We will show you how our team at Riordan SEO increased our client’s monthly organic search traffic by 280%.
As a result of the strategies that we implemented, we increased monthly search traffic from 12,428 to 34,798.
Client: recruiter.co.uk
Industry: News, Awards & Job Site
Goals;
- Maximise traffic for news articles and their affiliated job site and awards sites.
- Manage and maximise the potential for all traffic channels.
- Manage ad space banners as a revenue stream.
- Manage related job sites and award sites by maximising applications and sign-ups.
The Outcome Of Our Strategy;
- 280% Increase in traffic and still growing.
- 165% Increase in sign-ups.
- Naturally earned links as a result of good content and Google News appearance.
- Growth in ad revenue, with a steady and consistent increase over time.
- Overall improved User Experience, as evidenced by more user engagement (average session duration increased by 32%).
- Achieved organic first-page rankings for highly competitive keywords.
- Increased visibility in Google News.
- The engagement rate increased due to a better user journey.
- Ad revenue increased due to improved ad placement and management.
- Related sites also improved all around due to directing users and passing authority.
Key Takeaways;
- Improved Sign Ups
- Increased Traffic Value
- Fixed Search Intent
- Improved User Experience
- Reduced Bounce Rate
- Increased User Engagement
- Improved Google News Visibility
- 120% Increase In Revenue
How We Did It – The 8-Month Journey Of This Project
Month 1: Audit & Basics
A thorough SEO Audit was completed and we created a roadmap to prioritise what needed to be done promptly. This was a Drupal site, and we started with the basics, which included meta tags and programming variables for different terms. The first month also ensured optimal metadata existed throughout the whole site taxonomy. Sitemap was also reconfigured for better crawling.
Month 2: Content Strategy
We explored opportunities to exploit hot trending keywords, topics, and trends on Google. We built entities and topics around platforms such as Google Discover and News. A bespoke best practice article writing guide for SEO was created and shared with editors to add an optimised structure to their articles. Some of the articles were built around buzz words such as top 100, best of, etc. We also put together industry statistical articles that provided insightful information to users.
Month 3: Linking & Structure
We conducted a Link audit, which included 2 parts: backlinks and internal linking structure. An article-linking strategy was set up to connect topics and entities. Navigation, taxonomy and breadcrumbs were updated. A backlink audit was also conducted and included prospects to improve Authority.
Month 4: Google News SEO Signals
By this stage, it was time to tick off more of the signals needed for Google News and Discover. We implemented schema markup across the site and implemented a Google News sitemap.
Month 5: Better Rankings
By this stage, we achieved number 1 positions for a range of top keywords. We also saw huge spikes in traffic on Google Discover. Google news traffic soared by over 800%, and Google Discover traffic led to a spike in over 5,000 clicks in just 30 days.
Month 6: Backlinks
After fully reviewing prospects, it was time to process and get backlinks live. We started backlink building through press releases for the most competitive keywords and only sourced a link that would provide relevant traffic. We helped design statistical articles, which resulted in numerous High authority sites (some sites were 90+ DA) linking to these articles.
Month 7: Monetisation Of Platforms
The Ad selling space on the website needed an Audit. We searched for the best platform so different ads could be served for various audiences. It was vital that if a user is reading an article with a category called careers, ads such as jobs would be served. Ads were set up through tag manager and managed through an advanced platform.
Month 8: Improved Results & New Opportunities
While SEO was still ongoing with more opportunities to improve traffic further, we decided to review a whole new fresh digital marketing strategy. We audited all marketing channels and mapped out a new plan so that SEO, email, social and PPC Ads campaigns all contributed to the best ROI.
An overview of the results by month 8, which were better than expected.
Here were the results:
- Google discover has consistently shown huge spikes in traffic since month 4.
- Google News is now picking up every article, resulting in an over 800% increase in traffic in the first month after the changes were implemented.
- Much improved UX which led to an increase in sessions and reduced bounce rate.
- Technical SEO much improved and resulted in articles getting indexed faster.
- Monetisation ad revenue also increased with a better serving of ads per topic.
- Successful PR resulted in new readership viewers from other sites.
- Natural backlinks are where other sites link to us without asking because they provide statistical and quality content. This was all achieved through our ongoing content strategy, which was planned in Month 2.
The Results
After fully deploying our 8-month strategy, the site’s organic search traffic has grown by 280%. Other traffic channels, including email, increased by an average of 88%.
- Monthly search traffic from 12,428 to 34,798.
Revenue increased by an average of 120% for each month of the strategy compared to year on year.
Additionally, the client has achieved rankings for more than 1700 keywords within the top 10 positions, a significant increase from the initial count of 580 keywords when the campaign commenced.
If you require assistance in boosting your organic search traffic, you may consider checking out our SEO services or contacting us for a free SEO review of your business.