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How I Saved a Website that Google Hated [SEO Case Study]
in this video I'll teach you step by step everything I did to rescue a dead website and convince Google to love it eventually increasing its traffic by 61 if you've ever had a website that you're convinced Google hates then pay attention I'll have Google wanting to make out with your website in no time my name is Matt Diggity and I'm a director at the search initiative a Cutting Edge International SEO agency that Prides itself on our time-tested SEO strategies first let's get into the case study itself the client sells Health supplements in the United States in a wildly lucrative yet competitive Niche one of the main issues we faced is that their old website looked like it was definitely one of the first websites ever built and users weren't sticking around on it and converting like they should the site needed a 2023 overhaul I mean are you going to ingest supplements purchased from a website that has the ux design of Pac-Man this wasn't only hurting their conversions but Google was tracking these people bouncing from their website and that resulted in lower rankings and traffic also the website had low eeat it was hard for both Google and readers to tell who owned the site and it was impossible to figure out if those unknown owners were trustworthy of high rankings don't worry we'll get into all this stuff soon in addition the content on the site was not optimized for SEO the product descriptions themselves needed an overhaul but the website itself needed massive supporting content in order to build topical relevance in their Niche category and finally the website had a bunch of links but it was missing a certain type of link that would round out the link profile and give it trust oh yeah and one more thing that website redesign was going on at the same time so we had a coordinated website migration alongside all this SEO we had our work cut out for us and work our asses off we did ultimately resulting in a 61 increase in traffic and the client was making a butt ton more money I'm about to teach you all the tactics that got these gains but before I get started let me know if you appreciate content like this by dropping a bomb and the like button it's a solid win-win sure it gives me a sweet dopamine trigger which makes me addicted to making more videos like this but it also lets a YouTube algorithm know what you want to see more of the first item on our list is how to establish eeat on your website I'm starting with this because it's critical to do but ninety percent of SEO professionals get this wrong eeat stands for experience expertise authoritativeness and trust this unwieldy acronym which I'm now just going to call eat is a big hit in Google's quality rater guidelines and comes up 126 freaking times so people interpret e is a pretty big deal it's full of implications like Health content should only be written by doctors supplement content is best written by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Cat shaving content can only be written by Dr Evil I made a video called my official thoughts on the number one Google ranking Factor discussing e to save you the time from watching it here's a spoiler the way most SEO gurus teach eat is complete and utter [ __ ] stop for a minute and think about it Google needs to process 8.5 billion searches per day and Google needs to take the 1.13 billion websites on the internet and sort them for each of these searches every day do you think Google is really going to go to your website see who is writing your content track down your LinkedIn profile see what university you went to then call up the dean to make sure you majored in your Niche topic and got a 3.0 GPA or higher they go broke doing it for just one percent of the internet and even if they had the capacity and infinite budget to do it have you considered how easy it would be to fake you need to think like a search engine there are indeed some things that Google's crawler can check for cheaply and effectively and that's what you should focus on such as making it easy for readers to contact you they give plenty examples of this in the quality rater guidelines and it makes sense how easy is it for a crawler to figure out if you have a contact page or not so make one don't just have a form on it but include your address hard printed email as well as a phone number make an effort for an extra touch you can also Place contact information in your navigation and footer bars Pro tip when adding telephone numbers and email addresses always remember to make them clickable this is especially important for your mobile website as it means that users can simply click the contact information to call or email you instead of having to highlight copy and paste it if you have an e-commerce site also include customer service information like shipping details or return policies hell I even do this for affiliate sites by creating a return at domains.com email address and stamping it on my site next you want to go balls to the wall with your about page talk about the history of your business real trustworthy businesses have the story crappy SEO websites don't flash your credentials if you got them or at the very least the high Authority websites that you've been featured on list out who is behind the business and who creates content for the website include a headshot a link to social media profiles and individual email addresses again we're giving the crawler something easy to detect do these have to be real people what if you have an affiliate website and you don't feel comfortable placing your face on it personas work perfectly fine but you can do better get your writers on there or better yet influencers check out my video called how to beat eat and get influencers to represent your SEO website after you finish here next in the content itself have author bios pointing out who wrote the content include again the author name a short bio of their experience links to social media and a headshot you should also make sure that your content is up to date content freshness is another recommendation from the quality rated guidelines add a last modified date both visibly and using schema in your content optimize your title and headings to Signal the freshness of your content all the aforementioned tasks show that you're making an effort and that effort can be easily picked up by Google's robot but it turns out that according to Google search liaison Gary Ilyas eat is quote largely based on links which brings me to the link building part of this tutorial and how this client had a great link profile but it was missing a single link type to pull it all together if we go back to this tweet it specifically pointed out that its links on authoritative websites like the Washington posts that create eat the Washington Post is what's known as a seed site seed sites are manually curated super trusted websites on the internet that Google thinks are the best if you get a link directly from a seed site that's awesome but super rare if you get a link from another website that has a link from a seed site that's the next best thing what's the best way to get seed site links the first is digital PR what you're doing here is creating newsworthy stories and getting them in the front of the eyes of journalists in the biggest online Publications I wrote this article on which tech companies have had the biggest impact in the 21st century it leverages data and polls to achieve its conclusions and it's picked up 65 backlinks including the New York Times to succeed at digital PR you need to start with a relevant story what subject is particularly important today then you want to make your content as linkable as possible this almost always means that you want to include a lot of hard data and lastly you want to be able to get this in front of journalists that are interested in that subject I have a full video coming up on digital PR so make sure to subscribe that said these days I get fairy and the amazing team over at search intelligence to run our campaigns the second way to get seedside links is through Haro Haro stands for help a reporter out and it's a platform where journalists can request quotes from the public such as how is AI affected your workplace if you submit an answer to this question and they use it they'll give you a link how is a great link building tool because it's free to use it's just a major time thing anything free is going to attract seos like flies on poop so you need the following strategies in order to get results step one sign up to Haro is the source three times per day at 5 35 am 12 35 pm and 5 35 PM eastern time you're gonna get an email looking like this with your opportunities you want to jump on these as they come out and I'm going to show you the key to speed later I feel the need grenade for Speed this is what a request looks like to reply to this email here with your submission tip number one use chat GPD to turn out quick replies you want to answer as many of these as possible and quickly doing them all manually will be the death of you I like to give it a prompt like this a journalist has asked me how is AI affected your workplace I'm the CEO and founder of the online publication dignity marketing write a 50 word response to this that is clever controversial and extremely likely to be cited and Bam here we go fire this off to the journalist and move on to the next tip number two respond to as many queries as possible even if they're not directly in line with what you do this is a numbers game now that doesn't mean answering questions at only a veterinarian would know but if you have a Blog about vpns you can still answer questions as a pet owner relevance does not matter here are you going to turn down a link from American Express because their site isn't about vpns tip number three make your subject line stand out as you can imagine these journalists are getting bombarded with emails use a format like this horror response and eye drawing brackets then your particular expertise then add the query subject like this heart response CEO of five online businesses AI in the workplace tip number four have a dope email signature this is a nonchalant way to show off who you are and why they should link to you at this point in time we needed to migrate the website to the new look on the new site if you've ever done a domain migration you know that chances are that everything will go fine but there's a decent chance too that everything will explode in your face here's how to make sure it'll go smoothly guaranteed but first why do a site migration in the first place maybe you want to change your domain name it's time to upgrade from your poorly chosen myvpnreviews.info maybe you're upgrading your CMS and getting your clients dinosaur website off Wix or maybe you're switching hosts the list goes on what happens when a migration goes wrong oh stuff like losing all your rankings in traffic because you didn't properly map your redirects yeah that never mess it up with the following plan pick a smart date for migration you want a date when a minimal amount of people will be on your site and clearly not a huge day for sales like Black Friday personally I always migrated Saturdays crawl your existing website I'll use screaming fraud to get a complete list of all the URLs on my original site so that nothing gets lost as well as a list of existing redirects broken links and 404s which you can fix during the migration create the backup of your website in case the poop hits the fan create a staging site like staging.diggitymarketing.com and for the love of God please make sure it doesn't index by saying the robots.txt commands like this next copy over the old content to the new site now here's where you need to be super careful you need to do 301 redirects on each page of content to tell Google that the URLs exist in a new location on the new site now if you mess this up you will lose your rankings and traffic I recommend keeping a table like this that you can use to meticulously make sure that you redirected each page next you need to update your internal links if you mess this up you will lose rankings and traffic too in your website's HTML code you're still going to have links pointing to the old domain these will be broken if you don't fix them now after you've checked things a million times it's time to seal the deal and update your DNS settings to point to the new IP address also let Google know with search console's change of address tool and don't forget to remove the indexing Block in your robot subtax oh and here's a step that usually gets left out make a hundred percent sure that you generate a new XML sitemap with your new URLs instead of just copying over the old one with the old URLs now it's time to start logging into your rank and traffic tracker's an unhealthy amount of times per day to make sure that the new site is picking things up where the old one left off if we want some help with the site migration reach out to us at the searchinitiative.com we've done this more times than I'd like to count next whether you're in the e-commerce game or not pay attention to the next section because content optimization is the biggest thing you can do to improve your SEO traffic in an e-commerce that boils down to optimizing product descriptions any piece of content with buyer intent whether that be an e-commerce page or an affiliate product review as a dual purpose first to get traffic on Google by being SEO optimized and second to convert readers into buyers always keep your Target customer in mind for example if you're selling or reviewing headphones to Casual listeners on your site you're going to want to put your lower and durable headphones front and center and use language like great for everyday use but for the audio files it's all about sound quality so you'd use nerdy jargon words like lossless and signal to noise ratio but also don't overdo it when it's not needed Nike puts their product images for it in this product page because everyone knows what a fleece is you either like the design or you don't in those cases when you do need to dig into the details be informative list out the key features and benefits the technical specifications and FAQs and make sure that your descriptions are unique one of the worst things you can do is rip the descriptions and copy them over from the manufacturer's website Google holds back duplicate content here's a description taken directly from Sony's website about one of their TVs and here's a website that went join that sounds nice I'll use it on my site not just once but ten thousand times how much traffic does this page get on Google is zero a lot lastly how you structure your product descriptions and reviews matters just as much as your content and ux is going to get more and more important over time since the Advent of AI so make sure you're organized and clear after all this effort we we were able to improve this client's traffic by 61 and they now rank for 2 200 keywords an increase of 188 percent compared to their Baseline if you'd like us to do this to your site head on over to the search initiative.com scroll down to the bottom to the contact form and reach out we'll take a look at your website and let you know what we can do for you
