2 months of pure SEO = +50% organic traffic per day during quarantine

A story about how a site that works, brings traffic and requerest can give even more with pure SEO. And this is in the coronavirus spring, when users save money and spend them only on essential things. We will talk about improving on a site in the subject of construction and repairing in Kyiv and the region.

Introductory site and niche analysis

We started working on a site in the niche of construction and repairing in Kyiv and the region in February 2020.

Starting data:

• site on WP;
• domain name age - 5 years;
• the number of pages in the Google index is more than 1000;
• the number of external links - 240 donors.

Customer goals:

Increasing positions on targeted search queries in Google, which would entail an increase in hits on the website, that is, an increase in quality traffic.

Main areas of services:

• turnkey construction (from brick, aerated concrete, sip panels, frame houses);
• construction of elite houses and cottages.

Additional areas that are also interesting to sell for our customer:

• roofing works "on a turnkey basis";
• monolithic construction;
• building foundations and walls.

He was interested in large projects, large-scale works, that is, works with a large check.

The result of the initial audit of the site showed that:

• the information on the site was not relevant (for example, prices are for 2019, when it was the second month of 2020);
• optimization was more focused on info queries than on commercial ones;
• the completeness of the content on most landings was insufficient;
• SEO-optimization was done about three years ago. It has not been reviewed for a long time and it was spammy. That is, the keys are entered exactly and in places very rudely, sometimes so much that it was difficult for an ordinary user to read the information;
• there were technical errors, such as unspecified main site mirrors, duplicates, a lot of 3XX, 4XX errors;
• low-quality, spam, virus-infected donors;
• a large amount of shortcomings in usability for PC and Mobile.

In a project where there are already positions and traffic, it was necessary to work extremely carefully, because one wrong move and ... we could do harm instead of good.

How to start SEO for a Construction and Repairing Site

Creating a semantic core is an important stage in SEO promotion of any project. It is time-consuming and requires deep immersion in the customer's business. Fortunately, most of the services have been displayed on the site.

Important "but!" is that previous SEO work has been focused on collecting the maximum number of queries with a focus on traffic. That is, most of the queries were informational ones. In contrast we did not want to miss the main task that is the site should sell.

The main rules for collecting the core, which were followed by the specialists of Sprava when they started this project:

• there should be a maximum coverage of queries with words “price / prices”, “buy”, “order”, “Kyiv”, “Kyiv and region”, “Kyiv region”, “turnkey”, “cost”, etc., because they are commercial
• Queries with the words “photo”, “example” faded into the background.

Look at the clusters we have worked on. The screenshot shows the intermediate results after two months of SEO promotion:

In parallel with the core, two more problematic factors began to be worked out:

• technical errors;
• spam in the link profile.

Step 1. Eliminating of the technical errors

In order for SEO optimization to give the maximum possible result, technical errors must be eliminated immediately.

Technical tasks we have done:

• eliminating the duplicate of the site according to the working of 2 protocols;
• adjusting links in the navigation (there were addresses leading to the desired page through a redirect);
• eliminating of the 3XX, 4XX errors on the site;
• fixing critical errors in the current linking;
• removing duplicate meta tags in pages of the same type, as well as in pagination pages;
• closing from the index "junk" pages that are necessary for the functioning of the site, but are not needed for indexing;
• eliminating (deleting) unnecessary pages of the site that are technically generated by the engine;
• removed unnecessary (not needed for SEO) html tags in the site design;
• correcting robots.txt and sitemap.xml files.

This made it possible to "clean up the background". And although for positions directly the impact of errors is negligible (+2% for semantic core per month), such bugs could have a significant negative effect on project growth.

Step 2: Cleaning up website link profile

At the start of work on the project, it became clear that some of the donors were of poor quality, so we decided to purge. We went through all the donors and analyzed the quality of each.

An example of junk links:

As a result, 8% of donors were rejected.

Step 3: Working on landing page optimization

The strategy was to make an optimized landing page for each area of activity (in SEO terminology - a cluster in semantic core). It was necessary to work out all the landing pages according to the following checklist:

• meta tags taking into account the semantic core, in order to get the maximum CTR in the search;
• proofreading and additional optimization of text content;
• visual content optimization;
• creating technical task for the correction or complete alteration of texts (to maximize the satisfaction of the user's intent);
• checking and finalizing the linking on each page.

The result was seen in two weeks. Even taking into account the seasonality of the services offered by the company, the daily traffic from organic search was:

• February 13 - 125 users;
• February 26 - 150 users.

That is, SEO works led to + 20% of organic traffic per day

The result of the implementation of the first part of SEO optimization: +20% in daily organic traffic

Step 4. Dealing with missing content

In addition to content optimization, the SEO specialist created tasks for creating new content for existing landing pages: additions to texts or creating content for the page from scratch. For each page of the site, content was needed that would give the most complete answer to user requests on the topic of construction and repair.

The technical task for writing content looks like this:

• a complete list of questions, subtopics that need to be disclosed on the page, with examples;
• a list of additional words and phrases that needed to be used in the texts;
• keywords related to the topic of the page (if necessary).

We added new texts to the landing pages, harmoniously entered into the page structure and its optimization.

Intermediate results for the promotion of the construction and repair site

What makes us especially happy is the achievement of results in the construction niche, where many projects sank during the quarantine. Construction and repair are not essential items. Nevertheless, in 2 months we received +50% of users in organic daily traffic.

• February 13 - 120 daily allowances;
• April 13 - 180 daily allowances.

Daily dynamics in organic traffic for 2 months of SEO work

Our team is sure that the result would have been even better, but, unfortunately, at the beginning of March, the domain name payment was not made on time, and the project was unavailable for 4 days.

For greater objectivity in the analysis of the results obtained, as well as to exclude the seasonality factor, we suggest looking at the dynamics in comparison with 2019 of the same period. And here are the results we see:

• April 15, 2019 - 140 organic users;
• April 14, 2020 - 192 organic users.

Result: +37% in daily organic traffic.

Dynamics of changes in organic traffic in 2020 compared to 2019

Interesting dynamics of page changes. Look at the results for the top pages:

Dynamics of changes in organic traffic on the top pages of the site in comparison 2019 and 2020

It is fair to say that despite the growth in traffic, a number of parameters have unsatisfactory performance:

• % failures;
• average session duration.

These indicators directly affect the conversion of the site.

So, the next important stage of work on the project, which we do at Sprava, is the usability of the site. A work plan and recommendations have already been drawn up to improve the site and individual pages in order to improve user behavior and, as a result, increase conversions from the site. At the time of publication of the article, this step in the promotion has not yet been implemented. But we will be glad to share the results of these works with you in the future.

Conclusions

Even if it seems to you that your site works well, brings satisfying results, we are ready to provide a professional SEO audit and prove that you can do better and more. The mechanics are simple: that is the right strategy for SEO promotion and its competent implementation in practice.

Today our story was about how, with the right distribution of resources and step-by-step work on SEO, we managed to get +50% in daily organic traffic in just 2 months of work even during the period of quarantine and crisis for a construction site. The result is intermediate, not the maximum, but it already indicates that the strategy is chosen correctly and works well, despite the competitiveness of the niche.