SEO Content Case Study: How We More Than Doubled Traffic

You’re likely already publishing content to improve your:

BUT:

What happens when you write for humans first, and guide search engines with precision?

In this case study, we show how combining genuinely helpful content with structured data and a proven link building strategy led to measurable gains in traffic for our client.

The results?

Since the start of the campaign, the client’s monthly organic traffic increased by 118.9%, from 3,794 to 8,305 monthly sessions.

How did we achieve this?

A quick way of doing this for your own site is with our free AI Search Quality Rater Tool.

(Download it here)

But first you should read the rest of this case study, because we’ll break down exactly how we implemented these changes and how you can apply the same strategies to your own website.

Let’s dive in.

A Closer Look At The Case Study

Our client is a U.K.-based service provider in the gardening niche.

Before partnering with Search Logistics, the client had limited visibility for key pages despite valuable content.

Our goal was to improve organic performance by making their content more helpful to users and easier for search engines to interpret.

The Biggest Challenges We Had To Overcome

The most pressing challenges that we overcame during the course of this campaign were:

Create A Plan Of Attack

Once we identified these challenges, we crafted a comprehensive strategy to recover from the drops and accelerate the client’s growth.

Here’s a breakdown of the steps we took to optimize the website and improve its search visibility.

If you’re facing similar challenges, this approach can help you achieve better results.

Step #1: Writing Helpful Content

Creating content that ranks starts with writing content that genuinely helps people.

In this campaign, we focused on delivering clear, useful information ensuring every page…

…and reflected the client’s subject-matter expertise.

Before going into detail on how you can do this, it’s important to understand exactly what Google means by “helpful content”.

What is Helpful Content?

Google first rolled out the Helpful Content update in August 2022, with refinements in December 2022 and September 2023.

Since March 2024, it’s become a permanent part of Google’s core ranking algorithm.

At its core, helpful content is content created with users in mind, not search engines.

It’s content that delivers real value by answering questions, solving problems, or offering useful insights tailored to the audience’s needs.

Under Google’s guidelines, helpful content puts people first.

That means prioritizing:

…and usefulness over keyword stuffing or algorithm-chasing tactics.

To meet this standard, your content should be original, well-researched, and grounded in genuine subject-matter expertise.

Why Is Writing Helpful Content Important?

Google rewards pages that put users first.

Meaning?

Content that clearly answers questions, solves problems, or offers real insights is more likely to surface in top search results.

When visitors quickly find what they need, they’re more inclined to stay, engage, and trust your brand.

This kind of content also builds authority over time, making your site more resistant to algorithm shifts that target shallow or low quality pages.

How to Make Your Content More Helpful

Let’s look at what you can do to write content that aligns with Google’s algorithm:

1. Create Content That Satisfies the User’s Search Intent

Understanding what users actually want (i.e. their search intent) is the first step in making your content more helpful.

For example, adding hundreds of words of content to a product page isn’t as helpful to a user who is already looking to buy.

2. Improve Content Quality:

There are several ways that you can improve your content to make it more helpful.

Go deeper than surface-level explanations by adding:

…or case studies to your content.

This shows Google and your audience that you’re going beyond just providing information that users can find elsewhere.

Remember:

Users scan web pages to find what they’re looking for, so structure your content with a clear heading structure and use bullet points to organise your information in an easily digestible way.

3. Demonstrate Your Trustoworthiness

Share real-world stories or lessons learned from your personal or professional use of a product or service or as an expert within your industry.

Adding quotes or perspectives from people on your team or other trusted experts in your space helps show that the information provided is from a credible source.

For example…

If you run a sustainable fashion blog, you might include insights from your own wardrobe audit, such as how many fast fashion items you replaced with ethical alternatives within an article about building a minimalist, eco-friendly closet.

You can also add references from external sources to back up key points that you make to further build trust.

4. Don’t Forget To Make it Engaging

Getting users onto your page is only half the battle. You also need to ensure that they stay on your page, and ultimately, convert.

• Add benefit-led intros or summaries to grab attention and let users know that your page addresses their needs instantly.

• Add internal links to related content to keep readers exploring your site.

• Pose questions and include clear calls to action, like encouraging comments, downloads or subscriptions.

• Use images, infographics, and charts to break up text and make complex information easier to digest.

Implementing these recommendations helps improve the overall quality, usability and helpfulness of your content.

Step #2: Helping Google Understand Your Content With Schema Markup

So far, we’ve gone through how to make your content more valuable for your audience…

BUT:

There are also ways to make it easier for search engines to understand your content.

Structured data is one of the most effective ways to give Google a clear picture of what your content is about.

What is Structured Data?

Structured data (also known as “schema markup”) is a standardized code format that you embed in your HTML to label specific elements like:

…and more.

This provides powerful context that search engines and AI systems can interpret to understand, categorize and display your content more effectively

Why is Structured Data Important for SEO?

Adding schema markup to your content isn’t a direct ranking factor, but it offers valuable SEO advantages:

✅ Improved Search Visibility

By giving Google more context about your content, you increase the chances of showing up for the right queries.

This leads to more relevant placements in search results.

✅ Higher Click-Through Rates

When your content is marked up correctly, search engines can enhance your listings with additional details like:

or star ratings.

These visual upgrades make your results more eye-catching and encourage more users to click.

Take this product page as an example.

With Product structured data, Google displays the item’s price, stock status and star rating directly in the search result.

Without that markup, your result appears as plain text, lacking the extra details that help users make a decision.

Evergreen Structured Data

Search is evolving fast, but some structured data types continue to prove their value year after year.

Whether you’re optimizing an online store, a content hub, or a service-based site, certain schema markups remain essential.

✅ Informational Schema Types

Article / BlogPosting Schema – Crucial for publishers, blogs, and news sites.

Article schema helps your content appear in Google News, top stories carousels, Google Discover feed and voice assistant responses.

Include elements like headline, author, datePublished, and image for best results. For blog content, use BlogPosting, which is a subtype of Article.

FAQPage Schema – Ideal for support content, service pages, or blog articles that address user questions.

It allows Google to feature your Q&As directly beneath your search result in an expandable accordion format.

Tip: Don’t overuse this. Google has dialed back excessive FAQ use in recent updates, so apply it where the Q&A format is genuinely helpful.

✅ Business and Brand Schema

Organization Schema – This is one of the most foundational schema types and provides essential brand signals to Google, such as:

Organization schema helps populate your knowledge panel, reinforces brand identity in search, and can increase your credibility in AI-generated overviews or entity graphs.

For example, you can see below that Google uses LinkedIn’s logo in the search results and provides users with helpful links for navigation.

Product Schema – A vital markup for any online store.

It describes individual products and typically works in combination with:

• Offer schema: which adds pricing, currency, and availability info
• Review/Rating schema: to display aggregate star ratings, reviewer names, and the number of reviews

How To Use AI To Generate Structured Data

There are several tools that can be used to generate structured data, but one of the easiest and quickest ways to do so these days, is with the help of AI.

Here are some prompts you can use to generate the above schema markups:

Article

Generate JSON-LD schema markup for an article using the following details:

Headline: [Insert headline]
Author name: [Insert author name]
Publish date: [YYYY-MM-DD]
Modified date (optional): [YYYY-MM-DD]
Description: [Insert short meta description]
Article URL: [Insert URL]
Main image URL: [Insert image URL]
Publisher name: [Insert organization name]
Publisher logo URL: [Insert logo URL]

Here’s an example of a ChatGPT output:

FAQPage

Generate JSON-LD schema markup for a FAQ page using the following Q&A pairs:

Q: [Insert question 1]
A: [Insert answer 1]

Q: [Insert question 2]
A: [Insert answer 2]

[…add more if needed]

Here’s an example of a ChatGPT output:

Organization

Generate JSON-LD schema markup for an organization with the following details:

Organization name: [Insert name]
URL: [Insert website URL]
Logo URL: [Insert logo URL]
Contact phone: [Insert phone number]
Contact email: [Insert email]
Founding date: [Insert founding year or full date]
Headquarters address: [Insert street, city, region, country]
Social media profiles: [List URLs: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.]
SameAs profiles: [Optional: Wikidata, Crunchbase, etc.]

Here’s an example of a ChatGPT output:

Product

Generate JSON-LD schema markup for a product using the following information:

Product name: [Insert product name]
Description: [Insert short product description]
Brand: [Insert brand name]
SKU: [Insert SKU code]
Product URL: [Insert URL]
Image URL: [Insert product image URL]
Price: [Insert price]
Currency: [Insert currency code, e.g., USD]
Availability: [Insert availability status: InStock, OutOfStock, PreOrder, etc.]
Rating value: [e.g., 4.7]
Review count: [e.g., 112]

Here’s an example of a ChatGPT output:

Once you’ve created your markup, verify it using the Structured Data Testing Tool.

Simply copy and paste the code into the tool and click “Run Test”.

If there are not issues, you’ll see something like this:

… and if something is wrong, you’ll see this, where the tool will identify the line of code and explain what the error is on the right.

Once it’s been validated, you can add to the section of your web page inside a tag.

Step #3: Broken Link Building Strategy

Almost every single website on the internet has links that point to them.

Sometimes, those links can stop working or get removed.

Most site owners won’t realize when this happens, which can impact their site’s user experience as users trying to access the linked page are met with nothing.

We took advantage of this by executing a broken link building strategy for our client. You can too!

What is Broken Link Building?

Broken link building is the process of finding dead (broken) links on other websites, identifying what content was originally linked, and then offering your own relevant content as a replacement.

When websites link to pages that no longer exist and result in 404 errors, it creates a poor user experience and weakens that page’s authority.

You can turn this into an opportunity by:

1. Finding broken links in your niche using tools like Ahrefs.
2. Creating or suggesting a high-quality replacement on your own website.
3. Reaching out to the site owner to notify them of the broken link and propose your content as a fix.

How to Execute Broken Link Building

1. Find relevant websites within your industry that you want a backlink from.

The best ones are usually personal blogs and small companies where the owners will be grateful for your help and will also be more likely to respond.

A simple Google or ChatGPT search like this should give you a starting point.

2. Once you’ve got your list of sites, put them into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer > “Best by links” > Filter down to “404 pages” > “Show results”.

This will show you the dead pages on the site and how many referring domains they have.

3. Go through the results to find a topic that matches yours.

Here’s a decent prospect of a site that’s posted an article about pebble pathways.

And here’s where the broken link is:

If you don’t already have a similar piece of content on your website (in this case the broken page was a listicle on pebble pathway ideas), then this is where you’d create it so that it aligns with the broken link.

Reach out to the blogger or site owner telling them about your similar page and that you spotted the broken link. Here’s a template you can use:

Subject: Quick heads-up about a broken link on your site

Hi [Name],

I was browsing through your [article/page] on [Page Title or Topic] and noticed a broken link pointing to [briefly describe the dead resource, e.g. “an old SEO guide”].

Just wanted to let you know in case you want to update it!

I actually have a similar resource that might be a good fit as a replacement:

[Your URL] – [One-sentence description of your content, e.g. “a current, beginner-friendly SEO guide”].

Hope that’s helpful — happy to hear your thoughts either way.

Best regards,

[Your Name]

[Your Website]

Repeat this process for the rest of your prospect list.

By the end of it, you’ll have backlinks from relevant websites in your niche.

Results

Since the start of the campaign, the client’s monthly organic traffic increased by 118.9%, from 3,794 to 8,305 monthly sessions.

The number of keywords that the client ranks for within the Top 3 positions of Google grew from 136 to 234.