Website redesign for a better client conversion
Webba Booking was looking for a new design that would be more user-friendly, modern and turn visitors into customers. Here’s their website redesign case study.
/ SEO Case Study: 700% Organic Traffic Increase In 12 Months
SEO strategy incl. keyword research / content plan and execution / monthly SEO maintenance and optimization / Linkbuilding / Technical SEO Audits
In this case study, we will walk you through SEO strategy for one of our clients Inyova – a digital platform for sustainable impact investing.
The client came to us in May 2019, looking to boost their organic traffic and increase rankings for the most important keywords in their business niche.
After having mixed experience with trying to work on the website’s SEO on their own, they were hoping to get on a steady upward curve.
This was the starting point – inyova.ch organic traffic from January till June 2019.
/ Step 1. Technical SEO Audit
Our work started in June 2019 with assessing the overall state of the website. Our standard technical assessment procedure includes checking how fast are the pages on the website, does it index the way it should, is the health of URLs ok, are all images loading and does it check other technical requirements boxes. Having all the technical aspects in order is a must to start climbing on the top of google search results.
Overall, we were off to a good start and the client’s website was already in good shape. A couple of improvements on the to-do list were:
- Fixing URL redirects and broken links, sending visitors to webpages that no longer exist. They not only decrease the user experience but can also negatively impact the way search engines assess the website. The more broken URLs, the more red flags Search Engines see.
- Updates on the sitemap. Sitemap sends the info to the search engines about the website’s structure and helps them discover new pages quicker and easier. Some of the elements on the sitemap were either outdated or incorrect, thus we worked with Inyova’s tech team to solve it.
/ Step 2. Content Strategy
When all the technicalities are in place, it’s time to focus on creating the right content to bring visitors to the website.
Keyword research
Every good content plan has to start with keyword research. After all, what you write about should be relevant to your audience.
An industry insider knowledge might help with guessing what your customers are interested in. However, it does not always translate in pageviews on your website. Keyword research helps to narrow down exact keywords people are typing in their google search, see the approximate search volume, and how easy or difficult it would be to outrank the existing pages in the top positions of SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
The client’s primary target market is Switzerland and the website is multilingual – in German and English (now in partially in French too). Keeping that and Inyova’s user personas in mind and with the help of the powerful SEO tool ahrefs.com we could identify the main keywords to target:
- Geld Anlegen
- Geld Investieren
- Geld Sparen
- Investieren
- Invest in Switzerland
- Impact Investing Switzerland
In Switzerland, each of the German keywords has attractive monthly search volume and keyword difficulty that would allow competing for Google’s top positions. Most importantly, people searching for these keywords are those that Inyova would like to see on their website.
Content creation
After the focus keywords and more extensive list of supporting keywords were identified, it was time to plan the articles that both the website visitors and Google will like.
We agreed to work on a mix of in-depth skyscraper articles and shorter, concise supporting articles.
Skyscraper Technique was developed by an SEO expert Brian Dean and it became one of the most effective ways to boost organic search rankings. Skyscraper articles are meant to serve users’ search intent in the best possible way, provide the most complete answer to their question and therefore send positive ranking signals to the Search Engine.
For a multilingual site like inyova.ch we made sure to provide high-quality translations from German to English and vice versa.
Also, we can never forget about the keywords. A direct translation of the keywords without checking the search demand will not bring the maximum results. Therefore, keyword research has been done for both languages.
Content updates
While fresh quality content is essential, we shouldn’t overlook the potential of already published articles.
It’s often the matter of optimizing for the right keywords and providing more value with visuals, videos or updated content to make existing articles climb up the Google search results.
Therefore, some of the work focused on updating or merging existing articles to optimize for SEO and increase organic traffic.
Overall, more than 10 different articles were either newly published or updated from August 2019 until May 2020.
/ Step 3. Link Building
While the strategy was focused on on-page SEO, additionally, we worked on link building. After all, the number of backlinks is one of the top 3 Google’s rankings signals.
As you can see in the graph from ahrefs.com, even before our cooperation Inyova was steadily increasing the website’s referring pages and domains.
We continued link building and outreach for backlinks resulted in quality backlinks on various finance blogger websites. However, the main backlink growth is attributed to the client’s own activity. Inyova is very active in the industry and their PR & Event Marketing activities have resulted in a steady flow of links to their website.
/ The Results
When judging how effective the SEO strategy is we are always looking at these aspects: organic traffic growth, number of keywords in Top 3, 10 and 100 positions, performance of separate content pieces and growth of referring domains. Below we analyze the movements of these KPIs for our client Inyova.
Organic traffic growth
Organic traffic has been steadily increasing since the start of our cooperation in June. Overall when comparing May 2019 and May 2020 results we can see 706% increase in impressions and 701% increase in clicks coming from Google.
No. of Keywords in Top 3, Top 10 positions and Top 100 positions
When comparing the number of organic keywords, we can see keywords ranking 1-3 on Google doubling, #4-10 ranking keywords tripling and #11-100 increasing more than 7 times over the course of 1 year.
Backlinks growth
Both referring domains and pages are seeing an upward curve. Comparing May 2019 with the same period a year later, the amount of referring pages and domains have more than doubled.
New/Updated content performance
Publishing high-quality content based on extensive keyword research resulted in multiple articles bringing targeted traffic to the website. In this example, an article published at the beginning of October 2019, are bringing a consistent amount of targeted visitors monthly and ranks in 1-3 positions on Google for keywords like “geld anlegen”, “geld anlegen schweiz”, “geld investieren schweiz” and “investieren schweiz”.
