In the last 3 months, our SEO clients increased their organic traffic by 62% and their search engine visibility by 111%. Here's how we did it.
But first, as we were so chuffed about these results, we put together this little explainer video.
We've published various search engine optimisation case studies summarising how we've improved organic traffic and keyword rankings for individual clients, but never before have we written about how all of our clients have performed collectively.
A word on SEO and organic traffic.
There's no beating around the bush. Search engine optimisation is a painful and time-consuming process, but it's essential for online success.
While we recommend our clients adopt a content marketing strategy, simply producing content is not enough to rank organically.
You need to amplify your content so (hopefully) more people link back to you. Generally speaking, the higher the number of quality sites that link to you the higher you will rank and the more organic traffic you will receive.
Of course, this is all relative to what your competitors are doing.
Just because you gained 10 extra backlinks last month, it doesn't necessarily mean that you'll rank higher than your competitors. After all, they may have received 4 new links but from much higher-quality domains in the same period.
I guess, the point is if you are in an even slightly competitive market (I can't think of any that aren't), you have to be doing some sort of SEO to maintain your position at the very least.
Ideally, you'll do better SEO than your competitors and beat them.
What metrics are important in SEO?
We are a business-outcomes focused consultancy. This means that vanity metrics like website traffic are not the end game when you work with us. The end game (for us) is the number of qualified leads you receive that convert to business.
While qualified leads that convert are the end game, we need to monitor various metrics that are leading indicators that our strategies are working. These include:
- On-page SEO errors - here's how fixing on-page errors has a big impact on organic traffic.
- Page-keyword relevance - your pages need to be optimised for key terms. Here's how to write page titles and meta descriptions for search.
- Number of unique linking domains - we don't really care how many backlinks you have, we focus on unique linking domains. This is because the number of unique linking domains is more highly correlated with rankings than the number of backlinks. So, one site with 100 links to your website isn't much better than one single backlink.
- Authority of linking domains - higher quality domains > lower quality spammy domains
- Keyword rankings - the number ranking position changes across all of your top keywords (i.e. the ones that drive quality traffic)
- Search impressions - how often your site appears in search results, as measured by Google's search console
- Organic search traffic - the actually organic traffic that comes to your site, as measured via Google Analytics.
Individual SEO results.
Now to the detailed actual client results, warts and all!
In July 2018, we analysed key leading indicators for all of our SEO clients over the last 3 months compared to the previous 3 months.
Here's how each of them performed.
| Client | Industry | Organic % | Impressions % | Rankings | Referring Domains |
| Client A | Building Materials | 317% | 523% | 94 | 16 |
| Client B | Building Materials | 135% | 93% | 111 | 6 |
| Client C | Finance | 83% | N/A | 129 | 1 |
| Client D | Fashion | 59% | 42% | 70 | 3 |
| Client E | Professional Services | 51% | 15% | 52 | 64 |
| Client F | Trade | 41% | 124% | -5 | 8 |
| Client G | Building Materials | 29% | 79% | -31 | -3 |
| Client H | Building Materials | 21% | 72% | 16 | 51 |
| Client I | Non-Profit | 21% | 70% | 94 | 42 |
| Client J | Professional Services | 7% | 62% | 109 | 11 |
| Client K | Tech Start Up | 2% | 151% | 273 | 7 |
| Client L | Mining Industry | -19% | -12% | -47 | 47 |
And here's the summary of the aggregated results.
| Stats | Organic % | Impressions % | Rankings | Referring Domains |
| Average | 62% | 111% | 72 | 21.1 |
| Median | 35% | 72% | 82 | 9.5 |
| Max | 317% | 523% | 273 | 64 |
| Min | -19% | -12% | -47 | -3 |
Summary
On average, we increased organic traffic by 62% (-19% to +317%), increased the number of referring domains for each client by 21 and Google rankings by 72 positions.
However, as I'm sure you've noticed, not every client improved consistently.
Here's what happened to some of the outliers...
Client L decreased 19% in organic traffic.
Why did this happen?
Simple answer... they ignored on-page SEO errors, specifically an ever increasing number of duplicate page titles and ugly non-SEO friendly URLs. ? Thankfully, they've now implemented the changes we have recommended and have turned around the decline.
Client G lost 3 referring domains and declined in their overall rankings, despite our link building activities, yet they still increased organic traffic.
What the!? Why?
Well, this is because they 'lost' a lot of lower quality domain links and replaced some of them with better quality links that targetted their most important higher traffic keywords at the expense of some of their lower traffic keywords, which went down.
Similarly, the client who only increased their traffic by 2% was on a downward trajectory until they launched a new website in the middle of the analysis period.
If they hadn't launched this new site, which we optimised, their decline in organic traffic would have continued. Thankfully, their rankings are now improving significantly.
So, in summary, our strategies are working for our clients. We're chuffed with the result and so are our clients.