Case study 2 min read
SEO optimisation: how I doubled a website's traffic by working on 27% of its pages
An affiliate website for the United States was losing traffic. By optimising 30 of its 110 pages, it doubled its traffic in the first year.
Services used:
- Sector
- Affiliate website for the United States market
- Project
- Technical audit, new keywords and optimisation of the most important pages
- +100%traffic in the first year
- 30 of 110pages optimised (27% of the website)
- 3 weeksuntil the first changes showed in Search Console
The website’s clicks and impressions in Google Search Console, 2023.
The starting point: a website losing traffic every month
It was an affiliate website aimed at the United States market, and things weren’t looking good. It was losing traffic and the ads were worth less and less, even though the affiliate links converted at 11%.
The conversion rate was fine, so I didn’t touch it. The goal was to win back the traffic.
What I did
Reviewing the keywords
I started with an audit: which keywords ranked best, how much the secondary ones were worth and whether they matched the ones bringing the most searches at that moment.
The secondary keywords no longer attracted traffic. New ones had to be worked on within the same main keyword, and I found one that no page was ranking for.
In the chart, the red line is that new secondary keyword, which no page was ranking for. The blue one is the main keyword, and the yellow one, one of the best-ranking ones.
It was the opportunity to stand up to the competition that had entered the market a year earlier and that, together with some outdated content, explained the drop.
Technical audit
With Screaming Frog I reviewed the website’s technical condition. I found 404 errors and sitemap addresses that Google was still finding even though they’d been deleted from WordPress years before, and fixed them.
Optimising the pages that mattered most
I optimised titles, descriptions and headings, and completed the content with the new keyword on the 30 most important pages, out of 110.
What we achieved
Within three weeks the results were already changing: that’s the point where the chart starts to rise, and I hadn’t even finished the adjustments.
With only 27% of the website optimised, traffic doubled in the first year.
What we both gained
What the client gained
Winning back and doubling traffic in a year without rebuilding the whole website, while keeping the conversion rate that already worked.
What I took away
You don’t need to touch the whole website to change its course. Finding the search nobody was working on and focusing on the pages that matter most delivers more than spreading the effort across all of them.
