The online competition is increasing and together with this the cost of online advertisments. This makes a lot of companies start considering to spend part of their advertising budgets on SEO in order to increase their organic traffic. If you are researching about how to increase your organic traffic without necessarily having a big budget to allocate on SEO services there is a solution. The solution is to be trained on SEO. Either train yourself or the people who manage the content in your website . This way you will start being able to manage with a guidance from an SEO consultant your organic traffic generators and slowly, slowly optimize your website to bring more organic traffic.

This article is a case study and presents how seo training can assist companies increase their organic traffic. It presents the actual case study and the results achieved in cooperation with one of my clients who decided to give it a try and train his editor team on SEO with my help. The results have been amazing! From 1m organic sessions per month to 1.5m sessions (50% increase) in the duration of 20 months and from 2.1m organic pageviews to 3.5m organic pageviews (66%) in the same duration. To be noted that these results would have been achieved within a shorter period if between this period the website was not penalized by Google due to being hacked. You will see the effect of the penalty also in the results presented later on in this case study.

Business Location: Netherlands but the target audience was global

Business Industry:  Information for Expatriates

Website Language: English

Project Duration: Oct. 2016 to Dec. 2017

How to increase organic traffic: The Story

This is a very big website that is online since 2000. I cannot reveal its name though due to a contract I have signed with the client. The website provides assistance to expatriates and basically generates its profit from promoting/advertising businesses that offer products and services interesting for expats. When I came in contact with the client initially he asked me to make some advanced google analytics work. As I started doing this work I noticed that many of its landing pages were missing fundamentals on page SEO optimization rules Thus, I proposed to the client to try SEO. The client told me that he had many articles that were ranking in the first page but they did not know how this was happening and that in the past he had tried once again the SEO services but he had not seen any results. Anyhow, he agreed to try also my SEO services and he assigned to me one section of his website that was really having poor organic traffic but it was on a topic that was very profitable for his business. And this is how all started. Initially, I gave him my proposals on SEO optimizing one of his articles in this topic. The results were immediate. Within the first week after the changes were implemented the organic traffic for this article showed increased signs. It was not so difficult as the website has a very strong domain and lots of SEO juice coming from link building which is generated in a absolutely normal way without the client paying for it. This is what happens when the content in a website is good! Later on I started optimizing a group of articles and training his editors. We worked intensively together for several months until we pause the cooperation for some internal operational and organizational issues that he had to overcome. No matter this, the results below present how successful this SEO training project has been.

The project difficulties

• Not a lot of content writers to handle the on page SEO optimization requirements of the project.
• Not a lot of people in the IT department to handle the technical SEO requirements.
• Overloaded personnel.
• Too many IT projects running simultaneously.
• Not a lot of management focus on the SEO project (especially at the beginning)

The project strengths

• Strong website domain ranking and page rankings
• Good quality of content
• Will to try SEO proposals even on a small scale at the beginning
• Enough budget to devote in making SEO research and implementing SEO tasks

What we did

• SEO marketing research.
• On Page Optimization.
• SEO training for editors / content writers.
• Advanced Google analytics services.
• Online business consultation based on SEO.
• Google penalty removal guidance.

Services we continue offering to the client:

• At the moment the project is paused

Impact on Website’s Organic Traffic presented in Graphs

50% Increase in Sessions and Unique Users as shown in the graphs below

66% increase in the website’s organic pageview overall and up to 290% in pageviews in the sections of the website I worked closely with the editors as shown in the graphs below.

As mentioned earlier in this article the website had received a Google penalty during the time of our cooperation. The impact of this penalty started to be obvious when I made the monthly keyword ranking report at the beginning of May 2017. During April 2017 and as I was following the stats I noticed that there was a drop in the traffic. In the same period Google had send a notification for the penalty in the client’s search console. In all my reports from that moment until July 2017 I was insisting that we need to do something about it but there was a communication gap. The stats were showing a downwards trend except. In August 2017 we made a small break and the client told me that he was going to come back at the end of September cause the editors had a lot of articles to write and the SEO methods they had learned from me were making them finish the articles in more than double the time than before. But this was normal… I said ok and my last note to the client was to take care of the penalty. But somehow he was not listening… At the end of August he contact me again to ask me to help him. He had seen his traffic decrease from one day to the other by 50%! Google penalties can make such a negative impact and even worse and this is what I was afraid off all that time…. Anyway, at that stage he did listen to me and after making a report to Google to explain the steps that had been taken to overcome the website’s hacking problem Google brought back the website traffic in 3 days after we submitted the report. He was lucky! It took one more month for the website to reach the traffic that it had before the big penalty drop and 3 months to reach the traffic levels of March 2017. But after this the traffic trends finally showed all the hard SEO work we had done together with the editors. I must say, that this result can only be attributed to teamwork. Such results cannot be achieved if the content writers are not good and I will always be in favor of quality in the content instead of quantity! Quality is what brings SEO results and organic traffic and not quantity.

Client Testimonial!

Sofia provided easy-to-follow guides to implement her SEO suggestions, as well as new ideas for low-competition keywords and future content. She also provided advice to help us make our own SEO decisions and guided us through the process of editing and boosting our existing content.
Cassey Marriott – Expatica Chief Editor

How to increase your organic traffic – SEO training services

If you would like to increase your organic traffic and would be willing to learn some fundamentals SEO principles or even some more advance contact me and I will come back to organize a short call and discuss with you your project.

Additional professional SEO consultant services

Would you like to learn more about all the types of SEO services I offer? If yes, please follow any of the links below.

SEO consulting services per website type

You might be wondering if all websites require the same type of SEO consulting and how this service might differ from website to website. In my experience, I can say that the SEO principles are the same but the effort and continuity that is required definitely vary not only for different website types, but also for different industries, business sizes, locations and even the CMS that is used. If you would like to learn more, please follow any of the links below.