Growing Monthly Organic Traffic From 59k to 79k: B2C Automotive 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. A neglected blog resulted in a lack of keyword visibility for long-tail keywords
2. Develop the site technically to make sure it was optimal for search engines
3. Establish the brand as an authority in the industry with relevant backlinks

Long-tail Keyword Research & Blog Strategy

Before joining the agency, the client’s blog had been neglected with very few articles being published. Regularly publishing supplementary blog content has a number of added benefits to your SEO:

1. Improve Keyword Visibility – start to rank for relevant long-tail keywords that cater to informational keywords as opposed to purely commercial or transactional keywords.
2. Build Topical Authority – considering Google’s recent push in rewarding helpful content, regularly publishing informational articles to your blog can help establish your brand as an authority voice within your industry.
3. Content Freshness – shows Google that you’re regularly adding useful content to your website. This also relates to existing blog content being updated to reflect accurate information.
4. Internal Linking – by targeting long-tail keywords on your blog with informational content, you’re capturing visitors at the research stage of the user funnel. This provides an opportunity for you to guide these visitors to your main pages (i.e. if you have an eCommerce website, you can guide users to relevant product or collection pages).

We carried out long-tail keyword research to identify search queries that users were looking to find answers for in relation to the rideshare community. 

Here’s an example of how to find new keywords to target on your blog using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer too.

1. Search for a broad seed keyword related to your niche in Keywords Explorer and remember to select the correct target location.

2. Scroll down to the Keyword ideas section and click on View all for the Terms match and Question reports respectively.

3. Filter the results by Keyword Difficulty (a metric that measures how hard it would be to rank for a particular keyword) and Search Volume so that you’re left with long-tail keywords.

4. Here’s your final list of keywords that are easy to target for your blog.

You can also apply a similar approach by using Google’s People Also Ask and Related Searches features.

1. Enter the same seed keyword into Google i.e. “coconut oil” and scroll down to the People Also Ask section.

2. You can expand the results to reveal even more questions that are related to your original search query as well as the best answer to that question.

So not only have you identified new topics to cover on your blog, but you also have a guide on what kind of content you need to include in order to rank in the top spot for that question.

3. Scroll further down to the bottom of the results page to find additional Related searches to the seed keyword.

This is a great way to find potential topics (as opposed to just keywords) for you to cover. For example, a great article for an eCommerce website that sells coconut oil, is to write an article about its uses in cooking. Allowing you to not just create a blog post about all its uses, but also potentially create an entire section on the blog dedicated to recipes that make use of coconut oil as a key ingredient.

You can find out more about long-tail keyword targeting here.

Following the initial keyword research, our team of content specialists actioned the blog strategy outlined by our SEO team, and helped increase the site’s keyword visibility from 33k to 55k keywords over the course of the campaign.

Technical SEO Auditing

Having a technically sound website is the catalyst that’ll help ensure your web pages have the best chances of ranking. Technical SEO is all about making sure that your content is easily accessible for Google’s crawler so that it can find and index your pages as efficiently as possible.

As with each of our campaigns, we started by conducting a thorough technical audit of the client’s website using a range of tools including:

• Google Search Console – which is the best and most accurate tool for finding out about any pages that Google has struggled to crawl/index on your website, along with additional information about your website’s SEO performance
• Ahrefs & Sitebulb – both are great SEO tools for identifying SEO issues that would otherwise be impossible to do manually.

Here are some of the most common technical SEO issues that we come across:

1. Robots.txt / XML sitemap errors
2. Irrelevant or low quality pages being indexed that shouldn’t be
3. Poor Core Web Vitals performance
4. Poor site structure leading to inefficient crawling
5. Broken internal links and internal redirects
6. Poor metadata optimisation i.e. page titles, h1 headings, meta descriptions and image alt texts
7. Lack of structured data markup to make it easier for Google to understand content

Regularly auditing the technical elements of your website is worthwhile as it ensures that the core engine of your website is running smoothly and that other SEO factors such as content and backlinks are more effective.

Building Authority with Backlinks

The client already had a large backlink profile with links from many relevant and respected websites within its niche. Our goal was to continue to build on this momentum so as to grow the site’s overall domain authority and its positioning as a market leader.

To do this, we adopted a competitor based link building strategy which began with finding prospects by identifying websites that the client’s competitors had backlinks from, but the client did not.

One way to do this is via Ahrefs’ Link Intersect tool.

The tool allows you to add up to 10 of your competitors domains (or pages).

Click on “Show link opportunities” to see all of the sites that you’re missing a backlink from.

But first, filter the results by intersections so that you’re seeing the most relevant domains i.e. in this example, only domains that link to at least two of the three competitors entered will be displayed.

Here’re the final results (sorted by DR).

Once you’ve got your list of prospects, the next step is to carry out an outreach campaign by finding the contact information of these websites and then asking them to link to your website. When pitching to prospects, it’s important to ensure that you explain why a link to your website will be valuable to their audience.

Our link building efforts have resulted in the client’s link velocity seeing consistent growth over the campaign.

• The number of users increased from 59,406 to 78,959
• The number of new users increased from 55,068 to 73,071

The client’s visibility in the top 100 positions of Google grew from 33,676 to 55,099 keywords. This represents an increase of 63.6%.