There’s a common misconception that SEO is best for small, local businesses and that it’s too difficult to compete with the biggest players for high search volume terms. This misconception can dissuade ecommerce businesses and non-local businesses from looking into SEO services.
We’re here to put an end to that misconception. In this case study, you’ll learn how we brought one of our clients to the top of the search engine results page for terms with almost 50,000 searches a month and for a term with over 150,000 searches a month. Our hard work led to an estimated 150% increase in web traffic in an industry where a high volume of leads is essential to success.
Our Client: A Japanese Car Exporter
The client in this case study is an exporter of Japanese vehicles; they export these vehicles to a number of international locations throughout North America, Europe, and more. When they came to us for SEO services, they were already ranking fairly well for a number of relevant keywords, most of which had very high search volume. Their goal was to go from good rankings to great rankings; they wanted to make it to the top of the search results.
We knew we could help.
Our Analysis
We always perform an in-depth analysis before taking on any client, learning about their website, what their competitors are ranking for, and more.
Our analysis revealed a few opportunities for optimization which, when implemented, could drastically improve the site’s rankings.
The first opportunity was fixing the site’s structure. The website was massive; we knew that we’d need to work on creating silos and improving the site’s internal linking in order to make it easier to navigate for search engines and users.
The second opportunity was eliminating page cannibalization. Cannibalization is an important concept in SEO; if you have two or more pages that are ranking for the same terms, they end up taking clicks away from each other. This lowers the clickthrough rate (CTR) of each page, hurting the ranking of each page. We knew we’d have to consolidate pages in order to improve rankings.
Aside from these two major opportunities, there were several other ways we could optimize the site. Each page had hundreds of reviews, which could mislead Google about the intent of the page. URLs were sub-optimized, presenting a great opportunity for easy wins. Finally, the site wasn’t as mobile-friendly as we wanted it to be.
Adapting Content Strategies
Our biggest priority was page consolidation. The content on the website was performing well, as evidenced by our client’s solid rankings; the trick was consolidating pages without sacrificing those rankings in order to boost traffic.
The strategy we employed involved categorizing vehicle models into classes, creating hub pages for each of those classes, and then linking out to individual vehicles from those classes. Pages that were thin on content, underperforming, or cannibalizing from pages we wanted to rank were redirected to those hub pages, creating a clear hierarchy all while preventing cannibalization.
With page cannibalization addressed, we began work on the rest of the site’s structure. We fixed internal links, minimizing redirects and creating silos while optimizing anchor text. We also ensured that every page was easy to access through internal linking, eliminating orphan pages (pages with no internal links). While working on site structure, we took the time to optimize the URL for every page. The end result was a shallower site structure that was easier for users and search engines to navigate and understand.
Having addressed the site structure, cannibalization, and low performing content, we built new supporting content to help our hub pages and money pages rank for relevant terms.
To address the issues caused by reviews, we categorized each review, then optimized the testimonials sliders so that only reviews relevant to a given page would appear on the slider.
Finally, we performed a number of technical fixes and page edit to make the site more mobile-friendly, improving mobile page speed, layout, and more.
The Results: SEO Works For Global Businesses Targeting High Search Volume Terms
We talked about the results at the top: An estimated 150% increase in traffic, multiple high search volume keywords ranked at the top or near the top, and a ton of leads for our clients.
What we haven’t covered is the consistency of these results; take a look at this keyword chart.
Note the columns that show how rankings have changed over time; for most, there’s been a lifetime change, but no changes over the past 30 days. This means that we managed to get our client to rank #1 for these high-volume terms, and that they’ve stayed rank #1 for months.
We can deliver these results for your business, too. Just look at how many impressions and clicks our client is still getting:
Finally, take a look at how many of their target keywords are in the top 3 ranks, and how remarkably their overall rankings have improved since we started working with them:
We delivered these results for a company in a highly competitive field, helping them generate tens of thousands of leads. They wanted to make it to the top for relevant keywords; we got them there.
Imagine what we can do for your company—generating tens of thousands of leads every month at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising. SEO can help companies with an international reach rank for high-volume search terms; you just have to work with an agency that can create a holistic strategy to improve your rankings, and then implement it.
First Rank is that agency—you’ve already seen the results we can get. Contact us today for a free consultation.
