Overview
Challenge
An algorithm update came out that swept away over 50% of organic traffic.
It didn’t just happen to this company, but to nearly every company in the industry. They reached out to Seer for help.
We engaged in a technical SEO 3 month project to help in this critical stage.
Approach
Seer researched and gathered data from Google Search Console, discussed site history, changes, and timelines with their development and marketing teams, and very quickly discovered a laundry list of areas to change.
After identifying priority areas, Seer and the client were able to bring all stakeholders to the table to create an agile process for how we could successfully execute these recommendations.
Execution
Both teams worked to:
- Remove duplicate pages from the site at scale to make the overall domain 80% unique content vs. 20% unique
- Optimize internal navigation to allow Google to better index releases and categories
- Remove pages being promoted externally in ways that conflicted with Google’s guidelines
- Create a set of quality standards content should meet, prior to being published on the site
- Systematically identify and remove thousands of low-quality pages that devalued the site
- Address a host of other smaller optimizations, worked on in batches, to steadily make the site a well-oiled, value-driving, search engine- accessible machine
When troubleshooting technical SEO, our process is to consider over 100 areas of the site to identify the 10-12 items that could truly be hindering performance. Using data and experience to drive this prioritization is key, enabling a 60-90 day turnaround in results—compared to 6-9 months.
Results
Traffic was recovered after 3 months and increased 10% in month 4. Most others in the industry never recovered.
Additionally, users were able to navigate the site better and find one consolidated view for each individual press release.
