How to Increase Traffic by 96% (SEO Case Study)
– What most people don't realize is that there's three essential pillars of search engine optimization. Miss any single one of them, and you will not get traffic on Google. In this video, I'm gonna show you this in action with a step by step case study, where we double the client's
traffic in just eight months. My name is Matt Diggity, and I'm a director at
The Search Initiative, an SEO agency that specializes
in cutting edge SEO. And I'm about to give
away our best SEO tactics, the same tactics that
got this level of growth.
But first let me introduce a
case study that I'll be using to teach you these strategies. The client is a U.S based software company that offers cloud computing services to some of the biggest
brands in the world. Samsung, Nissan, Electrolux, you probably heard of them. Now, this client's domain
has indeed been around for nearly 20 years, which is
a good thing and a bad thing. It's good because it racked up a sexy domain rating of
68 over this journey, which does a lot for the authority
and trust of the website. It's bad because over time, websites start to accumulate a whole bunch of SEO junk. Hell, I give my websites a complete spring cleaning
service every year. So you can imagine how many
SEO no-nos racked up over 20. I'm gonna show you what you need to do to make sure your site is running to its full capacity
unhindered by SEO debt. As I mentioned before, SEO can be broken down into
three essential pillars.
First, we have technical SEO. We always start with technical
SEO, because mistakes in this department can
single handedly be the cause for you not doing as well
as you'd like in Google. This includes standards
like having a fast website that looks good on mobile. Next we have content. The content you write on your website is the foundation of SEO. Many people argue that
other ranking factors are more important than content. Just try to get on page one of Google without writing that
keyword in your content. Lastly, we have backlinks. The importance of backlinks is baked into Google's algorithm. When Google founder Larry Page patented his page rank algorithm, Google committed themselves to making links one of their
most important ranking factors.
So we have the three pillars of SEOs, technical, content, and links. Miss any one of these pillars, and you just put SEO on hard mode. Let's not play this game on hard mode. In fact, let's make it so easy, it's like using cheat codes. That's the purpose of this video. And I'll use a lens in this case study to illustrate these concepts. Now, if you could do a favor for me could you please obliterate
that like button. Hours of research and preparation went into making this video. If you appreciate that effort,
it would mean a lot to me if you smash the like button
for the YouTube algorithm, thanks a bunch. Let's kick things off with technical SEO. As I mentioned before, we always start off with technical
SEO for two main reasons. First because technical SEO
problems cause so much havoc, they can single-handedly
hold back your website.
You might have perfect content and links, but if you have one technical issue, you could end up on page 10 of Google. It's good to cross this
off your list right away. You might not even need to
work on your content and links. And secondly, because
resolving technical SEO issues is quick and easy, just
get it done and move on. Let's start with crawl budget management. What actually is crawl budget? The way Google actually
finds every website on the internet is by
sending the Google bot, their web crawler,
crawling through backlinks. This takes a huge amount
of time and resources. So to make sure their energy
bill doesn't get bigger than the U.S GDP, they assign a limit to how much they crawl each website. The crawl budget of your website
is determined by its size, how often it's updated,
it's quality, and authority. If you have a website with
hundreds or thousands of pages, you need to make sure you're
not wasting your crawl budget. Don't let the Google bot crawl
pages that are low quality, or not meant for SEO.
Our client had over 30,000 wasteful pages, so we had our work cut out for us. Here's some examples of
pages that can cause issues. If you have an SSL
certificate on your site, but you still have HTTP pages index, that causes unnecessary duplicate content. You can use the command
site:domain name inURL HTTP, to bring up a list of
HTTP pages that you need to take action on. I'll show you how to
nuke these pages soon. If you have a WordPress
blog, index pagination URLs also cause unnecessary duplicate content. Run site:domain name inURL
page, to see what junk comes up. Likewise tag pages, which
are so nineties anyways, shouldn't be indexed. Run site:inURL tag to pull these up. If you have a non www site, and you've indexed www
pages or vice versa, you can use the following
commands to bring them up. And then this one is up for debate, but some people don't like
to index their author pages. Some people like to keep them for EAT. I'll leave that one up to you, but here's your command to find them. Some other miscellaneous junk pages are, when you have the same URL index with and without trailing slashes, duplicate pages that have
the exact same content.
This typically applies to homepages. Staging server URLs, and customer facing URLs
like checkout pages. Now that you've identified
you've got some cleaning to do. What are your options? The first way to clean up your index and crawl budget issues is
with your robots.txt file. In this file, you can
straight up tell Google, "Yo, don't crawl this page." This is the basic format
you're supposed to use to block robots from crawling a page. User-agent is where
you specify what robot. The asterisk specifies all robots. Then disallow is used to point out which pages you don't want crawled. This is what my robots.txt file looks like at diggitymarketing.com. All these disallows are pages
I want crawlers to GTFO. Another way to block
Google from both crawling and indexing a URL, is
to use the no index tag. To do this, you write the following code within the head section of your page. If you have an SEO plugin like Yoast, it's as simple as setting this allow search engines to show this post and search results setting to no.
Lastly, we have the Google
search console URL removal tool, which can be used to
surgically remove results from the index. Note, this will only remove
your URLs temporarily. If you have other
settings that tell Google to index your content, it's
just gonna come right back. So make sure to double check. The next technical SEO treat
I'm gonna share with you is how to properly set
up a multi-language site with hreflang. Now, there's something I
wanna point out to you. This is important, even if you don't have a multi-language website. Imagine if you have an English
website targeting the U.S. Why not create a new section
for the UK, or Canada, or Australia, and dominate
the search engines for each country. That's what this site has done. Just check out the search
traffic this site has in each of these countries, and it pulled it off just by
copy and pasting its content into different sub-folders
for each location. Let me show you how to do this.
Everything I just
described is accomplished by using hreflang tags. Hreflang is an HTML attribute used to tell Google about the country and language a page is targeting. You use it to say, "Hey Google, this page is meant for Italy, and the language is Italian." If you don't use hreflang, and you have two versions
of the same page, you're gonna have
duplicate content issues. Imagine if you had a URL targeting the U.S and it was written in U.S English, you know, optimized spelled
with a Z like it should be. And you have another
URL targeting the U.K, with a ridiculous spelling
of optimized with an S.
Unless you tell Google
that these are meant for different countries, they're gonna assume this is dupe content. But what if you're not
copying English content for separate countries? What if you got an English
section and a French section. You still need to roll out hreflang, or you're gonna piss off Google. Here's how to do it, using an example. Install this free Insert
Headers and Footers plug-in to be able to quickly
edit your page headers.
Now let's say you had two
versions of the same page, one for American English
and another for British. You're gonna add the following
tags to each of these pages. The important part is the
quotes after hreflang. "En" specifies the language, and "us" or "gb" specifies the country. Let's say you added a new
Danish page and a French page. Then you write all these tags on every single one of these pages. Another way to implement hreflang is to do it with a sitemap. Go to Erudite's hreflang sitemap tool and start dumping in the various pages, and the languages and
countries they target. It's gonna spit out a sitemap like this which you would just add
to your current sitemap. Hreflang setup can be tricky, so if you need some help, make sure to reach out to me
at thesearchinitiative.com.
Speaking about sitemaps, that's the next SEO pitfall
I'd like to talk about. An XML sitemap is used to tell Google which pages you want them
to take notice of and index. Think of it like a table of
contents for your website. Without it, Google is just
left to its own devices on what pages it will find. Our client was missing theirs.
(Matt groans) Aside from telling Google what to index, your sitemap also tells Google what pages are the most important. This is what my sitemap looks like. Notice these priorities
and last updated fields. Pages with a higher priority and update frequency get more
love from Google's crawler. To create a sitemap is easy. Most likely you have WordPress installed. Install an SEO plugin like Yoast to automatically generate a sitemap. In the Yoast settings, go to general and then features. Set XML sitemaps to on, and that's it. You can find your sitemap at
yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. If you don't have a CMS like WordPress, and you need help generating a sitemap, leave a comment down below and I'll make a special
video just for you.
Next thing you need to let Google know that you made the sitemap. Head over to Google's search
console and click sitemaps. Enter the URL of your
sitemap and click submit. Now just make sure your robots.txt is referencing that sitemap and you're good to go, done and done. (Shia claps)
(static buzzing) We now move on to the next
pillar of SEO foundation and that's content.
I'd like to explain a
key concept of content that you need to understand. If you have a website about
fishing, you want Google and your readers to know that
you're an expert fisherman. One way to do this is to create as much supporting blog content on the topic of fishing, that Google simply cannot deny that you're a subject matter expert. This is called building topical relevance. And if you create articles
that target long-tail keywords with low competition, such as guides on how to use certain pieces of fishing equipment, then you can start to pull traffic from these articles as well.
This is why having a blog
on your site is so crucial. And unfortunately, this client hadn't touched
their blog in years. Here's how we resurrected it by first finding long-tail
keywords to target. Open ahrefs keyword explorer, and type in a broad search term that is related to your niche, set the target location, then click on the magnifying glass button. Term matches are keywords
that contain all of the terms from your search term. Questions are search queries
that are phrased as questions. These are really juicy for
long tail opportunities. Also rank for, is a report that
displays the other keywords that the top pages for
your search term rank for. And also talk about,
reports which other topics the top pages discuss. Let's do a deep dive into the questions. When you open the questions report, filter the keyword list to
find easy mode long tails. Use the terms, parent topic, filter to narrow down the list for
specific phrases and words. Then set a maximum
keyword difficulty of 10 if you're a newer site. You can go higher if you're established. Then set a minimum word count of four as long-tail keywords
tend to have more words, and are more specific.
Now that you find a nice
keyword to go after, let's start the process
of writing an article. When it comes to writing your article, I highly recommend using
Surfer's Content Editor. It's gonna look at the top
articles for your keyword and extract out what exactly
are the good things they did to get them to the top of Google. It's like bowling with
the bumper lanes on, you really can't miss. Type in your primary
keyword you want to target, and set the location.
Then click create content editor. You're gonna see a page
that looks like this. On the left is your writing area, on the right you'll see the
results of surface analysis. It's figured out how long
your content should be, the number of headings, images, and how often you should use
specific words and phrases. Gangsta. Next, you wanna head over
to the brief section, and figure out who your competitors are. Open these guys up one
by one and ask yourself, What subtopics do they
cover in their headings? Have they included FAQs? Are there any pieces of additional media such as images and videos
that you should include? What style is the article? Is it a listicle or a block of text? Some other words of advice,
don't pay too much attention to getting a perfect surfer score.
Many people get obsessed
with getting a 100 while 80 is considered great. I'd rather produce 10 great articles, than one perfect article. Next, don't forget about internal linking. Once your article is published link out to other relevant articles and have other relevant
articles linked to it. Check out my video on silos and interlinking after you finish here. Link in the description. Now we move on to the third
pillar of foundational SEO and that's link building. Many people argue that backlinks are the most
important ranking signal on Google's algorithm. And in this recent study by Backlinko which studied over 11 million websites, they found out the sites in
the top positions on Google have more backlinks than
those in lower positions. The most effective backlink
strategy is to build links to the pages that need them the most. Our client had little
to no backlinks linking to their most important service pages. Here's what we did to fix it.
First, you need to identify which are the most important pages on your site that are
in dire need of links. Go to ahrefs site explorer and enter your domain name at the top. Then you're gonna select best by links. This is gonna bring up all the pages in your site, ordered by which
ones have the most links. Make sure external is selected, and filter for 200 response code pages. That means these pages are live. Then sort by ascending. Now use the search filter to hunt down pages that
are important to you that have few or even zero links.
These are pages that are
supposed to be making you money, or at the very least should
be getting you traffic. Now that you've identified
your target pages, let's do some blogger
outreach to get some links. But what blogs should
you be outreaching to? My favorite way to gather link prospects, is by using the link intersect tool. Type in three or more
competitors up here at the top to pull up a list of sites
that link to your competitors, but don't link to you. Now you need to find their contact emails. This can be as easy as going to the contact page of the
website you wanna link from. Or you can use the
Hunter-Email Finder Extension to get it with a click of a button. Now you need to craft your email pitch. What are you gonna send to these guys to get them to link to you? Here's some tips, keep your
email short and concise, tell them why you're contacting them, and explain what's in it for them.
Here's an example template you can use. Hello first name, my name is Matt. I'm the founder of website.com. I really enjoyed your research
on correlation studies in your article on data driven SEO, which I came across while doing research on my own article about
performance marketing. But I noticed that you're linking out to this out-of-date page here. So I wanted to ask if my
more up-to-date article might be worth a mention on your page. Either way, keep up the awesome work, look forward to hearing from you. Once you've sent your email,
if you haven't heard back, send a follow up email. And make sure to monitor
your inbox for replies. If you wanna check out a
full guide I've created on blogger outreach, I've left
a link in the description. So what were the results
after all this effort? We doubled traffic for this
client in just eight months. And here's a number of keywords
in the top 10 of Google, which has been skyrocketing.
If you'd like us to do this for your site, head on over to thesearchinitiative.com, scroll down to the bottom to
the contact form and reach out. We'll take a look through your site and let you know what we can do for you..
