Welcome to this SEO case study where we delve into how we managed to increase website traffic by 147%
Read on for tips and tricks and our best advice
Like so many of the businesses that contact us, they had already been working with SEO for a while. Unfortunately, they were noticing a negative trend with lower rankings than usual.
In this case study we share how we helped them negate the effects of a Google penalty, and increased their traffic.
The client was a high-end car dealer that operated multiple stores in the United Kingdom.
The keywords and phrases they were optimizing for were not too competitive, and yielded a great return on investment.
With this knowledge already available, their main focus was to restore the website traffic to the previous levels, by ranking better on the search engines.
Our team began work immediately:
The basis for everything - The initial SEO report
When working with clients that already have an established website, the first step is to get an overview of their SEO history.
Since Google had last updated their Core Algorithms for Google Search, the client had noticed multiple keywords and search phrases had been ranking lower than usual.
Upon further inspection by our team, we noticed that most of this was because many of the pages were either running into issues with duplicate content or a very superficial level of content, which resulted in high bounce rates.
This is not a rare issue, since many car dealers and other e-commerce sites typically list their products for sale without adding much content to the individual listings. On the plus side, it meant that the work necessary was clear from the start.
Prior to engaging us for a complete overhaul of their SEO efforts, they had already signed up for our link building services and noticed slight increases in rankings. That gave them the confidence to extend our arrangements.
Targeting The Current Content And Optimizing Low Hanging Fruit
We prefer working with our clients, as opposed to parallel with them. That’s why we tend to incorporate as much as possible from their previous content strategies, and in this case we wanted to expand their webpages to help them rank better.
As is often the case, our initial reports showed great opportunity for many pages. They just needed our expertise and know how to start ranking.
We have developed a special set of principles that determine which pages offer the most return and least risk, and thus find keywords applicable to the site with the following key properties:
Positions 4-30 with
KD equal to or less than 30
Minimum CPC .01
By using these prerequisites it becomes relatively straightforward to identify which keywords are the most valuable, and offer the least amount of competition and workload.
During our scan of the large website, we found more than 400 different target pages that matched the criteria.
Once these pages were identified, we began to look for patterns. We quickly learned that many of the pages were listings for vehicles that were for sale. Since these pages contained keywords with low competitive score, we determined it would be an effective use of our time to begin targeting these pages.
Analyzing the competition
Any successful SEO strategy at some point involves checking out the competition. For one it provides ideas you might not have thought of yourself, and it also points you in the direction the others might be missing out on.
The high-end car niche does not work quite the same as many other types of industries though.
That means that we found many keywords from the competitors that did not match the services of our client. This type of data was often related to the type and make of the cars, as well as local data not applicable in the areas our client was operating.
Our analysis of the competitors led us to discover that most of the better ranking sites did not employ a content-heavy strategy, which meant we saw a missed opportunity that we ourselves could capitalize on.
We put our strategy into practice and during the following months worked hard on building quality content as well as building more links.
The outcome
Once we had identified the best possible keyword and phrases to target, we were able to improve the ranking of many pages. This way we managed to rank the 10 most important phrases on the first page, as well as boost many other phrases too.
This image shows one of their exact matches that we managed to catapult up the rankings and significantly improve in just three months through our managed SEO efforts.
Since hiring us the client has seen a noticeable increase month over month in traffic from search results, and overall traffic value.
Our main goal was to improve the content already existing on the website, and supplement that with an effective link-building strategy.
This image shows how all important metrics of the website, such as search terms and traffic, saw a consistent improvement over time.
Within a 3 month period we managed to recover the traffic for the website, improve many of the search terms, including a significant portion of page 1 results, and even managed a 200% increase in organic traffic value.
The Blue Creative is available to help your business with any SEO issue you might have. We are experts at correcting Google penalties and traffic drops. Please contact us for more details about our managed SEO services.
