SEO Case Study: How Our Strategy Helped This Client Achieve 89% Organic Growth In 4 Months [German market]

Our Client is a seasoned player in the german food and non-food wholesale industry. The company has been around for three decades as one of the biggest local suppliers and export wholesalers of grocery and non-food consumer items. Surprisingly enough, SEO has been a neglected area for the most part of their digital existence. From on-page optimization quirks to technical website issues to off-page missed opportunities, the website was struggling in every imaginable SEO area. This wasn’t going to be an easy ride and we knew we had some serious work ahead of us.  

It’s amazing how, in the span of fewer than 5 months, we have achieved some very solid results. We’ll talk about the results part soon but, first, let’s give you a rundown on how we approached this challenging project in the first place. 

Kicking off with a 360° SEO analysis

Our decade-long experience in the SEO space has taught us one thing that’s worth sticking to: the importance of a well-rounded analysis. The analysis is what helps us understand the gap and build on what is already working. We found a lot of basic on-page SEO elements missing or inappropriately executed. Some of these were pure SEO stuff, others more related to user experience, still others mainly concerned with conversion optimization. 

The keyword analysis

Everything in SEO should be tied closely to a client’s business goals. Keyword research, in that regard, plays a very crucial role. If you focus the majority of your efforts on the wrong keywords, SEO becomes a lost cause. You may be able to rank keywords or even bring in visitors at scale, but if those keywords or visitors aren’t relevant from a conversion standpoint, their business value is close to zero. 

It’s this reason we make it a point to collaborate with our clients on building an effective keywords strategy first. For that domain, we did the same. Our plan was to rank 15-20 most relevant keywords in the initial phase and then keep adding more keywords to the mix. 

The basic optimation elements

The SEO process can be very convoluted if you try to drill into every single aspect of the optimization. We wanted to keep things rather focused and aligned with the client’s end goal. There were a number of basic optimization issues which we thought we should address first. These included the following: 

• Setting up meta elements: Most of the site’s pages weren’t utilizing meta tags optimally. We set up keyword-optimized meta tags for all the category and subcategory pages.
• Optimizing web copy: the website copy needed a revamp. We ensured tweaking important elements like titles, headings, subheadings, and body paragraphs to make them aligned with our SEO goals.
• Optimizing images: Many images had missing alt tags and titles. We did fill the gap and re-uploaded their optimized versions to ensure better load time and enhanced web experience.
• Removing unnecessary redirects: More redirect resources on a site means inefficient loading and bad crawling experience for search bots. There were many unnecessary 301 redirects (from pages with no SEO value) which we resolved for the site. 

The technical and structural elements

Going above and beyond, we came up with the idea of proposing some structural changes and eliminating many technical anomalies that, we thought, might be having an adverse effect on the site’s SEO and user experience. And we were so right!

The navigation: Having completed the keyword analysis, we clearly understood that the current navigation and content architecture didn’t support the ranking goals. And so we had to introduce a whole new section (sub-navigation) to link their main products to the related keywords people tend to search for the most. This not only helped improve the site’s engagement and conversion rates but also proved very effective in helping gain some quick traction in organic rankings.  

Besides working on the header and footer section, we ensured the existing branding of the website remains consistent. Our job as their SEO firm wasn’t so much to focus on branding elements, yet we ensured that the UX experience — the look and feel — of the site is enhanced and there are no inconsistencies as far as their online branding is concerned. 

A lot of the on-page stuff we did at this stage was directly aligned with what came to be known as Core Web Vitals (after Google’s Nov 10th announcement last year). The image optimization (resizing, compressing, and adding width & height attributes) helped us remove issues around CLS (cumulative layout shift) and LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) to a very good extent.

Setting up a cache system and adding async attributes to non-critical scripts and third-party widgets helped us eliminate render-blocking resources, improving load time and enhancing the overall performance of the website. 

All in all, the website went through a major optimization overhaul and all the on-page, structural, and technical changes we made started to show their impact right from the first month. What’s more, we devised a robust off-page SEO strategy to supplement all these other efforts. The off-page plan encompassed a wide range of strategically aligned activities, including contextual link building, content marketing, social media sharing, and more. 

We don’t say we are there just yet, but the results we have achieved in the span of fewer than five months already prove our strategy’s mettle. 

The Results

Total Clicks increased by 130% and Total Impressions by 170% in the last five months (leading up to Feb 2021).

Core Web Vitals and Mobile Usability issues have been addressed and the site started to get picked up for Rich Results like FAQs and Sitelinks Search box. 

A number of high-potential keywords with monthly traffic volume over 10K started to rank on the first and second pages in Google’s organic results. These are highly competitive keywords and perform great from an ROI perspective. 

Our strategy helped increase their average monthly traffic by +85% (per SEMrush Analytics).  

This is a huge difference compared to where the site stood in the past. The dramatic increase in organic traffic was made possible by over 2000+ keywords that started to get momentum due to our focused SEO efforts. 

The average (per day) sessions from organic traffic increased by 89%. 

The website’s organic visibility (from tracked keywords) increased by 150% (per Ahref analytics tool). As new keywords started to rank within the first few pages of organic results, the site’s click-through rate also started to improve in proportion. 

Five months period is a very limited time for an SEO campaign to pan out — especially when the market is competitive —  yet we have managed to achieve staller results. At the moment, the organic channel is the biggest source of their traffic (96%) and the number of new sessions and new users per day is continuously surging. 

This is a project in progress and there’s a lot to be achieved for our client. If you want us to collaborate on your project and emulate the same level of success, get in touch today. We’ll walk you through our process and explain how achieving a 500% growth in less than six months is possible.