the search graph is, but about being able to execute and get results even with constraints and limitations in any niche.
My client now has a niche site and sells specific digital products, so since they now get between 7,000 and 8,000 visits a month, they've significantly increased their conversions.
I was able to (one person) with one writer and a very limited budget, build something I'm really proud of.
This proves that you don't need fancy SEO tricks to get high rankings and traffic to your blog or website. You don't need to fool Google with the latest SEO hack that won't work in a month.
It is the SEO strategy, not the SEO tactics, that increases traffic.
