How to Grow Traffic by 60.99% & SEO Topical Authority (Case Study)
Whether you’re working on a brand new website, or building your existing site’s organic presence, it’s important to showcase your topical authority to both Google and your audience. They want to see that the information you provide, or the products that you sell, are of great quality and are coming from a credible source. That’s why it’s essential to present yourself as an authority through your content and your backlink profile. In this case study, you’ll learn the exact steps that my team at The Search Initiative took to increase our client’s organic traffic by 60.99%. In this article, you’ll learn how to: Before that, let’s find out a bit more about the website’s goals and the main challenges faced during the campaign. The Challenge The client is a website selling health supplements in the United States, who joined the agency having already decided that they wanted to migrate their dated website and build a fresh site from the ground up with SEO in mind. One of the main challenges of this campaign was to make sure that the migration was carefully planned and executed to ensure that the site’s original rankings and traffic were sustained. We also added E-E-A-T signals that established the client as a trustworthy and authoritative voice within the industry – read on to learn how to do this. The next focus was to produce well optimized content for the product pages by writing compelling descriptions that convert as well as producing supporting blog content to build topical relevance and improve keyword visibility for informational keywords. Finally, to build the backlink profile of the new domain, we boosted the newly optimized product pages by executing a link building strategy, including HARO (which you’ll learn all our tricks soon). Find out how you can overcome these challenges for your website by following the steps below. Executing an SEO-Friendly Site Migration Making the decision to migrate your entire website shouldn’t be taken lightly. In some cases you might not have a choice, which is why it’s worth being aware of the risks and challenges that you might face along the way. Apart from potentially completely losing or breaking parts of your website, a site migration can also have significant impacts on your SEO. I’ll walk you through the process of an SEO-friendly site migration below, but for now, let’s look at what a site migration actually is. What Is a Site Migration? A site migration is the process of making significant changes to a website’s structure, technology or design. Here are some examples on why you might want to consider a site migration: Unsure about which hosting provider to use? Check out my video below. How Site Migrations Can Impact SEO A site migration is a substantial task that requires rigorous and thorough research and planning before you even begin to execute the strategy. With many moving parts and teams involved, it’s important to be aware of the SEO impacts that this can have. For example, without careful planning, you may lose your site’s precious rankings and traffic due to incorrect URL mappings and redirects or, you may encounter slow site-wide loading times as a result of incorrect server configurations. Even after the migration is complete and everything has gone to plan, it’s crucial to monitor progress to ensure that your site maintains and/or builds as much organic visibility as possible post-migration. SEO Site Migration Checklist I’ve put together this checklist so that you can be sure that your migration will be executed in an efficient and SEO-friendly way. Due to the scope of the work and risks involved, it’s good practice to plan your site migration for a time where, should things go wrong or there is a temporary dip, the impact is minimal. This is of course, assuming that your business has some seasonality to it. A site migration before or during the holiday season is not advised. The last thing you want to do is lose out on all of the potential traffic from a peak season as a result of your migration not being executed properly. Likewise, some days of the week may be quieter than others. For example, you may find that the start of the week is the best time to do your migration as fewer people browse your site at this time. Personally, I always migrate on Saturdays. Therefore, make sure to pick a smart migration date that allows time for you to monitor progress and iron out any issues that are presented post-migration. Using an SEO web crawler tool of your choice (i.e. SEMRush, Screaming Frog, Sitebulb etc), crawl your website so that you have a comprehensive record of everything that is on your website before the migration. For example, this will ensure that you have: You should also create a backup so that if for whatever reason the launch of your new site doesn’t go to plan, you can always revert back to the original if needed. Here’s a comprehensive guide on how to backup your website. This precautionary step is vital in making sure that you have peace of mind before launching. The next step is to create a copy of your website so that you can test and revise all of the changes that you intend to make – this is called a staging site. This staging site should be uploaded to a new server and ideally, should be on a separate domain or subdomain so that you can compare your new website to the original site before the launch. This’ll allow you to check and verify important things like making sure that the URLs from your old site are correctly redirected to the new site. Another important step is to make sure that you block access to this staging website from Google. This is to prevent both the staging site AND the original site from being indexed by search engines and in turn, potentially competing against each other for rankings. There are several ways you can do this: Add the following line of code to your pages: <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> You can’t carry out a migration without a clear and well organized URL map. Mapping your URLs involves keeping a list of all of your existing URLs so that you can match them up with the new URLs on your new website and implement the necessary redirects correctly. This is why crawling your original website comes in useful. In addition to your crawl, you should also compile your URLs from your XML sitemap (this is a file that serves as a roadmap for Google to access your pages). You can access your sitemap via the following URL: example.com/sitemap.xml Your URL map can be as simple as this: Original URL New URL Redirected? olddomain.com/old-url/ newdomain.com/new-url/ Yes/No If you’re changing the structure of your URLs or combinings old pages into a single page, remember to map all of the combined pages’ URLs to the correct new URL. When it comes to actually migrating the content (i.e. your HTML files, images etc), I strongly recommend doing so in small chunks. The more pages you move at once, the higher the chances of something going wrong. So take your time and carry out the migration whilst carrying out checks and tests at each stage. This’ll make it easier for you to identify any potential issues that may arise. This is also your chance to update any of the content if you need to. Without implementing proper 301 redirects, your new pages will not receive the traffic and PageRank (ranking power) of the old pages, which will significantly impact the new site’s rankability. 301 redirects are a way of indicating to users and search engines that the location of a web page has permanently moved. Using your URL map, you can go through each of your pages and implement a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new URL. If for whatever reason you have an old URL that is no longer needed, you can redirect it to another relevant page on your website, or serve a custom 404 page to let users know that the page no longer exists. Once you’ve redirected your URLs, you also need to remember to update all of the internal links (hyperlinks from one page on your site to another) on your new website. You can find all of the internal links from your website crawl that you did right at the start of the process. You should change all of the internal links from the old URLs to the new URLs to avoid unnecessary internal redirects. Imagine you had the following scenario. If you don’t update the internal link, then Page A would have an internal link to Page b. But, when clicked, Page b would redirect to Page B. This creates an unnecessary internal redirect that when multiplied across thousands of requests, can seriously affect page load times. Therefore, you should update the internal link so that, you have: Although your Read More Read More
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