Cheap Used Car for Sale: Organic Traffic Increased by 300% in 6 Months [SEO Case Study]

“I want to rank for the first page with these keywords.”

This is what clients tell us all the time. But, for a website in a competitive industry, ranking for money terms can be a battle itself.

In this SEO case study, I’m going to show you how we were able to get over 800 key terms of the client in the top 5 positions, with an increase in traffic, using our SEO solutions.

• Brief Background about the Client
• Determining the Problem
• Zion Port Solutions
• Results of the Study

Brief Background about the Client

Before we proceed with the case study, I’ll give you a brief background about the client:

• The client works in the recreation and touring industry.
• Their website already has good traffic – with some of their key terms ranking in the first page.
• The client’s goal was simple: get above-the-fold-rankings, specifically positions 1 to 3.

So, here’s the problem…

The client’s main keywords were directing traffic only to the homepage instead of the inner pages. Competitors have individual pages and enough quality content to talk about the keywords, while the client only has the homepage to rank for the same set of keywords they are targeting.

Keyword	Google.com Position
arkansas river rafting	4
rafting arkansas river	4
royal gorge white water rafting	4
colorado rafting	6
rafting in colorado	8
rafting colorado	8
white water rafting colorado	9
colorado white water rafting	10
whitewater rafting colorado	11
colorado rafting trips	11
white water rafting in colorado	11
colorado whitewater rafting	11
colorado river rafting trips	23
colorado river rafting	26

When we checked the website, 75% of the pages that are contextually relevant to the target term “white water rafting Colorado” are linking to the homepage. While the client has an existing page for the target term, only 25% of the links point to this page — which explains why the white water rafting page is only in position 7. Because the homepage is the only one ranking for their money terms, the competition is taking over most of the online real estate above-the-fold.

What’s Our Solution?

The website is already ranking, so there’s no need to do extensive keyword research and choose another set of keywords to rank. But, there are three things that became the focus of our strategy:

• The entire website structure was too cluttered and lacks organization, hindering the site from ranking for the target term.
• Inner links needed to be established
• The content needs improvement to provide contextual relevance to the target keywords and pages.

Solution 1: Restructuring the Site

The initial site structure of the page looked something similar to this:

The whitewater rafting page that is contextually and syntactically relevant to one of their main target keywords is too far down the website structure, which explains why it’s not getting enough traffic.

We proposed a new hierarchy for the website to organize the pages and distribute the equity coming from the homepage to the relevant pages. Here’s what we did:

1. Initially, the white water rafting page was under the page for their adventure packages. We moved the page up to the second tier and created content that will include the key term.
2. We organized the pages under the adventure packages and made sure they are in the appropriate categories.
3. The content for the Why Choose Us page was transferred to the homepage to serve as one of the main USPs of the client.

The new site structure allows the pages on the succeeding tiers to earn authority from the homepage while organizing the pages to enable a more logical and contextual connection for each page’s content.

Solution 2: Linking inner pages

As most of the equity of the keywords lies on the homepage, the inner pages are being overshadowed and losing traffic from what’s supposed to come from the target keywords of the website.

With the new site structure, we were able to address inner page linking so the homepage does not cannibalize all the rankings for the target keywords.

Because we needed to get the white water rafting page ranking, we split the target keyword “white water rafting Colorado” between the homepage and the inner page. We used long-tail variations of the keyword on the homepage, while the exact matches of the keyword went on the inner page.

The new pages we created, as well as the existing pages that provide contextual support for the target term, were linked to the white water rafting page.

Solution 3: Improving website content

The homepage has a considerable amount of content, but it lacks quality content to support the unique selling proposition of the company. We didn’t want to affect the current rankings of the website, so what we did is take some of the existing content from the homepage related to white water rafting and place it on the new white water rafting page.

Instead of having the homepage explain all the information about the client’s services, we populated the new pages with content that are relevant to the intent of the keywords they are targeting. Some of the content on the inner pages were rewritten to address keyword stuffing.

After All That Here’s What We Got

After applying these solutions, we were able to:

Increase the traffic to nearly 8,000 from the initial 2,500 monthly visitors the website is receiving, showing a growth of almost 300%.

Over 800 keywords of the clients from the initial 300 are now in the top 5 positions.

We were able to rank 50 terms on positions 1 to 3, including the main keyword targets of the client.

With the increase in organic rankings, the client had less reliance on ad spend.

So, were we able to achieve the client’s goals? A big YES! The strategy may appear simple — because it really is! It’s all about finding the right opportunities on the website, looking for the pain points, and implementing the right methodology.

Needless to say, the client was happy with the results — and this means another satisfied business for our partner.

from Zion Port

Cited From Honey Guard