True Comeback Story After Being Hit by Google Update

About

This Edu-Tech website has been in business for close to seven years and they have been growing organic visibility consistently by publishing quality content daily. 

During this time in the industry, they successfully outranked some of the top competitors and surged to the top of their niche. 

Their goal for 2020 was to touch one million organic users but as everything seemed to be working, the May 2020 Broad Core update took the website by surprise. 

The organic traction declined considerably and they were confused whether the goals could be met as there were just a few months remaining for the close of 2020. That was when we extended our hands and pulled them back on track.

Background

Things were going great for this Edu-Tech website until the May 2020 Broad Core update. Their previous agency could not pinpoint what was wrong and the reason for the downward spiral. So the management decided to bring in another SEO agency and zeroed down on us. 

They were pretty clear about the goals and objectives – bring back the lost glory and bring forth a strategy that can increase their organic traffic 20% month over month. 

Since we like taking up challenges even if it means going the extra mile, we accepted the task and it now stands as a testimony for the rest of the world to see how a well-thought-out strategy can turn things around.

Our SEO Strategy in a Nutshell

Since the website was receiving close to a million organic visits each month, we decided to take it on as a managed project. Our first step was creating a strategy for the site. Our team adopted a 360-degree approach to bring the site back to its former glory and make it even better! 

Our Action Plan

A tailored SEO solution amounting $10,000+/Month was planned in November, and it continues to be executed.  

On-Page SEO 

• The meta title, description, and schema were further optimized based on our research for better SERP rankings. 
• We made sure the posts were published under the names of real authors and linked them with their Social profiles for authenticity.
• We optimized the page speed to be in line with the latest Core WebVitals standards. 
• AMP was implemented as we found a majority of the users came through mobile devices. 

Content Audit

We found the competition was too high for only long-form content can achieve the desired results. Our content audit helped identify the topics that had huge traffic potential and incorporated those into the content calendar. 

We also created a list of existing content that required a refresh. This was to ensure that the content speaks about all the latest updates. We did this because Google and other search engines need to understand that the content is frequently updated and is evergreen. 

Building Backlink 

With the website performance fine-tuned, and content refreshed, we kick-started the link building activities. Since we had a massive inventory of 50,000+ niche relevant domains, including those in the finance sector, our link building team flung into action. 

Since the website had a domain authority of 30+, we shortlisted those that had more than 40+ and 50+ DA. 

Results

As you can see in the images below, the website started showing a visible increase in organic traffic just a month after implementing our SEO strategy. It registers a 20% month-over-month growth since then. 

Conclusion

The website spent 70% less on SEO services than they used to. This was mostly because our business model is different from other companies. We have talented SEO professionals in-house both in India and the US. Other agencies get most of their SEO activities outsourced to keep margins high.