Case Study: How We Increased Organic Traffic by 316% in 25 Weeks

Today we are going to look at how we dramatically increased traffic for a local SEO client.

The client’s request was simple “We want above-the-fold-rankings, specifically in positions 1-3 for our target keywords.”

Here is a screenshot of our success over the first 6 months.

Brief Client Background

Before we proceed with the case study, here is a brief background about the client:

The client is a provider of outdoor adventure tours, ranging from whitewater rafting to mountain expeditions in their region. They oﬀer a variety of packages to provide the ultimate outdoor experience for customers.

Their website already had some traffic – with some of their key terms ranking on the first page.

The client’s main goal was to increase visibility for over 20 keyword terms on Google.

After analysing our client’s existing properties, we found the following problems:

Target keywords were directing the traﬃc to the homepage instead of relevant landing pages.

Competitors have individual pages with good content ranking for the same set of keywords, while the client only has the homepage to rank the keywords.

There was only one existing page that targets the keywords, but not enough links to establish contextual relevance — pages were linking to the homepage only.

After a deep analysis of the entire site, we noticed the website structure lacked organisation.

This is a problem because a website without an organised structure will hinder rankings.

This is what the original site structure looked like:

The page, targeting the keywords for whitewater rafting, was too far down the site hierarchy.

This explains why it was not getting traﬃc.

We advised on a new website structure to make the pages more organised.

This will help distribute equity from the homepage to the relevant landing pages.

This will then provide a more logical and contextual connection among the pages.

Here is the new website structure:

The inner pages relevant to the target keywords were losing traﬃc.

Most of the keyword equity directs to the homepage.

The new website structure establishes the connection between the landing pages.

This ensures the homepage does not cannibalise all the rankings for the target keywords.

The target keywords were used in both the homepage and the relevant landing pages.

Exact match keywords were also used in a variety of landing pages targeting a specific key term.

The content on the homepage was improved to highlight the unique selling point of our client.

Some of the existing content about whitewater rafting was transferred from the homepage to relevant landing pages.

This was done to avoid losing rankings.

Some parts of the content were re-written to avoid keyword stuﬃng and over-optimisation.

New pages were also created to provide contextual support to the landing page with the target keyword.

From 2,535 monthly visitors to 8,798 monthly visitors, amounting to a growth of 316%.

Over 821 keywords ranked in the top 5 positions.

51 keywords are now ranking in positions 1 to 3, including the target keyword.

Through website restructuring, content creation and inner linking, our client was able to rank for their targetted keywords.

This ultimately helped them claim the top positions on search results and increase visibility, dramatically.

SEO is not a one-size-fits-all process.

There are many things to take into consideration to increase rankings.

If you need more visibility online, feel free to contact us here.