I love optimizing websites for search engines so much I regularly do consulting work on the side. But what I love more than THAT is showing clients the amazing year-over-year results of a successful SEO campaign.
The data from the images below come from an eCommerce website in an extremely competitive niche. When I first started in April 2011, they received an average of 80 visits per day; that number jumped to ~200 visits per day - a 150% increase!
Here’s how their weekly organic traffic (excludes branded terms and not provided) looks like for the past year:
And here’s the month over month comparison:
It goes without saying that looking at overall traffic doesn’t tell you much so I segmented by their product category pages (excludes branded terms and not provided):
And the month over month comparison:
And yes, I know the user engagement rates are pretty terrible but there was nothing I could do about it since getting any UX/Design changes done was like walking through a (political) mine field.
What did I do to get all this free traffic? Nothing you probably couldn’t find reading the various blogs out there. If you’re looking for specifics, here’s a quick hit list in the order the projects were executed:
Keyword Research - they just weren’t targeting the right keywords.
Source Code Optimization - involved many crucial on-page elements such as the title, h1 and body text.
Technical Infrastructure Optimization - dealt with cleaning up the domain by addressing canonicalization issues, HTTP responses and robots exclusion.
Internal Link Building - cross linked their various category and product pages to improve crawler access.
Content Creation - managed a team of two outsourced content writers for the company blog.
External Link Building - hired, trained and managed a team of three link builders for website outreach.
Digital Asset Optimization - focused primarily on image optimization.
Other things that helped was a healthy dose of optimism, perseverance to succeed and a little algorithm change from Google.
Now that I’ve shared my example, how about you leave yours in the comments below?