Our Client in a nutshell…
Our client hosts negotiation training seminars where they teach individuals and teams on how to improve their negotiating skills.
Users go to our client’s site, book a seminar date (held in hotels around the world) and learn from experts in the field.
Additionally, companies can sign up for in house negotiation training that will take place in their office.
Our client’s training system is based on the research of the company’s founder who was a pioneer in the negotiation training space.
Performing an SEO Sitewide Audit
After understanding the client’s business model and customer base, we conducted an audit on their site. The initial SEO audit is extensive as we needed to research the following:
1.Server health and security of the site
- Server issues can prevent spiders and inlinks from reaching our client’s site.
- Security issues will hurt our client’s rankings with the search engines.
2.Running a self crawl on the site
- Crawling our client’s site is designed to see all the response codes for the site, as well as checking the tags used on every page.
3.Checking the indexability of the site
- We want to make sure that the search engines will have no issues indexing any of our clients content
4.Checking the site architecture
- Having an optimized site architecture is important for the user experience. Additionally, it signals to the search engines the hierarchy of our pages’ importance.
5.Keyword Research
- This allowed us to understand what keywords we should target to best increase the client’s customer base. Additionally, it provided research for us so we could create quality landing pages/articles for the relevant keywords that we wanted to target.
6.The overall link profile
- The backlink profile of a site is a major factor in the authority it has with the search engines. The link audit allowed us to find potentially harmful links that could lead to penalties with the search engines.
The list above is a summary of our audit process. To see the extensive work that goes into every client’s audit click here.
Issues and Solutions
While we cannot share all the tricks of our trade, after all, we do have a competitive edge that we need to maintain, below is a partial list of issues that we discovered and the solutions we implemented.
1.The client hosts seminars all around the world. However, they did not have specific location pages for each city that they operated in. Our research showed us that potential clients were searching for courses that were location-specific. For example, a user in Chicago would search for the phrase “negotiation course chicago”.
To resolve this issue we created specific pages for the cities that our client operates in. We created content that included information about the location hotel and the city. This allowed us to compete for the search traffic at the local level.
2.The client’s previous SEO company had saturated the blog with lots of small blog posts that didn’t offer any value to our audience. Search engines look at this content as thin value and will not rank it. Additionally, many of these posts were targeting the same keywords. This was leading to keyword cannibalization (where the search engines are not sure which page of ours to rank for the keyword in question).
To resolve this we first researched the metrics for all the pages on the blog for the previous 6 months. Any post over a couple of years old that had not gotten at least 5 clicks in the past six months was put on a list. We then grouped the content pieces with similar content in smaller groups. Any page that was left by itself was permanently redirected to the homepage.
Next, we took the small content pieces with similar topics and rewrote them into longer authoritative articles. Then we permanently redirected the old URLs to the new posts.
To show one example of the result this had. We had 7 pages that got 21 clicks over a 6 month period. After combining and rewriting the content we got 108 clicks over the next 6 months.
3.Our next step for the blog was finding new keyword opportunities for our client to expand their traffic. We analyzed our client’s competition to discover keyword opportunities that we weren’t taking advantage of. After we had a list of new keywords to target we created high-quality unique content to dominate the competition in those spaces. We were able to rank these new articles quickly thanks to our creation method and by acquiring valuable links for the articles.
Examples of the effectiveness of the article building strategies that we employ can be found below. The arrows in the graph point to the time when the new article was published and the clicks that we have gotten in that timeframe.
Article #1
Article Launch Date: 10/2/19
Clicks Since Launch: 530
Average Clicks Per Month: Approx 88
Article #2
Article Launch Date: 11/26/19
Clicks Since Launch: 499
Average Clicks Per Month: Approx 110
Article #3
Article Launch Date: 12/17/19
Clicks Since Launch: 551
Average Clicks Per Month: Approx 137
4.Our plan to increase our client’s backlink authority with the search engines was twofold. First, we examined the clients link profile and discovered that a lot of the links were low-quality links. These can be seen as spam and lead to penalties with Google. Therefore, we created a disavow file and uploaded it to Google. This lets the search engines know that we did not endorse those links.
Next, we worked on a link building campaign to gain high quality and relevant links for our client’s site. This process is an ongoing one as increasing the amount of domains that link to our client helps the site’s overall rankings with the search engines.
Results
So what were the results?
A great barometer in SEO is the increase in non-branded traffic. This is organic traffic that we capture that does not include users who searched for our client’s brand name.
Comparing the last three months in 2020 (screenshot taken on 4/12/210) to the same time period in 2019 we see the following:
2020
Clicks: 7630
Impressions: 480,000
2019
Clicks: 4940
Impressions: 271,000
This is a growth of 2690 Clicks and 209,000 Impressions. Of course, the best part of this growth is that the traffic is organic. That means that year over year we will expect the numbers to improve as our rankings continue to climb with the search engines.
We hope this case study shows you just a bit of what we do from an SEO perspective. A lot of our clients think that SEO is black magic 🙂 However, in reality, it takes an understanding of search engines, our clients’ customers and website, and putting in the work to crush the competition.
If you want to know more please reach out and speak to an account manager. They will be happy to walk you through the process and help grow your company’s online presence.
