SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

Here are some notes I made when I worked for a company that did very well in SEO. This was a few years ago now, so this might be horribly out of date now.

Hygiene factors

- Never expose an error page to Google. - Never expose an empty page. - Make sure all content is visible on first page load (e.g. not behind pop ups). - Show the same content to Google as to users. - Make sure all relevant content is in the HTML (not loaded dynamically). - Make sure page load times are good.

Keywords

- Research keywords you need to match. - Build database of search terms you wish to match, grow and improve this database over time. - Carefully curate pages, their URLs and metatags to match these keywords. - Use this database to choose which pages to expose to Google and make sure that all links and pages have the correct follow/nofollow attribute. - Steadily grow the content you expose to Google over time, keeping the quantity and quality of content on pages exposed to Google high.

Site structure and internal links

- Organise your site in a shallow tree structure. Top level pages should have many links to lower level pages. - All levels of the tree should have keyword rich content which is useful to users. - Not every level of the tree needs to be visible in the Google search results, it is mostly to make things easy for the crawler.

External links

- Use PR and social media to generate good backlinks for your site. - Use social media like reddit, pinterest and others as well as facebook and twitter. - Do not generate fake backlinks, if Google thinks you are doing this they will give you a severe penalty.

Submit your sitemap

- Submit your sitemap in Google webmaster tools and make sure it is kept up to date at least weekly.

Bounce rate

- Carefully monitor your bounce rate and time on site for users coming from Google as these are key factors in Google rankings.

Click through rate

- Use descriptive and relevant titles and metatags to improve the click through rate from the Google search results to your site. - PR, social media, advertising and other channels can improve brand awareness that in turn improves click through rate. - Regularly check a selection of searches that you rank on to assess the quality of your Google search listings.

That's not the case, actually. Your content should be based on the intent of the search. For example, if someone's Googling "how to improve a process," they're looking for practical advice on improving processes. They're NOT looking for "benefits of process improvement," "why you should improve your processes," etc.

Sure, you can write the BEST article on one of these topics, but it's not going to rank because that's not actually what the user is looking for. Hope that makes sense :)

Edit: and the above is a very common writer mistake. They write interesting content, but it's just not that relevant as a search result.

Yep, I didn't mean to criticize the article itself, which is super informative. Thanks for the piece :-)

You can only control your own content while following Google guidelines, so state-of-the-art, world class content will however & pretty always be your best shot?

Are they really trying to say that SEO was the sole reason that the organic traffic grew so much? That is ludicrous. It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that the service itself grew in popularity, or relevancy, or reputation, etc.?

I'm convinced SEO is modern-day snake oil. If you have a useful website/service with well-written content then the traffic will come to you. The idea of trying to "SEO" a useless/poorly-built website is like an obese person taking herbal pills because the bottle says they help weight loss.