Growing Monthly Visitors From 15k to 41k: Home Maintenance 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 client’s backlink profile already had thousands of referring domains, so the main focus was to find link prospects that weren’t already linking to them. 
2. The locations that the client served across the States contained substantial amounts of duplicate content which prevented them from ranking to their potential.
3. The site had an old, outdated website design, which meant that user experience elements such as navigation were poor.

Identifying New Link Prospects

Having accumulated a strong backlink profile with thousands of referring domains, the main challenge we faced was identifying link prospects that didn’t already link to the client’s website. 

One of the methods we used to find new link prospects was to look at the client’s competing domains and reverse-engineer their backlinks profiles.

Ahrefs’ Link Intersect tool instantly provides a list of websites that your competitors have backlinks from, but you do not.

Enter your domain (or target URL) into the tool along with your top ranking competing domains (you can add up to 10), then click “Show link opportunities”.

The tool displays all of the websites that you’re missing a backlink from, however, not all of these will be relevant. To filter the results further, we recommend filtering so that you’re seeing opportunities where at least two of the competing domains have a backlink from the same website.

Here’s the final list of link prospects.

The more competitors you compare against, the more link building opportunities you’ll have. 

Once we pooled together the prospect list, we identified the most relevant domains (by looking at domain authority, topical relevance and other metrics) and executed an outreach campaign to continue to build the site’s domain authority.

Location Page Optimisation

Having large amounts of duplicate content on your website will hinder your SEO performance. This is because Google likes to serve user’s with results that offer unique content that satisfies the searcher’s intent. 

The client’s website has hundreds of location pages targeting location-based keywords (i.e. “japanese restaurant in new york”), however the content on these pages was templated and nearly identical.

To check the amount of duplicate content on your website, we recommend using the following tools:

1. Copyscape – this is great for when you want to check for duplicate content on a single page.
2. Siteliner – this is great for when you want to check for duplicate content across your entire website.

In order to reduce the amount of content duplication, we rewrote the text on each of the pages (starting with the client’s most important cities) to make sure it was unique. To do this, we first identified the target keyword for each page and looked at the top ranking competing pages to identify potential content gaps.

The aim was to provide users with as much information about the client’s specific offering for each location as possible. 

Apart from optimising the main content, we also ensured that on-page metadata such as the page title, headings and meta descriptions were also optimised for the target keyword.

This optimisation, combined with creating additional supplemental content on the client’s blog resulted in a steady increase in keyword visibility over the course of the campaign. The client is currently ranking for 4,144 keywords compared to 1,161 within the top 10 positions of Google’s search results.

Implementing Breadcrumb Navigation

Adopting modern web design practices is a crucial part of maintaining a positive user experience. This is especially true as websites that were originally designed twenty (or even ten) years ago may not follow the best practices for creating a web experience that users today are accustomed to and expect.

This was the case with this client, whose design was outdated and hindered the usability of the navigation of the website. One of the core features that we added to the site is breadcrumb navigation.

Generally displayed towards the top of a web page, breadcrumb navigation (or breadcrumbs) are a path of links that show users where they are on the website. 

Here’s an example of what’s a hierarchy-based breadcrumb, which is the most common type.

Implementing breadcrumb navigation has the following benefits:

• Gives users a way to find their way back to their original location or to browse other relevant pages within your website’s hierarchy. 
• Makes it easier for Google to crawl and index your web pages by following the contextual links.
• Improves Google’s understanding of how the pages on your website are related to one another.
• Google sometimes breadcrumbs within the search results, instantly giving the user an idea of where they’ll land by clicking on the result.Here’s an example:

To find out more about how to implement breadcrumbs for your website, check out our guide here.

• The number of monthly new users increased from 12,958 to 34,616

• The number of sessions increased from 15,323 to 41,132