Growing Organic Traffic by 777%: B2B Manufacturer Case Study

Disclaimer: As a white label SEO agency, we keep the names of the websites we work on confidential to respect our partners.

1. The website is in a very specific niche, so a core challenge was helping the client find relevant keywords for new blog articles to build keyword visibility.
2. Overcoming the almost complete lack of technical optimisation of the website
3. Optimising the backlink profile by disavowing numerous existing spam links and adding new high-quality links monthly

Keyword Research & Content Optimisation

As the niche of this website requires expert knowledge that only the client’s own writers would know, our main focus with the content strategy was to perform extensive competitor research to provide new content ideas as well as suggestions on how to optimise existing content on the site. 

This involved content gap research to find topics and keywords that the client was missing out on.

One way to do this is via Ahrefs’ Content Gap tool.

1. Enter your domain into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and click on the Content gap report.
2. Enter up to 10 of your top competitors’ domains, or individual pages

3. You can then filter the results by Intersections to see the most relevant keywords that you’re missing out. In the example below, the results have been filtered to show only keywords that at least two of the three competing domains entered are ranking for, but the target website (i.e. gettingpersonal.co.uk) is not.

Top tip: make sure that you’re looking at the results for the right target location.

4. You now have a list of keyword opportunities that you can target. Note that not all of the queries will be relevant to your website (as some competitors may offer products or services that you do not), so you will need to review the list to identify which terms are worth targeting on your own website.

Following the keyword research, we created content plans which contained suggestions on how the client’s writers should approach writing the content. To do this, we looked at the top ranking competing pages for the target keywords and identified key elements such as the page title, heading structure, topics covered etc. This allowed up to put together a skeleton of what topics needed to be covered along with recommendations on whether the page required additional rich media such as accompanying images and/or videos.

To find out more about how to create an exceptional blog post, check out our article here.

Technical SEO Auditing

Technical SEO is one of the three core pillars of SEO. The other two are Content (On-Page SEO) and Backlinks (Off-page SEO).

If the purpose of content is to grow keyword visibility and backlinks to build authority, then the purpose of technical SEO is to ensure that the content on your site is easily accessible and understandable for both Google and users.

As mentioned before, the client’s site lacked technical optimisation which meant that one of the main points of action for us was to carry out a full technical audit by crawling the website using Sitebulb. 

You can also use other tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush and Screaming Frog to do this.

We also recommend running your website through additional testing tools such as:

• PageSpeed Insights – a great tool to measure the performance of your web pages i.e. how fact they load
• Schema Markup Testing Tool – a great tool to check whether the structured data on your web page is valid.
• Copyscape & Siteliner – great tools for checking whether your site contains duplicate content.

Here’s a short breakdown of some of the technical fixes we implemented for the client:

• Site Speed Improvements – we installed the Nitropack WordPress plugin 
• Index Management – we identified and removed a number of unnecessary pages that were indexed by Google (specifically, duplicated and thin content pages that offered little value to the user). 
• Breadcrumbs – we implemented breadcrumb navigation to help improve the user experience
• Image Optimisation –  we optimised over 200 images that were missing alt text

Find out more about our technical SEO services here.

Backlink Auditing

Although Google’s systems are much better at identifying link spam than they used to be, they’re still not perfect.

The client’s backlink profile had hundreds of spam links that were likely coming from their competitors – a negative SEO attack. 

To avoid risking a possible manual penalty or algorithmic devaluation, we audited the backlink profile by exporting referring domains from Ahrefs, Majestic and Google Search Console (to get a comprehensive dataset) and identified the potentially harmful backlinks. 

When combing through the referring domains, we looked out for factors like:

• An excessive amount of backlinks from the same domain – most websites will only link to your site once or twice
• Over-optimised or irrelevant anchor texts – if you spot irrelevant anchors that have nothing to do with your website
• Forum and blogspot domains – these are the most common types of websites that are used for negative SEO attacks

Once the harmful domains were identified, we updated the disavow file and submitted it to all four properties (http, https, www.http and www.https) of the client’s Google Search Console.

After tidying up the backlink profile, we also continue to build authority to the site with a blogger outreach campaign by targeting the client’s service and product pages with mostly keyword-rich anchor texts to provide the biggest relevance and ranking boost.

Our link building strategy has resulted in the client’s site seeing a steady increase in backlinks over the past six months or so.

• The number of users increased from 1,161 to 10,907
• The number of sessions increased from 1,389 to 12,189

The number of keywords that the client was ranking for within the top 100 positions of Google increased by 720% from 851 to 6,976 keywords.

And the number of search terms ranking in the top 10 positions grew from 99 to 1,000 keywords over the past year.