How we used advance SEO strategies & content development to hack growth
A venture capitalist friend who invested in a Software-as-a-Service(SAAS) tech startup company approached Growth.pro for help at the end of April 2019. Their biggest problem was that the site was not ranking for any important keywords and they were not acquiring any new sign-ups for their solution.
In order to show numbers, the startup was buying paid keywords in Google Adwords which was priced at more than USD20 per click.
The important keywords are hyper-competitive with very low search volumes per month as the solution is in a very niche space.
We onboarded the client from Malaysia and immediately ran a detailed audit on the website. One of the most pressing problems was that the site structure was badly set-up as its content was many levels deep. This is very destructive to Google’s crawlers (Googlebot).
You see, for Google to crawl a website and index its content, it has a crawl ‘budget’. This budget depends on many aspects: site’s age, freshness of content and especially site speed and structure.
One major problem with the website was its speed. See the image below..
The first thing we did was to do a complete site migration to a world-class hosting company and did a structural revamp of it. We cleaned up its database, set up a caching system that pre-caches all images. At the same time, we also set up a Content Delivery Network (CDN) so that all images, CSS and javascript files are served from the nearest server from the searchers’ locations. As the client’s customers are worldwide, we need to get the website speed to be super fast when serving users from all parts of the world.
We took less than a day to complete the migration and another day to fully optimize the speed of the site. See the below results..
One of the most important ranking factors for Google is site speed and also mobile-responsiveness.
One other major issue with the site was that there were many errors when it was viewed on a mobile device. Our website developers got to work and quickly corrected all the issues with the site.
Recently, Google has changed its algorithm to be mobile-first, instead of desktop. With this in mind, we know that any mobile-friendliness issues with a site will not bode well with Google, therefore, we took immediate action to rectify this.
Once the mobile issues and site speed were taken care off, we attacked the pages and content of the site. We did a thorough competitive analysis and keyword research to identify issues. One thing we found out was that the client was using a major “money” English keyword that described its solution with a localized usage term. This local search term had very few search volumes per month globally and as the client’s target was international, we made the change to it.
Our team then crafted content that has strong topical relevance to our client’s solutions and put up two separate long-form articles into their blog. At the same time, we updated some of the old blog content with additional info and made huge changes to many blog content titles, URL names, sub-headlines, header-tags. We also researched on semantically-related keywords and synonyms, then sprinkled them into the old articles strategically.
After 10 days, the site started to be indexed in Google’s international databases with hundreds of important keywords. Our next target is to get scores of the keywords to move up to the first page and also to get as many of them to be on the no.1 to 3 positions.
Conclusion
SEO must be handled in a holistic and strategic level. Most SEO agencies work with their clients on the tactical execution but usually there is no overall strategy and planning.
Google has more than 200 ranking factors that include domain authority, content execution, user-experience, competitive landscape, local vs international, device and many more. At the same time, the search engines continuosly update and change their algorithms, depending on market conditions and technological advances.
There is no one magic silver bullet to get your website rankings up. However, in order to execute a holistic SEO strategy, the team needs to be experts in multiple areas: server/site speed optimization, on-page/on-site technical SEO, off-site SEO linkbuilding, advance keyword research and content development, conversion rate optimization, headline & sales copy writing and many many more.
Feel free to talk to us on our online chat or just submit your questions on our contact form. We would love to advice if you need help.
