Topic: Health tourism and leisure
Region of promotion: Ukraine
Client’s head office: Truskavets
Service: SEO Strategy Light, SEO Individual
Year the case was created: 2018
Goal: increase the visibility of the website in priority areas and in general.
The story
At the end of February 2018, we received a request from a potential customer whose business is aimed at selling holidays in sanatoriums in Western Ukraine. According to the client, most of the key queries were already in the top positions, and they only needed to improve those below TOP3-TOP10.
The project turned out to be outdated and has both positive and negative features. For example, most of the positions were already in the TOP, which means that there are adequate content, authority, and behavioral factors. At the same time, exceptional accuracy is required in order not to lower existing queries from the TOP3 and raise those below.
Several agencies and an in-house SEO specialist worked on the website. We needed to understand what was not done, what mistakes were made, and where the work was done properly.
Preliminary analytics, commercial offer, and first steps
Already at the stage of the commercial proposal, we realized that in this case, it was necessary to identify 20% of the tasks with a potential 80% impact on rankings. This will significantly save the client’s budget and reduce the time to achieve results.
We added the following types of work to the specified 20%:
- Analysis of all queries in the TOP 100 to identify those that cannot be changed (they are already in the TOP 3) and those that need to be improved. The analysis was based on the principle of answering the following questions:
- Is this a customer priority?
- Can this query get much more traffic if it is moved up?
- Does the query’s position (at the moment) allow it to be done quickly?
- Analysis of relevant pages in terms of the quality of optimization for a specific query or group of queries. Formation of recommendations and tasks to improve the process.
- Evaluation of the link profile: quality, ease of perception, quantity. Creating a link-building strategy.
- Audit of critical errors in the field of technical optimization of the website.
In the process of performing these works, we identified queries and pages to build a strategy for further actions. We realized that there were no critical comments on the technical optimization side, but some work needed to be done on the content and links.
The following adjustments need to be made to the content:
- meta tags and titles;
- headings and titles;
- Mention of queries in the texts;
- expanding the content with the addition of missing key phrases.
On links:
- We identified the reasons for the lack of link mass, links that were placed manually on the Internet (crowd marketing, website registration in authoritative directories, mentions through social media systems, Facebook, etc.)
Results
The first positive change in website visibility occurred exactly one month after the start of cooperation. We were very pleased and even a little surprised by the result. We managed to raise the website by 21% (from 17.45 to 21.15 according to Serpstat). I emphasize it in just a month!
For reference: Domain visibility in the Google search engine
Serpstat calculates this indicator based on the ratio of the number and popularity of key phrases for which a website is in the top 20 of Google. ‘The visibility index corresponds to the maximum possible visibility of a website for 1 million key phrases from the Serpstat database. The resulting number is multiplied by 1000 to make it easier to work with the visibility index’ Serpstat.
After getting acquainted with these indicators, we wanted to determine which types of work had the key impact.
In general, everything turned out to be easier than we thought, because all internal changes on the site were carried out by the client and were not closed before the visibility update. The only thing that could have affected this growth was the links from external websites that we manually added.
To make sure that our links had worked, we checked the dynamics of link mass growth in the Ahrefs service and the indexing of pages with links in the Google search engine. As a result, at the time of the increase in visibility, about 90% of the links were taken into account.
We also checked the relationship between the links that had already been placed and the growth of keyword rankings.
As a result of the analysis, we were convinced that our links had a major impact on the site’s position. We also saw growth on other pages and query groups. We can hope that the weight of the link mass was distributed across the site and made adjustments to the balance of purchased and natural links. This could have influenced the growth of 1385 queries.
Let’s take a closer look at the dynamics of the site’s positions:
After reviewing the growth schedule, the customer approved the first plan of changes. We, in turn, continued to work on building natural link mass, joined the acquisition of perpetual links on exchanges using our technology (very strict filtering), and formed the following recommendations. The result was obtained very soon.
The site’s visibility has increased to 26.43, i.e. by 51% from the initial value of 17.45. A large number of high-frequency queries have moved up to the top, and the value of key queries in the top 100 has increased by several thousand.
Client’s feedback on cooperation:
«The number of calls has recently increased to 40 per day. We are currently satisfied with everything’ – Maria.
