This article is a “from the vault post” – I originally wrote it back in August 2013. The site I wrote it for no longer exists, so I’m bringing it back to life on the Local Digital blog.
We recently had a client come onboard who had seen a massive drop in organic visits to their site. The issues that have caused this drop are varied due to a site migration that missed a few tricks, but part of our recovery strategy was to get the “simple things” right in an on-page SEO sense.
So what do I mean by the simple things? A keyword research and mapping process which fed into the following old faithful essentials of on-page SEO:
- Optimised title tags with relevant keywords
- A paragraph or two of static content that introduces the page, reads naturally and includes relevant keywords where appropriate
- Optimised meta descriptions that encourage the user to click the search result
Getting these areas of the site right, in particular for the home page and key category pages, was our first port of call before dealing with anything else with the site. There’s more work to be done to get them back where they need to be, however as the upward trend in natural search visits is already showing, simple things can have a strong impact:
The changes we suggested were implemented by the client quickly, crawled by Google even quicker and were rewarded more or less straight away with increased rankings and traffic as a result.
To get more granular on the results, the following graph compares the traffic after the changes were made (the blue line) to the period before the changes were made (orange line):
This equates to a 75% increase in SEO visits, a 73% increase in Unique Visitors and a 38% increase in Pageviews.
So far after one week in August 2013 the site has hit the same amount of organic search visits as it did in the entire month of June; all as a result of some simple changes to the basic elements of on-site SEO.It’s only early days yet, but these initial gains are great and we’ve also seen some significant keyword improvements:
This just goes to show that getting the basics of your on-site SEO right is absolutely essential, as it’s the first step towards awesome performance in the search engine results.
