SEO Audit Case Study: 1.4M Visitors in 6 Months

In this SEO case study, we’ll show you how we managed to get our financial services client’s website to an all-time high of 1.4M visitors in just six months…

…without building any links!

This is a perfect demonstration of why you should run a comprehensive SEO audit on your website every year.

So I’m going to show you the 4 step process that we followed to transform this sites search traffic below…

A Closer Look At The Case Study Site

Our client’s site provides real-time market data, news and services within the financial trading sector.

They also have tons of content about investing and provide free and paid tools to help everyday investors make good decisions.

They are seen by their users as a “trustworthy and reliable source of information” in their niche.

All sounds good, right?

Here’s the problem:

The client joined Search Logistics after losing over 30% of their organic traffic almost overnight.

Their primary goal was to:

The Biggest Challenges We Had to Overcome

The site’s organic traffic was growing nicely until July 2021…

Almost overnight organic traffic dropped by over 30% and showed no signs of recovery over the next couple of months.

What’s worse is they couldn’t determine the core issues of what was causing the organic traffic drop.

That’s when they got in touch with us.

The main problems we faced for the client were:

These SEO issues were single-handedly destroying the site and it was clear that Google wouldn’t rebound the site automatically.

Why?

Firstly the site had indexed hundreds of irrelevant and poor-quality pages, which…

1. Caused unnecessary index bloat
2. Wasted the site’s precious crawl budget

Remember: It costs money for Google to crawl your pages.

So why would they waste their money crawling low-quality pages?

In addition to all of this, the site’s loading times were very slow. This provided a poor user experience – especially for mobile devices.

Good user experience is essential if you want your site to rank in the SERPs.

Lastly, the client’s site operates in the competitive finance niche and clearly didn’t have topical authority. This was going to be a big task for our team.

Thankfully we have handled tons of situations like this before.

After running a comprehensive SEO audit on the client’s site, we developed a clear SEO strategy to revamp it.

Creating A Plan Of Attack

Here is a complete breakdown of the 4 essential steps we took to overcome all of the client’s challenges.

Remember – You can use this same process and implement each to get similar results for your own site.

Step #1 – Removing Unwanted Pages From the SERPs

Most websites have some unwanted pages indexed by Google.

The odd unwanted page sneaking into the index isn’t much of a problem.

But when there are hundreds (or even thousands) of these pages are indexed – it can significantly impact your SEO.

Here’s why:

Google has limited time and resources for crawling and indexing websites (known as “crawl budget“).

When numerous unwanted pages are indexed, it wastes this crawl budget for your site.

Eventually, your site’s crawl budget gets used up. At that point, Google stops crawling and indexing your important pages.

This is called “index bloat“ and is where the problem becomes serious!

1. Identifying Pages Causing Index Bloat

Below is a list of the most common types of pages that cause index bloat and how to find them on Google.

Just copy and paste the searches into Google and replace the site with your own domain:

#1 – HTTP Pages

• site:yourdomain.com inurl:http://
• site:yourdomain.com -inurl:https://

#2 – Paginated Pages (i.e. domain.com/blog/page-2/)

• site:yourdomain.com inurl:/page/
• site:yourdomain.come inurl:p=

#3 – Tag Pages

• site:yourdomain.com inurl:/tag/

#4 – Author Pages

• site:yourdomain.com inurl:/author/

#5 – WWW. And NON-WWW. Pages

If your site follows www. URL structures, then you shouldn’t have any non-www. web pages indexed (and vice versa).

• site:yourdomain.com inurl:www.
• Site:yourdomain.com -inurl:www.

You get the idea! Some other types of pages that also cause index bloat are:

• Trailing slash – URLs follow a structure where they end with a trailing slash “/”. You shouldn’t have any pages indexed that do not contain a trailing slash because it causes duplicate pages and content.
• Duplicate pages – Multiple pages on your website that all contain the same content. A common duplicated page homepage example is domain.com, domain.com/index.html, domain.com/homepage/ etc.
• Test or Dev pages – Test pages from your website’s staging or development site.
• Other thin content pages – Pages that offer little value to the end user, such as empty category pages on eCommerce websites or Thank you pages.

It’s crazy how many types of pages there are, right? And Google has to try and crawl each and every variation.

You can imagine how easy it is for an established site publishing content for 10+ years to get a ton of index bloat.

So get it sorted straight away!

2. Removing Pages Causing Index Bloat

Once you’ve identified the pages causing index bloat, there are a few ways to remove them:

#1 – Delete The Page

Remove the content and serve a 404 (not found) or 410 (gone) status on the URL. In most cases, the page will be removed from the index after it’s been recrawled by Google.

#2 – Noindex Tag

Add a noindex tag to tell Googlebot (Google’s crawler) not to index a URL. You can easily do this by adding the following line of code to the top of any page:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

Just ensure that Google can see the tag by double-checking that you haven’t blocked the URL on your robots.txt file.

#3 – URL Removal Tool

Google’s Removals Tool allows you to temporarily remove URLs from its search index. This typically only lasts around six months.

You must either delete the page or add a no-index tag after using the removal tool to ensure it’s permanent.

Step #2 – Improving Page Speed Performance

Your websites speed is something you should take seriously.

How fast your website loads significantly affects your overall user experience. And user experience is something that Google takes very seriously.

Here’s what I mean:

You land on a slow-loading page and because it takes so long to load – you get frustrated and leave quickly.

This is called “bounce rate“, a metric that Google directly tracks on your site.

It also plays a crucial role in Google’s ranking algorithm.

Why does Google care?

It comes down to Google’s ultimate goal – Deliver the best possible search experience to its users.

That’s it!

Use Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool for free to see your website performance.

Just enter the URL of the page you want to measure and the tool will provide a score out of 100 based on a number of metrics.

The tool also tells you exactly how to solve these issues by providing instructions on fixing each one.

Cool, right?

Website page load speed is no longer a luxury – it’s a necessity.

When auditing our client’s page performance, we noticed that the mobile version of the site had particularly slow loading times.

This was something we needed to sort out quickly!

Here’s how we did it:

1. Lazy-Loading Images & Video Content

Simply defer loading large or resource-intensive page elements like images and videos until they are actually needed.

The images and videos load in as the user scrolls down the page.

Lazy loading will significantly:

This is especially true for mobile websites where users may never reach the bottom of the page.

Learn how to implement lazy loading for your own site following this tutorial.

2. Image Compression

Large files take longer to load.

That means you need to compress images to less than 100KB per image.

How do you do that?

We use image compression tools like TinyPNG and Image Compressor to reduce image file size without compromising on quality.

You can even take advantage of a tool like ShortPixel to do it automatically whenever you upload an image to your site.

3. Minify JavaScript & CSS Files

Most websites have JavaScript and CSS files that take up a lot of processing time.

But what most people don’t know is that you can minify these files to remove:

..so they load quicker.

If you do this manually, it will take forever.

We use Terser to minify your JS files and Totpal to minify your CSS files quickly but you can also use WPRocket.

By optimising the page speed with just the 3 techniques above, we significantly improved the time it took for the client’s website to load – especially on mobile.

Step #3 – Building Topical Authority with Blog Content

With the core technical SEO issues out of the way – it was time to focus on website content.

This meant creating quality content that ranked well in Google and provided tons of value to their audience.

Regularly publishing blog content on your website has a number of huge benefits:

1. Increases your keyword visibility for long-tail keywords
2. Provides internal linking opportunities for the most important pages on your website
3. Builds topical relevance, showing both Google and your viewers that you’re an expert within your industry
4. Generates more traffic from Google

After performing a full content audit, it was clear that the client lacked the quality content they needed to rank.

Our team also identified significant content gaps between the client’s site and key competitors, which prevented them from building topical authority for both Google and users.

This was even more important because the client was in a YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) niche – Finance.

What is YMYL?

YMYL websites cover topics that may impact a person’s:

This means showcasing Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust (E-EAT) is essential.

The next step was to create a detailed content strategy for the blog that involved an outline of which topics and keywords should be covered.

Here’s how we did it:

1. Competitor’s Blogs

This is the simplest (but most effective) way to expand your own blog content. You simply look at what your direct competitors are posting about.

You can either:

But there is an even better way to get content ideas and see what keywords your competitors are targeting with my intelligent keyword spreadsheet (you can dowload via the link below)

Download our Intelligent Keyword Spreadsheet.

This powerful sheet uncovers your competitor’s low-competition, high-traffic keywords FOR FREE.

It takes less than 5 minutes and will give you a massive list of keywords and content ideas to focus on.

2. Ahrefs Content Gap

Another way to find new blog post ideas is to use Ahrefs’ Content Gap report.

This will provide you with a list of keywords your competitors are ranking for but you aren’t.

You can then create new articles that are optimised for these keywords to fill the content gap.

Simple, right?

Enter your competitors’ domains into the tool along with your own website (you can add up to 10 competing domains).

Click “Show keywords” and Ahrefs will pump out a list of all the keywords your site is missing.

Go through the keywords to identify any relevant topics to your website.

If you already have a similar page to your competitor but aren’t ranking for a specific keyword, you don’t necessarily need to create an entirely new blog post.

Add new content to the existing page to cover the topic gap.

Work smarter, not harder.

3. ChatGPT

ChatGPT is an AI model that is great for generating content ideas for your blog.

Use the following prompt template and type it into ChatGPT:

Generate X blog post ideas about [enter your niche / industry / topic

Here’s an example of SEO topics:

You can extend this search further by getting ChatGPT to focus on specific subtopics:

Found a couple of content ideas?

Now, get ChatGPT to create an outline for it:

Now you can refine the outline and ensure it covers all the core sub-categories for the main article.

Make sure that you:

Just using those 3 topic expander techniques, we were able to fill in all of the key topic gaps our client’s competitors had.

Step #4 – Implementing Internal Linking

Internal linking might be one of the most underrated SEO strategies.

What is that?

Internal linking is when you create hyperlinks from one page of your site to another (page of your site).

It’s also a ranking factor that Google uses to better understand your content while helping readers and search engine crawlers navigate your site easily.

Pretty important, right?

There’s more…

Good internal linking can enhance website’s:

The bottom line is you need to pay close attention to your internal linking strategy.

Internal Linking Best Practices

Below are the best practices we use to implement good internal linking.

#1 – Use Descriptive Anchor Text

Choose descriptive and relevant anchor text for your internal links.

Google considers the anchor text as a:

Use keyword-rich anchor text that accurately describes the linked page.

#2 – Link To Relevant Content

Internal links connect related pages and content within your website.

By linking to relevant pages, you provide users with more information and resources, encouraging exploration.

This can:

#3 – Optimise Link Placement

The placement of internal links within your content matters.

Aim to place important internal links at the top of the page or within the body of the content where users and search engines are more likely to notice them.

This ensures that the links receive more visibility and authority.

#4 – Use A Reasonable Number Of Links

There is no hard rule on the correct number of internal links you should have.

A good guideline is to add internal whenever they are relevant. But don’t overdo it – too many can confuse users and weaken link authority.

#5 – Create A Logical Site Structure

A well-organised website structure with a clear hierarchy and intuitive navigation helps users and search engines understand the relationship between different pages.

Ensure each page is easily accessible through internal links, enabling users to navigate seamlessly.

Here’s an example of an eCommerce website:

Blog post > Product page > Sub-category Page > Category Page > Homepage

#6 – Use Breadcrumb Navigation

Breadcrumbs are a helpful navigation aid that shows users the path they’ve taken to reach a specific page.

They improve user experience and reinforce internal linking by providing clear paths for website navigation.

Here’s an example of what breadcrumb navigation looks like:

#7 – Fix Broken Internal Links

Broken or outdated links can harm user experience and SEO.

Check regularly for broken links and update them.

This ensures users can navigate your site smoothly and helps search engines correctly crawl and index your content.

It’s worth spending the time to ensure that your internal linking strategy is on point. You’d be surprised at how big an impact it can have on your site’s performance (and even rankings).

The Results Are In

That brings us to the exciting part…

After running the in-depth SEO audit and implementing the 4 key tactics above, the client’s site reached a massive all-time high of 1.4 million visitors in a single month.

Crazy, right?

But that’s not all…

The site is now ranking for 93,914 keywords in the top 10 positions of the search results compared to 80,522 at the start of the project (November 2022).

That’s an increase of 16.6% in just six months.

Don’t underestimate the importance of technical SEO and creating great content your readers will love. It can generate significant gains in shorter periods of time than you might expect.

Need help with your SEO? Click here to get in touch now.

Wrapping It Up

Here’s the big takeaway from all of this…

Technical SEO is essential and if you aren’t running SEO audits consistently, you are running a huge risk of massive issues in the future.

The truth is that quality content and good technical SEO are the foundations your website needs.

As a reminder, here’s a quick recap of the 4 steps we used:

Don’t have the time to do it yourself?

Hire my SEO team to help. Submit an enquiry here!