As of today (The 24th of August, 2016) my agency has been open just over 1 month, and we’re happy to say we’ve had some fantastic results, so much so that we can case study several of them to show you exactly what we’ve done, the spend and the results.
Table of Contents
This is a UK based client that specialises in a niche with high value product sales, here’s an overview of what we had to start with:
- £6,000/Mo Budget (+ £20,000 Upfront For Initial Work)
- Very Old Domain (10+ Years)
- Non-UK TLD (.Com even though it targeted the UK)
- Large PPC Budget – Spends around £18,000/Mo on Adwords
We started off by doing a complete analysis of the OnPage and OffPage, which concluded:
- The client had no active link building campaign, and had acquired links either naturally or from offline/online promotions, such as competitions, local directories, newspapers etc..
- The site had very poor structure, with random folders and a layout that didn’t make too much sense.
- Most of the sites meta data was automatically generated, and missed out on tons of keyword opportunities.
- The sitemap was split into several sitemaps with configurations which made the crawling of the site slower than better.
- There was no schema, local markup or microdata on the site what so ever.
We were lucky that the client had an offline developer version of the site, as we started implementing OnPage changes via the developer version of the site all at once, re-ran our OnPage analysis tools, made further changes and then uploaded the SEO’d developer version to the live site.
OnPage Changes
The OnPage changes we made took a total of 2 weeks, which were:
Site Structure
We changed the entire site structure, removing a /product/ string, which served no SEO purpose and pushed the site structure levels even further down the chain.
Previously, the structure levels were:
Level 1: Home (Root)
Level 2: Brands / Categories (/example/)
Level 4: Products (/example-brand-or-cat/product/name/)
Level 5: Sub-Products (/example/example/product/name/name2)
Level 3: Blog, About etc.. (/example/blog-or-about/)
This was making all the URL strings way too long, and without breadcrumbs made the URLs look plain ugly inside Google, so we added breadcrumbs, we removed the trailing slash from URLs and changed the URL levels to:
Level 1: Home (Root)
Level 2: Brands / Categories (/brand-or-cat)
Level 2: Blog, About etc.. (/blog-or-about)
Level 3: Products (/brand-or-cat/name)
Level 4: Sub-Products (/brand-or-cat/name/name2)
Meta Data
Whilst fixing the URL structure, we had an inhouse member of the team crawl the entire site and make an Excel doc changing the over 8,000 pages of automatically generated meta data by hand. This took our inhouse team member about 58 hours of work to do – He managed to do it over the cause of the 2 weeks.
We then had the developer use the Excel document to automatically change the meta data we had re-written for each page URL.
Sitemap
Previously, the sitemaps seemed completely random and weren’t automatically generated which meant it missed hundreds of new pages that had been created since the previous agency created the old sitemap.
We split the sitemap into several sitemaps:
- Main Pages (Home, About, Blog, Events etc)
- Blog Posts/Categories
- Brand & Category Pages
- Product Pages
We also had our developer make sure any new pages in any categories would be automatically added to the correct sitemap in future.
Microdata
The address in the footer had no schema, so we made sure that was marked up.
We also added author and article schema to the author box on each blog posts.
Content Campaign
Previously, the blog only had about 20 posts over a number of years on the site. We decided to have our internal writer spend 4 hours per day writing a new post and publishing it.
Our writer is trained in OnPage SEO, so several of the posts were targeting “best” and “review” type keywords, which added an additional 300 visits in the week after they had all been put live.
We also had our writer make sure every post was targeted and interlinked, which adds topical relevancy to the entire site and passes juice throughout these pages.
Once these posts were live, we used our link building assistant to submit the posts to sites like Tumblr, Reddit, Forums etc.. Which help them be more powerful for the internal linking, adds more ref’ing domains and up’s the crawl rate.
Link Building Campaign
Though we haven’t had enough real time to see how our link building campaign will do overall, whilst the OnPage updates to the dev site were going on, we had our link building assistant and suppliers work on a number of links which helped a lot with the end result and increasing crawl rate when we put the new site live.
Editorial Links
We work with a number of bloggers in the UK, and have access to tons of databases for all sorts of sites.
We used sponsored posting, our own outreach campaign and a specialist provider to get related links from not only the likes of Huffington Post UK, but also got links from several Mommy/DIY/Home etc.. type bloggers.
This resulted in over 25 new referring domains in just 10 days.
Infographic + Submissions
Luckily, the client had already created an infographic several years ago which dated the changes in the industries law.
We had our link building assistant spend 5 hours submitting the infographic to over 50 sites, and then had him spend several hours do outreach to sites that had posts around the topic, and may benefit from the infographic adding to the blog post.
This resulted in 40 new nofollow referring domains, and 17 dofollow referring domains.
Citations
The site had several of the bigger citations in the UK, but hadn’t really done any niche or local citations.
We had our assistant go out, build a spreadsheet around missing citations and we then manually checked them ourselves. Once we approved the list, we had him go and build the citations.
This resulted in 35 citations being built, with 4 of those citations being dofollow. 30/35 of the citations were .uk TLDs, as we’re focusing on UK SERPs only.
Live, Submission & Indexing
We put the site live on Friday, the 29th of July, 2016.
Over the Friday and following weekend, we used webmaster tools to re-crawl the homepage and several main pages, removed the previous sitemaps and re-submitted all the new ones.
We also used our internal submission/crawling tactics to get the site completely reindexed, which resulted in the crawl rate jumping massively in comparison to how it was prior to the new site going live.
The Results
The client is over the moon with our results, and has signed a 12 month contract to work with us as a direct result of the first month of work.
As you can see, the number of unique purchases, conversion rate, revenue etc.. Is all up in comparison to the previous week.
We’re also increasing the scale of the link building campaign, which is continuing to show even more growth.
If you’d like to see similar results, then why not get in contact with my agency today.