Since I ventured into the world of digital marketing, I have tried every SEO optimization technique “known” to man in hopes of finally finding something that worked.
I continued to test and soon found some specific SEO strategies and tactics that had excellent results for my and my client’s sites.
And now, I’m here to share my latest SEO case study that helped my client get tremendous results, going so far as to increase site traffic by 700%.
Premise: this single SEO case study is one of many ways to succeed with SEO. Every SEO campaign and every niche will have different nuances, and some strategies that might work well for some sites might not work well 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 site optimized a specific niche and was already ranking for some competitive keywords with a monthly search volume of 500 to 1000.
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 to rank for almost all the keywords in its niche.
The biggest problem was its non-search engine-optimized content and the need for a quality backlink profile.
Do you know how I got the results for this SEO case study? Read on; I will go into details without further ado.
5 strategies that blew up traffic with SEO optimization
1. In-depth audit of content
I started by identifying all site content, pages and articles. To do this, I used Screaming Frog. I then extracted the main things that interested me for the On SEO Page, such as:
- URL
- SEO Title, SEO Title Length
- Meta Description, Length of Meta Description
- H1
- H2-1, H2-2, H2-3, H2-4, and so on.
- Word count
Now having a clearer situation of the pages and posts of the site, I at article by article and entered it into Ahrefs to identify the main keywords for which it ranks.
As an SEO consultant, I believe that if an article/page does not rank in the first three pages of a Google search, it is useless to use backlinks to gudgeon positions; it makes no sense because Google has already decided that the content is not relevant to users.
Then some factors can influence, and a technical SEO audit should be done for each site to rule out potential errors, but once ranking factors such as website speed, usability on mobile devices, internal links, etc., are excluded or improved, it becomes all about On SEO Page since the main goal of Google RankBrain is to understand the user’s search intent and provide them with relevant results.
But is Google good at understanding user intent, also called “search intent”,?
Let’s find out below.
2. Research, Renew, Optimize and Republish
Most pages were not written from an SEO perspective and needed to follow complete keyword research, including the main keyword, secondary, variational and LSIs. So, I started from:
Keyword research
I researched relevant keywords for each article/page using my keyword research method for SEO. I tried to understand the search intent to choose the right keywords.
How?
Go to Google to type in the main keyword and, in some cases, secondary ones. Let’s take an example to understand better. Let’s say I’m trying to rank for the keyword “SEO optimization tips“.
Do you also notice how featured snippets invade the first results in Google? Google is changing, and we also need to optimize SEO accordingly. Learn how to optimize featured snippets to be first among the results in Google.
In this case, I put the link of the first competitor on Ahrefs and extracted the keywords for which it ranks by dividing them by type.
Summarizing this passage, I have identified the following:
- The likely principal keyword for each article
- From this, I identified a useful competitor for the next step
- Using Ahrefs, I identified and organized keywords by their type
In the next step, I modified and optimized the content; let’s go and see.
Renew, Optimize and Republish Content
Most of these posts were written on very specific topics without much research volume and had content related to one of the digital services they offered.
If there were no SEO potential for a post, I would cancel it and set up a 301 redirect to a relevant content resource or home page.
At the end of the content audit, only about 30 blog posts were left to revamp and optimize.
I recreated the content where it was needed taking into account the search intent and trying to bring the blog posts to about 1300-1500 words. Here is where On-Page SEO optimization comes in, for which I prepared the guide:
On-page SEO: A beginner’s guide to optimization
Below I only give a summary of the parts to be optimized:
- Include the keyword in the SEO title, H1, and text
- Using short URLs
- Optimize the title tag
- Writing a meta description CTA
- Optimizing images
- Fix internal links
Renewing and optimizing content did not lead to a 800% increase in traffic.
There was also a need for backlinks. Therefore, I started doing outreach.
3. Link building
To climb in ranking, you already know you must create high-quality links. So avoid buying PBNs and links in quantity so that you can say you created backlinks for the site. It either doesn’t work or is counterproductive.
You first need to understand what stage the site is in; if it is new, there will be a sandbox period where even if you create backlinks, you don’t see any effect on SEO ranking. Read my recipe for sandbox reduction.
The building blocks for creating backlinks
Relevance
Google uses backlinks to determine what is your website niche.
So, I had a backlink to the article in question that deals with SEO optimization, Google’s algorithm will assume that my site is SEO-related.
Moreover, if the backlink website is also about SEO, the algorithm will have even more “evidence” 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 rewards trustworthy sources. But with thousands of websites popping up every day (and not all of them providing accurate information), how does a search engine decide that one website is more trustworthy than another?
There are several theories; I anticipate one: trust is determined by Google’s algorithm and is obtained through backlinks from websites that already rank. This is not a proven theory, but it makes sense logistically.
Power
There is an old algorithm called “PageRank,” which is a formula that Google uses to determine how important and authoritative a page is based on the number and power of links targeting it.
When you get PageRank from a backlink, this is what we like to call “link juice” in the industry. Having more valuable backlinks = more link juice = higher rankings.
You need all three (power, trust, relevance) to be successful.
A site then has 3 phases, each corresponding to a certain type of backlink. Let’s briefly look at the 3 phases:
The 3 phases of a website
Sandbox
The first phase of any website is the Google Sandbox. At this point, your Web site is completely new, and your main priority should be to build “Trust” with Google, so no shady schemes to quickly gain rankings that could get you penalized.
How do you know when you have built enough confidence and jumped out of the Sandbox Stage?
Don’t worry, you will know. Traffic graphs will appear vertically that day.
Reliability
Stage 2 is the trustworthy stage because you have already established that your Web site is credible, relevant, and useful to your audience. At this stage, it is important to continue building trust by building more links through guest posts.
There is a new type of backlink at this stage: link insertions or links that are added to existing pages or articles.
Authority
The last step in the process, authority mode, takes everything you have done so far and turns it up to 11.
How do you know when you are in authority mode? When you start ranking as soon as you post new articles.
Then there are the 3 stages of link building that we quickly see.
I stretched it a bit too far, but it was a necessary description so that you understand what stage your website is in and what kind of backlinks to create. To learn more, read what link building is and how to do it.
The site in question is in the “reliability” stage. Therefore, I had to create links by guest posting and inserting links into existing articles.
How did I choose the sites on which to publish guest posts?
I analyzed the following metrics for each site:
- DR – Domain Rating of Ahrefs > 30
- Site traffic – detected with Ahrefs > 3000
- DA – Domain Authority (Detected with Moz or Websiteseochecker) > 30
- CF – Citation Flow (Surveyed with Majestic or Linkody) > 10
- TF – Trust Flow (Detected with Majestic or Linkody) > 10
- SS – Spam Score (Detected with Moz or Websiteseochecker) ≤ 1
Meanwhile, I continued with SEO optimization by creating new content
4. New SEO-oriented content
While doing outreach and creating 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 indicated in part above. Many people write content and find a keyword to “optimize” it. Writing content this way only considers so many SEO factors; I do not recommend it.
Therefore, before creating any new content, I did extensive keyword research in different languages, sorted the worksheet and created new content.
Notice how I said keywords instead of keywordsù?
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, you can rank a single content for several keywords. A few days after each was published, they all started ranking for different keywords, often on the first 3 pages of Google,
Here’s the important thing to notice when it comes to content: it doesn’t matter how much content you produce or how often you produce it. What matters is how relevant and SEO-optimized it is.
5. Internal linking for SEO
Something that helps SEO optimize your site is about adding internal links between the pages. It takes five seconds and helps (especially on a large scale).
When I started working on the site in question, there were some internal links on most of its pages and posts, but there needed to be a clear strategy behind them.
After completing the initial content audit, I reviewed the entire site by adding new internal links and optimizing the anchor text of old ones.
The strategy I used was simple. Add at least 5 internal links to each blog post using the anchor text it includes:
- The target keyword from other posts
- A variation of the target keyword or
- A long-tailed secondary keyword
Simple enough?
So, all you have to do is go through the posts and add internal links.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed this SEO case study, and can help you with your project and 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.
Now my client has a niche site and sells specific digital products, so since he gets between 7,000 and 8,000 visits per month, he has good increased conversions.
I was able to (one person), with one writer and a limited budget, build something I’m proud of.
This case study shows that you don’t need fancy SEO tricks to get high rankings and traffic to your blog or website. You don’t need to trick Google with the latest SEO hack that will only work a month from now.
It is SEO strategy, not SEO tactics, that increases traffic.