BACKGROUND
Affiliate website specialised in reviewing weight loss supplements.
Our client’s website provides a platform for users to access trustworthy, specialist reviews and decide which diet supplement is best suited for them.
The main focus of the campaign was to build the website’s authority in its niche and push rankings to the first page for high-volume niche relevant terms.
Within 6 months from the start of the campaign, we increased organic traffic by 493.65%,
from 3,778 in November 2017 to 22,428 sessions in April 2018.
THE CHALLENGE
The weight loss supplements niche is a very competitive environment, with SERPs being dominated by huge brands such as Holland & Barrett, Amazon, My Protein and various health magazines, like Women’s Health.
OUR SOLUTION
The main focus of the campaign was to stabilize the website and make sure that the negative SEO from competitors will not trigger an algorithmic penalty from Google, bring back the decreased organic positions in SERPS, strengthen up the website’s authority in this niche and improve as many positions on the first and second page as possible.
TECHNICAL AUDIT
The first step of the campaign was to produce a comprehensive technical audit for the website to identify any issues that might hold it back from performing at its full potential.
We identified and addressed several issues:
- Loading speed - this could be improved by optimising images and leveraging browser caching.
- Duplicate content caused by improper use of taxonomies
- Internal 301 redirects, which implied a review of the sidebar navigation menu
- Alt-tag missing for product images
WEBSITE AUDIT
Another area we addressed as part of the technical audit and which had a massive impact on the growth of the website, was the internal structure of the website.
Site structure plays an imperative role for both usability and SEO, helping users navigate easily through the website and crawlers discover the most important content.
The website should follow a logical structure with a clear, easy to follow split
between sections, with your core pages located within maximum 3 clicks from the homepage.
Almost half of our client's pages were within 4 to 8 steps away from the homepage, therefore we decided to completely overhaul the folder structure of the site. Now, all pages stay within 2 steps from the homepage. With good navigation and proper internal linking we assured that link equity is flawlessly distributed across the website.
However, note that this is a strategy recommended for small websites with a flat structure, that target only one topic and it can’t be applied to complex websites.
THIN CONTENT
As part of the initial audit we identified an issue with thin content, where over 50% of the website pages had under 900 words. The niche in which our client operates is content heavy, so we identified an opportunity to boost authority by providing high-quality, comprehensive content that covers the topic holistically. As we know Google rewards fresh, long content that addresses user intent, so we knew that this strategy will support us in achieving our main campaign goal.
Using keyword research we identified what users are looking for and we incorporated all their questions in the content we created. As a result we increased the length of the homepage from 1,500 words to 10,911 words by answering over 20 of the most popular questions around the product our client offers. By extending the on-page copy and targeting highly relevant terms we increased the visibility of the homepage, which now ranks for over 3,200 keywords.
Following the same strategy we raised the average word count per page from 700 words to 2,216 words per page.
In addition to expanding the website’s copy, we also reviewed and optimised:
- Page titles
- Meta descriptions
- On-page headings
INTERNAL LINKING
Once we developed our killer content, it was just a matter to help Google navigate the website and discover all the pages we created. We used internal linking strategies to distribute link value throughout the site, from pages with authority to others with less authority.
We used a balanced combination of targeted, branded and miscellaneous anchors to help Google determine the relationship between the various pages, posts and content on the website.
Appart from contextual internal links we sourced, installed and tested a number of plugins allowing us to add related articles to our client’s money pages. Using the plugin we’ve added the crucial internal navigation allowing for a better page rank and authority flow throughout the most important pages.
LINK BUILDING
Throughout the campaign we increased the authority of the domain by building highly relevant and authoritative links from blogs and niche websites.
Our activities increased the backlink profile of our client from 27 referring domains at the beginning of the campaign to currently, 374 referring domains. We achieved these results by prospecting a huge list of relevant websites with high SEO value, traffic and authority. We provided those opened for collaboration with high quality content, targeted at their audience to secure a backlink to our client’s website.
THE RESULTS
With the recommendations from the audit actioned in November and links being pointed at the key internal pages, traffic continuously grew month-on-month.
By May 2018, organic traffic was up 493.65% compared to the start of the campaign, from 3,778 in November 2017 to 22,428 sessions in April 2018.
Similarly, the number of new users had increased by 487.11%, with 19,774 new visits in April compared to 3,368 in November.
Overall domain metrics have increased as well. Using Ahrefs key metrics as reference, at the start of the project the DR of the domain was 45, while the UR for the homepage was 10. Currently, the domain DR increased to 59 (+14 up) and the homepage UR increased to 41 (+31 up).
ORGANIC TRAFFIC
The website saw an increase in the keywords towards the end of 2017. Following this, we started to see big traffic improve in the following months. We find this is a very normal behaviour with all of our campaigns.
REFERRING DOMAINS
This website needed lots of links built to help establish itself as an authority. We made a big growth in the link velocity and helped them to scale their link profile effectively. This contributed towards the increased traffic.
TRACKED KEYWORDS NET GRAPH
Across the 48 core keywords we monitored for this campaign we registered a net increase of 852 positions in Google.com. This increase was seen across Google Desktop and Google Mobile.
TRACKED KEYWORDS
You can see from the below table of keywords, that many of the keywords moved into the top positions, including some large volume keywords. This is what helped to drive the traffic up significantly.
