TheVigilante
Banned - Multiple Rules Violations
- Aug 31, 2010
- 14,993
- 16,105
Matthew Woodward is back with a case study about a travel company whose website and SEO was completely chaotic and how he took that website to 1,951 first page rankings with 656 of them ranking on top 3 spots of SERPs.
He breaks down his strategy into 7 steps with each one having its own goal:
+ Keyword research: The first step was to identify the right set of keywords to build content around. They were then categorised into topic-based clusters which allowed them to work with an endless database of relevant topics and their keywords that could be worked with across the site.
+ Backlink audit: Next step was to understand the sites existing link profile and flag any links to disavow. Using Ahrefs, he found that around 96% of the links were low quality links coming from bad web 2.0’s, old directories and irrelevant links.
+ Competitor analysis: This step was about understanding and correcting the content structure the way Google prefers it. Here Matthew showed a list of things that were reviewed and worked upon.
+ Content strategy: Now was the time to create a long-term, research-backed publishing schedule. They removed, consolidated and restructured the existing content.
+ Onsite audit: This is about uncovering all technical issues such as illogical site structure, lack of internal linking and duplicate content.
+ Improving user experience: Website speed, responsive website design, new high-quality images to all pages and other actions to make the experience on the website better.
+ Link building: Last but not the least was to pump up the site with relevant inbound links. Five critical things to note about link building were:
+ Results:
He breaks down his strategy into 7 steps with each one having its own goal:
+ Keyword research: The first step was to identify the right set of keywords to build content around. They were then categorised into topic-based clusters which allowed them to work with an endless database of relevant topics and their keywords that could be worked with across the site.
+ Backlink audit: Next step was to understand the sites existing link profile and flag any links to disavow. Using Ahrefs, he found that around 96% of the links were low quality links coming from bad web 2.0’s, old directories and irrelevant links.
+ Competitor analysis: This step was about understanding and correcting the content structure the way Google prefers it. Here Matthew showed a list of things that were reviewed and worked upon.
+ Content strategy: Now was the time to create a long-term, research-backed publishing schedule. They removed, consolidated and restructured the existing content.
+ Onsite audit: This is about uncovering all technical issues such as illogical site structure, lack of internal linking and duplicate content.
+ Improving user experience: Website speed, responsive website design, new high-quality images to all pages and other actions to make the experience on the website better.
+ Link building: Last but not the least was to pump up the site with relevant inbound links. Five critical things to note about link building were:
- Link building is pointless on a poorly built site.
- Your site needs solid foundations first.
- Links can do as much harm as good.
- You need to build strategic links.
- Obsessive compulsive link building leads to wasted budget.
+ Results:
- Organic visitors had grown from an average of 9.8k visitors per month to 58k at the very peak of high season.
- It also increased the number of top 3 results from 197 to 656.