SEO Case Study
1. Pet Niche Site SEO Results
Background
This site was getting almost no traffic, even though it was registered in late 2013. The owner had spent a good amount of time on this site and built out a significant amount of pages, however, it wasn’t getting hardly ANY traffic.
Audit
The first thing we always do is audit the site to see if it has any major underlying issues. This site had no penalties, it just never ranked page 1 for the target keywords. It also had no over-optimization, they just didn’t have many links.
Ahrefs shows organic keywords but it doesn’t tell the whole story – You can see below that the site had keywords in the top 100, but that’s not as important in being in the top 10. That’s where our “easy wins analysis” REALLY COMES IN HANDY.
Easy Wins Analysis
With our easy wins analysis, we look for keywords that are ranking somewhere in Google, but not in the top spots where the majority of the traffic is. If we can identify these, we can push them up and see quicker traffic gains.
For this site, we identified 1001 easy wins keywords, ranking mostly on page 2-3 with traffic between 10 – 9,400ms, with CPC between about .50 cents – $6.
This site had HUGE potential, but since the site wasn’t cracking page 1, it wasn’t getting much love.
Content Gap Analysis
With the content gap analysis, we look for competitor keywords that the site isn’t targeting yet, and this becomes the basis for our content creation.
For this site, we found 103 keywords volume between 150 – 2900 ms, with similar PPC costs to the easy wins. We worked with the client to pick out high priorities and selected some keywords based on their industry trends knowledge (This is why we work WITH the customers to understand business goals).
Here’s what our campaigns looked like:
Month 1:
- 1 Guest Post – Exact match on easy wins
- 1 Guest Post – Exact match (another kw) on another easy win
- Link Building (Web 2.0s) – partial match, brand, naked anchors
- Blog Post – 1 x 1000 word post – informational kw focus based on industry trends
Month 2 – Very Similar
- 1 Guest Post – money keyword variation
- 1 Guest Post – money keyword variation
- Link Building – partial match, branded, naked anchors
- Blog Post – 1 x 1000 word post – money keyword
Month 3 – Similar, But got more anchor text diversity
- 1 Guest Post – Branded
- 1 Guest Post – Branded
- Link Building – Branded, URL, Partial match mix
- Blog Post – 1 x 1000 – Content gap kw, high volume
Results
Since this site had a decent amount of content already and had so many opportunities for easy wins, we really focused on getting those easy wins up to page 1.
When we were able to do this – The traffic exploded:
Takeaways
This was only 3 months of work and this site has a ton more potential. In the next 3 months, we’ll begin linking some high volume keywords that we used for content. This site is set up for domination in the niche!
Here are some other early campaign results from clients:
Niche How To Website:
Health Advice Website:
Dog Breeder:
