Growing Monthly Organic Traffic By 150%: International SAAS Case Study

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

• As an international SEO campaign, we noticed that the client’s hreflang attributes weren’t correctly implemented which meant that there was a potential issue of the wrong content being displayed to the wrong users.
• Index bloat was another challenge that we encountered as the client had thousands of low quality legacy pages indexed, that were no longer relevant and offered very little value to the user.
• The client’s blog was neglected with very few supporting articles being published on a regular basis. This was a missed opportunity to increase keyword visibility and bring in more targeted traffic to the website.
• The homepage and service pages on the website were struggling to break into the top positions and required a boost with a targeted link building campaign.

Hreflang Implementation

The site contained content in a number of different languages which targeted various countries, but the hreflang attribute was not implemented correctly which led to possible content duplication.

The hreflang attribute is an HTML tag that is used to tell Google about localised versions of your web pages.

For example, you may have pages that are written in English, but one targets British users and the other targets American users.

The content itself will be pretty much identical, apart from nuances between American and British English i,.e. “Analyze” vs “Analyse”.

But you want to make sure that the British version of the page is displayed to British users and the American version is shown to American users.

This what a hreflang tag looks like: 

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x-y” href=”https://domain.com/alternate-page”/>

• rel=”alternate” – this tells Google that there’s an alternate version of the current page it’s looking at.
• hreflang=”x-y” – this tells Google that the content is written in language “x” and targets the country “y”.
• href=”https://domain.com/alternate-page“ – this tells Google the location of the alternate page.

Find out more about how to implement hreflang tags here.

Fixing Index Bloat

You want to ensure that Google’s crawl budget – the amount of time and resources it spends crawling and indexing your pages – is used as efficiently as possible. Index bloat occurs when you have lots of unnecessary or low quality web pages that are indexed by the search engine. 

The most common types of pages that can create index bloat are:

• HTTP pages
• /tag/ and /category/ pages from your blog
• Paginated pages i.e. domain.com/category/page-2/
• Legacy pages – i.e. this client had thousands of old event listings still indexed. 
• Thin content pages – pages that don’t offer much value to the end user.

Such pages should be removed from Google’s index by implementing a “noindex” tag within the page’s source code.

Here’s what it looks like:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, follow”>

This directive tells Google to follow (crawl) the page, but not to store (index) it.

Check out our chapter on index and crawl management from our SEO Textbook here.

Improving Keyword Visibility With Supplementary Blog Content

A great way to build more visibility within Google’s search results is to target long-tail keywords with supplementary blog articles.

Long-tail keywords are more specific, tend to have less monthly search volumes and thus, are easier to rank for than broader, more competitive keywords.

One way to find long tail keywords is via the People Also Ask box in Google’s search results. To find these, search a broad seed keyword and scroll down to the PAA box to find a range of specific keywords and queries that users have searched for.

Find out more about targeting long-tail keywords within your content here.

By creating blog content that targets these kinds of keywords, we were able to increase the site’s keyword visibility whilst also making use of SEO tactics like internal linking to guide readers to core landing pages.

The added benefit of publishing such content on a regular basis is to build more topical relevance (aka topical authority) within the site. In other words, this allows you to show Google and prospective visitors to your site that you’re an authority voice and credible source of information within your niche.

Conducting A Targeted Link Building Campaign

The final piece of the puzzle was to execute a targeted link building campaign to help boost the rankability of the most important pages on the client’s website: the homepage and service pages.

Using the Link Intersect tool on Ahrefs, we created a list of backlink prospects by comparing the referring domains that the client’s top ranking competitors had received links from, but our client did not.

This was followed by an outreach strategy where we targeted the homepage and service pages with a range of keyword-rich and URL/branded anchor texts.

This link building strategy has resulted in our client’s link velocity seeing consistent growth throughout the past year.

• The number of users increased by 66.82% from 6,191 to 10,328
• The number of sessions increased by 156.09% from 11,890 to 30,449