Cases 19.04.2024

Website renewal becomes SEO crown jewel: 97% more clicks

Sales growth Digital marketing Search engine marketing

A site renewal almost always reduces organic visibility in search engines. Especially when the technology changes in the background. With careful preparation, the dip can be minimized.

In this example, a consumer marketing customer wanted to renew one of their brand’s sites and switch from WordPress to Shopify. This was in 2022, before ChatGPT had hit the market.
The client set a tough goal for the site’s organic search engine visibility: the site had to become the crown jewel of the entire brand portfolio. Its visibility had to be ranked number one among all customer-managed sites with the following indicators:

• Organic traffic volume
• Number of clicks on your site
• Number of search terms connecting to the site
• Estimates of organic traffic volume obtained with SEO tools

Careful background research revealed further areas for development

First, we took steps typically associated with site renewals, such as configuring redirects, mapping which pages to keep and remove, and which pages to merge. After that, plans were made to increase visibility.

We mapped out which topics within the site’s theme have poor visibility. The study revealed, among other things, that the site was not able to respond to nearly all searches from people related to the customer’s category.

“We operate in a category with high search volumes. People are actively looking for information, and there are a lot of topics that interest them. That’s why we wanted experts to consult us on how to build a clear plan of the content we will start creating with our team. How can we optimise our search engine visibility in the best way and take measures and content in the right order.”, shares the client.

The old site had over 250 pages. There were a lot of tag and category pages created by WordPress that printed the same content on several pages. They can cause not only pages with thin content, but also duplicate pages to problem. Algorithms value good content that helps us move forward. Similar problems were not wanted on the new site.

(Note! Google hadn’t released its Helpful Content update yet.)

Expert content for visitors’ burning questions

We created a detailed content plan using many tools to answer questions from visitors to the right pages. Logical grouping of content helps search engines understand content better and builds trust in content.

The structure of the new site made it possible to clearly place pages on a particular topic in their own sections. In this way, search engines gradually learn what the purpose of each page section is.

In the content plan, we took great care not to confuse different search intentions. Not much informative content was created for a specific section of the page if the visitor just wanted to buy the products. The customer was deeply committed to the plan and gradually implemented it until the end of 2022. As planned, content was added to the site, which our analysis revealed that visitors were looking for on the site.

Due to industry-related regulations in the case study, only about 20% of the plan could ultimately be implemented.

Huge growth in clicks and number one positions in terms

It often takes 6–12 months for the effects of search engine optimization to become visible, depending on the starting point of the site. In this case, the first signs of success were received in summer 2023.

In January 2024, the following results were already recorded:

• 97% higher click-through (Search Console 1/29/2024)
• 129 terms at the top of search results (56 terms in January 2023, up 130%)
• Total visibility* 150% higher (January 2023 vs 2024. Source: SEMRush)

*SEO tool’s estimate of organic traffic. The estimate is based on the number of search terms, search volume and rankings that connect to the site.

In August 2023, Google released its extensive core algorithm update, and whenever traffic increases after such updates, we can say that our plan has worked.

The site has surpassed the sites originally rated as the biggest competitors by several significant keywords that are important to the customer. An increase in the number of keywords already in position one indicates that the pages respond well to the needs of visitors.

The new site has almost the same number of pages as the old one, but they are of a completely different quality. This is also evidenced by the time spent on the site, which, according to Google Analytics, is now four times longer than on the old site.

The value of the results is increased by the fact that no SEO measures were performed on the site in 2023.

Key factors for success

The main reasons for the positive development:

• Clear goals for the site renewal
• Careful background research
• Client committed to implementing an SEO plan
• Content reviewed by an expert

But like every site, there is still room for optimization on this site in terms of technical condition and internal linking. Not to mention structured data. And it’s always worth checking what new questions potential site visitors have raised.

But the most important thing is that when the measures are carefully planned, their effect does not cease.

Dagmar played a consultative role in the project. Among other things, we helped the customer in designing the structure of the site and preparing for migration. The customer produced the content based on Dagmar’s instructions. Each content was checked by the customer’s regulator.

If you don’t have the resources to produce content, our creative team is here to help.

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