How To Increase Traffic By 96% (SEO Case Study)

Regardless of your website’s size, the keys to a successful SEO campaign are (on-page), links (off-page), and technical factors.

Your content acts like the body of a race car, and it’s referring backlinks like race fuel. The technical factors act like the nuts and bolts allowing everything else to perform at its best.

If you miss either of these then your website will struggle to rank much like a race car struggling to get down the track.

In this case study, you’ll learn the exact steps that my team at The Search Initiative took to increase our client’s organic traffic by 96%. You will get a crash course in the three pillars of SEO (on-page, off-page, and technical factors) through the lens of this case study.

In this article, you’ll learn how to:

Before getting into the details of the strategy, here’s some important information about the website’s goals and the main challenges that were faced.

The Challenge

The main objective for this campaign was to increase the amount of quality organic traffic on the site to grow the number of leads.

The client is a US-based SaaS (Software as a Service) B2B company that builds and offers cloud software with web pages targeting a range of countries including English speaking countries such as the U.S.A., as well as Japan, China, Korea, and France.

With this in mind, one of the main challenges was index bloat. There were over 30k crawlable URLs on the English version of the website alone – quite excessive for a SaaS website. Fixing these crawl budget issues and uploading the XML sitemap which was missing when the client joined TSI was a priority. More on that, below…

The client’s hreflang (a way to tell Google about the language and target location of your content) setup had not been implemented correctly.

Although the core landing pages of the site were relatively well optimized, there was a lack of supporting content to drive traffic towards them. This is because the client’s blog was not active, with just a handful of articles published.

This was tackled by researching and writing informational blog articles to target long-tail keywords. This helped build the client’s topical relevance within the niche as well as provide internal linking opportunities towards the main pages on the site.

The final step was to build authority with a link-building strategy that focused on building page authority on the website’s most important pages: the homepage and service pages.

Follow the steps below and find out how you can also overcome these challenges for your own websites.

Crawl Budget Management

What Is Crawl Budget & Why Is It Important?

Google only has a limited amount of time and resources that it can allocate to crawling and indexing the World Wide Web. Therefore, Google sets a limit on how much time it spends crawling a given website – this is known as the crawl budget.

The crawl budget is determined by two elements:

If you have a large website with hundreds of thousands of pages, you’re going to want to make sure that only the most important pages are being crawled i.e. that you aren’t wasting your crawl budget on unimportant URLs.

Crawl budget management is about making sure that you’re stopping Google from crawling irrelevant pages that cause index bloat.

How To Fix Index Bloat

Index bloat occurs when Googlebot crawls too many pages of poor quality. These pages may offer little to no value to the user, be duplicated, be thin in content, or may no longer exist.

Too many unimportant and low-quality pages being crawled wastes precious crawl budget as Google spends time crawling those URLs instead of the important ones.

Our client’s English site had over 30k legacy event pages indexed – these were pages that included very little content about industry events within the client’s niche i.e. a flier for the event along with essential information such as dates and times.

Let’s look at some of the most common culprits that cause index bloat and how you can find them using a site search:

site:yourdomain.com inurl:https://

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

site:yourdomain.com inurl:/page/

site:yourdomain.come inurl:p=

site:yourdomain.com inurl:/tag/

site:yourdomain.com inurl:/author/

site:yourdomain.com inurl:www.

site:yourdomain.com -inurl:www.

You may also come across these kinds of pages:

example.com/with-trailing-slash/
example.com/without-trailing-slash

There are several ways to tell Google which pages you want crawled, and which ones you don’t:

Here’s the robots.txt file for my site:

You can generally find your robots.txt by accessing: yourdomain.com/robots.txt

The basic format for blocking Google from crawling your page(s) is:

User-agent: [user-agent name]
Disallow: [URL string not to be crawled]

Here’s an example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /author/

The above rule prevents all robots from accessing any URL that contains /author/.

Find out more about the best practices for your robots.txt file here.

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

If you have a WordPress website, you can do this easily via a plugin like Yoast SEO.

On any page, scroll to the Advanced tab on the plugin and where it says “Allow search engines to show this Post in search results?” select No.

Find out more about how to manage your crawl budget here.

XML Sitemaps

While your robots.txt file is used to prevent search engine bots from accessing certain pages, there’s another important file that you need to guide Google in the right direction regarding which pages you do want it to find and index.

That’s the XML sitemap – which our client happened to have missing from their website.

What Is An XML Sitemap & Why Is It Important?

The XML sitemap is a “map” of URLs using Extensible Markup Language.

Its purpose is to provide information about the content on your website i.e. the pages, videos, and other files, along with the respective relationships between them.

XML sitemaps are important because they allow you to specify your most important pages directly to Google.

Here’s an example of what a sitemap looks like: https://diggitymarketing.com/sitemap.xml

Providing this information makes it easier for crawlers like Google to improve crawl efficiency as well as understand the structure of your web pages. Think of it as a table of contents for your website.

By doing this, you’re increasing your chances of your web pages getting indexed more quickly.

Here’s an example of a basic XML sitemap:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns="https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

   <url>

      <loc>https://domain.com/</loc>

   </url>

   <url>

      <loc>https://domain.com.com/blog/</loc>

   </url>

</urlset>

More often than not, your XML sitemap will likely look like this auto-generated one from Yoast: https://lakewoodrestorationpro.com/page-sitemap.xml

Why? Because it’s much easier to use a plugin/tool to generate your sitemap than to hardcode it yourself manually.

How To Create An XML Sitemap

There are many ways to create an XML sitemap for your website depending on your CMS.

Your sitemap should now be automatically generated and available at either com/sitemap.xml or yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml

Name your file “sitemap” it will be saved in .xml format.

There are also XML Sitemap generators like XML-Sitemaps.com where all you need to do is:

One thing to note about the methods detailed above is that they may contain URLs or pages that you do not want to be included. For example, crawlers like Screaming Frog may include paginated pages or /tag/, /author/ pages – which as you learned above, cause index bloat. So, it’s always good practice to review the generated files and make sure that only the right pages are there.

There’s also the option to code your XML sitemap manually, this is fine for small websites with very few pages but perhaps not the most efficient for massive sites.