This was for an eCommerce client in the travel industry.
I started working with this company in 2017. In the years prior to working with me, they had mostly flatlined and were on a trajectory of an overall decline, as seen in the image below.
In 2016, the year before starting with me, they had approximately 200k Organic Users and made $1.7m in Organic Revenue.
After two years, their Organic traffic increased 312% to 800,000+ Users, and their Organic Revenue increased 207% to $5.5m.
How I Did It
I worked on a lot of big projects for this client over those two years; more than I want to list here, but the below are what had the most impact.
- Technical SEO Audit
- This audit found the usual, like broken internal links, 302 redirects, 5xx errors, and so on. But I also discovered issues with incorrect canonicals throughout the site, slow page-loading speeds, pages being blocked in robots.txt file that shouldn’t be blocked, and strange internal redirects happening across the site.
- Content Audit
- Identified about 70 pages to remove from the site and 100 pages to immediately improve
- Optimization Recommendation and Implementation for Top-Performing Pages (~5-10 per month)
- This included keyword research and optimizing titles, meta descriptions, headers, and page copy
- Structured Data Penalty Cleanup
- Against my recommendations, this client implemented structured data that went against Google’s guidelines. And they got caught and penalized. I helped them clean up the bad markup.
- Added New Structured Data Markup
- This was markup like AggregateRating and BreadcrumbList
- Consulted through an HTTPS Migration Strategy
- Affiliate Program Improvements
- I helped them remove duplicate affiliate pages from search engines, made affiliate pages non-indexable, helped them develop terms and conditions for their affiliates, removed affiliates who were violating program rules (like duplicating content and using brand logos), developed emails to request that affiliates use nofollow links, and fixed GTM tracking issues
- Optimized pages for “Page 2 Opportunities” (keywords that ranked in positions 11-20)
- Analyzed and cleaned up the Disavow file
- Internal linking for top pages
- Reduced Links in Navigation
- This website had a massive number of links in the main navigation and footer. I worked with them to reduce those links to only what was necessary, while working with their CRO team to ensure that the changes wouldn’t impact conversions.
- Improved breadcrumbs structure by added missing sub-categories
- Featured snippet optimization
- Ongoing Updates to a manual XML Sitemap
- Fixed issues with mixed uppercase and lowercase URLs throughout the site
- Reduced Internal Link Dilution Due to Over-linking
- Category pages were linking to products five times each. It was a major waste of link authority distribution. I worked with them to wrap three links into one and remove one unnecessary link, resulting in each product block showing only two links.
- Cleaned up thousands of thin pages
- They had thousands of indexed pages such as /replyall and /print pages. I helped them get these pages out of the index and non-indexable for the future.
- Researched link building opportunities for client to act on
- I identified 2-3 per month, but I don’t know how many the client followed up on
- Blog content development
- I did the topic ideation and worked with their writer to develop five articles per month.
- Trained two marketing coordinators to do basic SEO research and optimization
- This significantly increased their team’s ability to optimize less important pages of the site while I worked on the top priority pages.
- Duplicate content analysis and strategy
- I discovered that much of this site had duplicate content. I don’t know if they copied the content or someone copied them, but I worked with them to identify the most important pages to fix and to rewrite those pages