For our conference planning client, we carefully and thoroughly designed an SEO campaign. This campaign would help them achieve an online presence while also doing just as well as their competitors or better.
In this case study we hope to illustrate the steps taken and how this helped the client’s website rank for keywords related to their business.
The obvious goal for this campaign was to have Google see them as an authority for the niche they are in. We had to implement various steps to achieve this. The very first thing we had to do was take them from Squarespace and move them over to WordPress because it gives more flexibility. We then started a technical audit of the entire website and proceeded to implement fixes that stood out.
Once the technical audit was completed, we went to the drawing board and started researching and planning content for the website. This is a crucial step, as it would make or break the entire strategy so we had to be extremely careful and design the whole content plan prior to implementation.
On top of the content that was going to be published on the website, we had come up with some ideas for doing some digital PR. Consider this being the gasoline to a car; without the PR, the rest is futile.
Website History
This particular client focuses on corporate events globally. Even though they have been around for more than a decade, the online presence was minuscule.
We were going to go against top corporations, so our client needed to really stand out and make sure they were seen at the same level as the other corporations and then some. We didn’t want just to get them at the same level as the rest; we wanted to overtake the competition entirely.
Issues Affecting the Website
There were three major things affecting the client’s website:
- Content
- Technical problems
- Backlinks
Content
When we started working on the website, they lacked supporting content; all they really had were their service pages. So, we have to start planning a topical map so we can make it easier for the search engines to understand the importance of the content and how they relate to each other.
This, in turn, would improve the site’s ranking and improve the user experience. We had to make sure our clusters were tight, and we covered every possible relevant topic we discovered while also implementing great on-page SEO.
Technical
The entire website was riddled with various errors that made it more difficult for the search engines to crawl and index pages, so we had to make sure before adding content that we fixed all these technical issues. Hence, we had an excellent foundation for future work.
We also had to ensure that the website’s speed was top-notch, didn’t affect the user experience, and gave the wrong impression to Google and other search engines.
One important thing that many SEO professionals don’t do is take advantage of custom schema. Instead, 90% of SEOs rely on the default schema from SEO plugins like Rank Math and Yoast SEO. So we had to make sure we wrote custom schema for the client’s page so we could help the search engine do their job more efficiently.
Backlinks
As we all know, backlinks are the backbone of SEO, especially when dealing with a highly competitive niche. We had to analyze what type of links the competition was/had acquired and attempt to get those as well. But like before, we couldn’t be content with getting the same backlinks the competition was acquiring, we had to go beyond those to make sure that we were differentiating their backlink profile.
So we went out and acquired links from sites like Entrepreneur, Forbes, MSN, etc… To name a few well-known websites.
Course of Action
Knowing what we needed to do, we had to get to work and implement all these very carefully, one by one.
Once we successfully implemented the different strategies, the website started to take off. Even though we aren’t quite done with the content, the website has done well through algorithm updates from Google.
Traffic-wise, the keywords aren’t the greatest, but they do offer the client a great ROI. As we all know, just because you are getting thousands of visitors, if they don’t convert, then it’s not worthwhile.
Building Topical Map
So our goal, from the get-go, was to make sure that the service pages were in the top 3 of the SERPs, so we had to make sure to find supporting content that would help those service pages rank better but also add value to the entire content strategy.
So for example, if our client was in the “dog walking” business, we have to find content that we could use to support that page and add relevant internal links to it.
We find that the best supporting content is articles created around questions being asked through the internet.
To find some ideas, we will go to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer and navigate to the questions report.
Since we were starting from 0, we wanted to add some filters to this report so we can find some KWs we can easily rank for but added value at the same time. So we specifically wanted keywords that had websites that were DR 10 ranking in the top 5 of Google.
After applying this filter, we went from over 5,000 keywords to only 59. This was much easier to go through and we could find exactly the type of keywords we were searching for.
We came across the keywords “how many calories does a dog burn walking” and “how to stop dog chasing cars when walking”. With both of these keywords, we can add a call to action to offer our dog walking services while also adding supporting content to our “dog walking” service page.
We want to make sure to add these competitors we find during our research to a spreadsheet, where we will have a database of all the competitors so we can reverse engineer. We can also keep an eye on the competitors that do well after core updates and see what they are implementing so we aren’t left behind.
On-Page Optimization
Using a tool like Screaming Frog or Website Auditor from SEO PowerSuite, we have to make sure our on-page is on point.
So we wanted to make sure to take a look at the following:
- Meta Titles: Even though most people believe you should have at most 65 characters, it has been proven in tests that Google still reads and ranks pages well, not following this 65-character rule. That being said, we also don’t want to have a spammy title One thing we do want to make sure is that we have the keyword at the beginning of the title.
- H1 Headings: The H1 should match your meta title and shouldn’t be too different, as this would confuse the users and search engines. From some minor testing, we have noticed that when both H1 and meta title is the same vs different, the page seems to perform better in terms of ranking. One really important thing is to make sure that the page only has one H1 and not multiple.
- Meta Descriptions: You want to make sure to add relevant keywords within the meta description but at the same time treat it as a space to entice potential visitors to visit your website over the competition.
Hierarchy
We want to make sure that the hierarchy of the h tags is followed. Too many times, we see web developers use unnecessary h tags instead of <p> tags properly resized or not following logical structure.
In terms of hierarchy and structure, heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) are used, much like the headings and subheadings in a book or academic paper, to organize content and give it a logical structure. This is not only beneficial for readability but also important for search engine optimization.
This is extremely important for smaller sites, since we need to help the search engines understand our content as much as possible. Big and establish websites can get away with not following the rules as Google and other search engines already trust them and comprehend what the website is about.
With a smaller website without a logical structure, search engines may misinterpret which parts of your content are most relevant to specific search queries. For example, you might have critical information under an H3 tag, but if you lack a parent H2 tag, search engines might not give that information the weight it deserves.
Technical SEO
One important thing to look at during a technical audit is robots.txt. We need to make sure that someone didn’t mistakenly block bots from crawling really important pages of the website or the entire website for that matter.
So you need to be really careful what you write and how you write the commands within the robots.txt file. One important thing you want to make sure to do is add the URLs of your sitemap within the robots.txt file so you help the bots find the rest of your pages easily.
Speed
Our client’s website wasn’t performing well in the PageSpeed Insights test (mobile) that we ran when we started to work with them, so we had to take action and improve these as much as we could.
So, we went to work and followed the guidelines presented by PageSpeed Insights to improve the speed of the website. Even though as we add new things, the score shifts a bit, and we are comfortable with the results.
Schema
As we said earlier, the majority of SEOs don’t create a custom schema for the websites they work on. They just rely on the default schema implemented by plugins like Rank Math or Yoast (If they are using WordPress).
As you have noticed throughout this entire case study, our goal is not to be like everyone else, we want to do as well as them plus 50% more, especially since we are the new kids on the block, we had to go big or go home.
The first schema we used was the LocalBusiness schema, within this schema, we detailed everything about the business:
- Address
- Entities
- Previous links built to the website
- Keywords
We added a few others as well, but those are some of the bigger ones. Once set and done, we had 696 lines of code, for this LocalBusiness schema. Keep in mind we added various links and keywords. So this makes up a bulk of those lines.
We then proceeded to create the following schemas as well:
- WebSite Schema
- WebPage Schema
- Article Schema
- Organization Schema
- Person Schema
- Product Schema
There’s some overlap with a couple of these, so you can copy and paste a lot of the information, so it’s not as terrible as it sounds.
Link Building
As stated earlier, backlinks are one of the most important things for SEO if not the most important, especially when you are competing against big corporations. From previous relationships, we were able to land various DR70+ and DR 80+ links.
Many of these links the competitions didn’t have as part of their backlink profile, at least at the time of this writing.
One thing we would like to point out is that since these are some top-tier sites, we used partial match anchors. An exact match was not possible as the editorial process for these websites go through various editorial processes before getting published.
The links needed to look as natural as possible and add some sort of value to the piece we were contributing, or else these links would get striped without notice and have the potential to ruin long-term relationships.
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