On-Page SEO Case Study: +2,550% Search Traffic

What happens if you fix all of your clients on-page SEO problems and updated their existing content to be more user-focused?

They get a 2,550% increase in monthly engaged organic sessions:

How did we do that?

Mostly by updating content to be more user focused!

This is more important than ever before now that the Helpful Content Update is baked into Googles core algorithm.

I’ll walk you through everything we did step by step below.

A Closer Look At The Case Study Site

Our client is a local home maintenance service provider based in the United States, but focusing on optimising their website for a single state (and surrounding areas).

Before joining Search Logistics, the client lacked visibility for important commercial intent search queries.

Therefore, the main objective here was to grow the visibility for keywords that would convert organic visitors into potential leads and customers.

The Biggest Challenges We Had to Overcome

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

1. Adaption of key service pages to match the user’s search intent
2. Creation of local service pages to capture relevant traffic
3. Fixing indexation problems on the blog

All of this issues existed at the technical and content levels of SEO so we were able to act relatively quickly as everything was under our full control.

Creating a Plan of Attack

Having identified the key issues holding the site back, we devised a comprehensive strategy that would bring about growth for our client’s website.

Below, you’ll find a breakdown of exactly what steps we took to optimise and boost our client’s visibility in Google search.

If you have similar issues for your own website, you can replicate the same steps or get in touch if you want us to do it for you.

Step #1: User Intent Optimisation

The client’s key service pages weren’t converting organic visits into enquiries or paying customers.

This suggested that there was a disconnect between what users were expecting to find on the page, and what was actually being provided.

In other words, the user intent wasn’t being met.

User intent (aka search intent) refers to the purpose behind a user’s search query. It’s the “why” behind what a user types into a search engine.

Understanding user intent is crucial because it helps ensure that the content you create aligns with what users are actually looking for.

When content matches user intent, it leads to higher engagement and better user satisfaction.

This alignment increases the likelihood of users finding your content useful, staying longer on your site, and converting into customers or subscribers.

User intent can generally be categorised into four main types:

1. Informational Intent: Users are looking for information or answers to questions. They want to learn something e.g. “how to bake a cake”, “what is blockchain technology”, “benefits of yoga”.
2. Navigational Intent: Users are trying to find a specific website or page. They already know where they want to go e.g. “Facebook login”, “YouTube”, “OpenAI website”.
3. Commercial Investigation Intent: Users are researching products or services before making a purchase decision. They are comparing options and seeking recommendations e.g. “best smartphones 2024”, “top laptop brands”.
4. Transactional Intent: Users are looking to make a purchase or complete a specific action. They have a strong intent to buy or engage in a transaction e.g. “buy iPhone 15” or “cheap flights to New York”.

In our client’s case, the service pages have an informational user intent, as searchers will be looking for information about what kind of services the client offers.

Here are some insights on how to optimise for each type of user intent:

Regardless of the keyword you’re trying to rank for, it’s vital that you ensure that your content reflects its search intent.

Step #2: Local Service Page Creation

In addition to optimising your content to mirror the searcher’s intent, you’ll want to make sure that you’re also capturing users who are looking for what you offer.

1. Keyword Research

For instance, our client offered their services to a number of locations, but didn’t have content that reflected this.

We created local pages to target these geo-specific, service-based keywords covering their service areas.

Identify Local Keywords

Find keywords related to your services that also include your local area (e.g., “plumber in London”).

Make a list of all of the services that you offer and a list of locations that you serve, then simply create permutations of all of these to form your keyword list.

For example, if you offer emergency plumbing services in London, Brighton and Surrey – you’d have:

But you can also have variations like:

2. Optimise On-Page Elements

The next thing you need to do is optimising on-page elements, such as:

Title Tag

Include your primary keyword and location within the page title.

Here’s a template that you can use:

[Service] in [Location] | [Your Company Name]

For example: Emergency Plumbing Services in London | Your Company Name

Meta Description

Write a compelling meta description that includes the keyword and encourages users to click onto your website instead of your competitors.

URL Structure

Keep it clean and include the primary keyword and location.

Here’s a template that you can use:

yourdomain.com/location-service

For example: yourdomain.com/dallas-emergency-plumbing

Headers (H1, H2, H3)

Use headers to structure your content and include your keywords naturally.

The H1 should ideally also include the main keyword and location.

3. Content Optimisation

Now, let’s see what we did to optimise our clients’ content.

Service Description

Write detailed descriptions of your services and address the key pain points that prospective customers will want to know about what you do.

For example, if you offer emergency plumbing services, what exactly is it that you do? Do you specialise in a particular type of plumbing i.e. you might only handle commercial properties instead of residential?

Customer Testimonials

Add testimonials and reviews from local customers to build trust and relevance.

Images

Showcase your expertise by including high quality images that are relevant to your services throughout the page.

This shows users exactly what they can expect from you and helps demonstrate your professionalism.

Include CTAs

Make it easy for users to reach out to you by including prominent and compelling calls to actions.

Follow the same guidelines as outlined previously in this case study.

Local Information

If you have a physical location that users can visit, make sure to include key information such as the address but also instructions on key landmarks or details about how to visit.

4. Internal Linking

Now, internal link building is key when it comes to site structure and navigation. This is why you need to take advantage of this strategy.

Main Menu Navigation

Once you’ve created your local pages, add them to the main menu navigation so that users (and Google) can easily find them.

Contextual Links

Remember to also add links to and from other relevant pages on your website.

This again helps Google discover your pages, but also guides users towards your important service page which is designed to convert visitors into leads/customers.

Following the steps outlined above will help ensure that your service pages (and landing pages) capture local users who are ready to hire you.

Step #3: Fixing Indexation Problems

One of the most crucial elements of SEO is making sure that your pages are accessible to Google’s web crawlers.

Without this, they simply won’t rank.

The paginated pages on the client’s blog had a canonical tag pointing to the first page of the blog section.

For instance, example.com/blog/page-2 had a canonical tag that pointed to example.com/blog/.

Canonical tags are used to define the main (or canonical) version for duplicate, near-duplicate and similar pages.

They are added to the section of the web page and look like this:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://example.com/sample-page/” />

• link rel=”canonical”: This tag specifies that the link provided is the master (canonical) version of the page.
• href=”https://example.com/sample-page/”: This attribute indicates the URL where the canonical version of the page can be found.

By adding a canonical tag from /blog/page-2 to /blog/ (and so on), our client’s site was missing out on ranking for lots of keywords because Google wasn’t sure which should be the canonical.

The solution here, which is recommended by Google, is to “give each page its own canonical URL”.

In other words, we needed to add a self-referencing canonical tag to each /paginated /blog/ page.

So, this means that for example.com/blog/page-2, you’d add the following canonical:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://example.com/blog/page-2″ />

In order to give Google a nudge for indexing these pages, we submitted them to Google Search Console via the URL Inspection tool.

Copy and paste the URLs at the top of Google Search Console.

Click on “REQUEST INDEXING”.

Give the tool a few minutes to fulfill the request.

Once it has, you’ll see something like this:

The final step in the process was to make sure that these pages were added to the client’s XML Sitemap, which is a file that lists all the important pages of a website, helping search engines like Google to crawl and index the site’s content more efficiently.

You can usually find it via the following URLs:

1. yourdomain.com /sitemap
2. yourdomain.com /sitemap.xml
3. yourdomain.com /sitemap_index.xml

If you don’t already have a Sitemap, you can use a WP plugin like RankMath or a tool like ScreamingFrog to create one for you.

Once you’ve added all of the pages that you want Google to crawl and index, submit it to Google Search Console.

On the left-hand side of the page in the menu, click “Sitemaps”.

Enter your website’s Sitemap URL and click “Submit”.

You’ll see something like this once it’s been submitted.

If you have any pages that aren’t being crawled, following the steps outlined above should help resolve this.

The Results

After fixing all of the page seo SEO problems above, our client had a 2,550% increase in monthly engaged sessions…

Not only that:

But the clients primary objective was to increase leads and sales from organic traffic. We also saw the number of events in GA4 increasing by 478%:

Plus:

The number of keywords that the client is ranking for in the top 10 positions of the search results has increased by 1,783% from 18 to 339:

Are you struggling with SEO?

Here are 3 ways that we can help you:

And if you have any questions…

…please feel free to leave a comment below!