How Our Strategy Helped a Client Achieve 89% Organic Growth in 4 Months [German Market]

Summary of Key Results (Over a 4-Month Period)

• +150% increase in organic site visibility (according to Ahrefs).
• 130% increase in total clicks and 170% increase in impressions (according to Google Search Console).
• Resolved Core Web Vitals issues and optimized the website for Rich Results.
• +89% increase in monthly organic traffic (according to Google Analytics).
• Our efforts resulted in the website getting indexed for over 2,500 keywords on Google (according to SEMrush).
• The organic channel now accounts for over 96% of overall website traffic (according to Google Analytics).

Our Client is an experienced player in the German food and non-food wholesale industry. The company has existed for three decades as one of the largest local suppliers and exporters of food and non-food products. Surprisingly, SEO had been neglected for most of their existence in the digital world. From on-page optimization quirks, to technical site issues, to missed off-page opportunities, the site struggled with deficiencies in every possible SEO area. This was not going to be an easy task, and we knew we had serious work ahead of us. Remarkably, in less than 5 months, we achieved very tangible results. We will talk about the results shortly, but first, we will outline our approach to this challenge.

Starting with a 360° SEO Audit

Our decade of experience in SEO has taught us one important thing: the importance of a comprehensive analysis. An audit helps us understand the gaps and build on what is already working. We noticed many fundamental SEO elements that were missing from the site or poorly implemented. Some of them were specifically related to SEO, others were more related to user experience, and still others mainly to conversion optimization.

Keyword Research

Everything in SEO should be closely aligned with the client's business goals. Keyword research plays a pivotal role here. If you focus most of your efforts on the wrong keywords, SEO becomes futile. You might be able to achieve high rankings for keywords or even drive a large number of visitors, but if those keywords or visitors are not relevant from a conversion standpoint, their business value is close to zero. For this reason, we always strive to collaborate with our clients to build an effective keyword strategy. For this domain, we did the same. Our plan was initially to rank 15-20 of the most relevant keywords, and then add more.

Core Optimization Elements

The SEO process can become very complex if you try to dive into all aspects of optimization at once. We wanted to stay focused and align with the client's end goal. There were many basic optimization issues that we deemed worth addressing first. These included:

• Meta Elements Setup: Most pages of the site were not using meta tags effectively. We configured keyword-optimized meta tags for all category and subcategory pages.
• On-Page Content Optimization: The website's content needed a refresh. We made sure that important elements such as titles, headings, subheadings, and paragraphs were aligned with our SEO goals.
• Image Optimization: Many images lacked proper alt attributes and titles. We filled this gap and re-uploaded optimized versions to ensure better loading times and enhance the on-site experience.
• Eliminating Unnecessary Redirects: More redirect resources on a page mean inefficient loading and a poor crawling experience for search bots. There were many redundant 301 redirects (from pages with no SEO value) that we resolved for the site.

Technical and Structural Elements

Going a step further, we came up with the idea of proposing certain structural changes and eliminating numerous technical anomalies that we believed could negatively affect the site's SEO and user experience. And we were right! Navigation: After completing the keyword research, we realized that the current navigation and content structure did not support ranking goals. We needed to introduce a completely new section (sub-navigation) to link the primary products associated with the most frequently searched keywords. This not only helped improve the site's engagement and conversion rates, but it also proved very effective in gaining quick traction in organic rankings. Beyond working on the header and footer sections, we made sure that the site's existing branding remained consistent. Our job as an SEO agency was not to focus on branding elements, but we ensured that the user experience - the look and feel - of the website was enhanced and that there were no inconsistencies when it came to online branding. Many of our actions on this site directly aligned with what was later defined as Core Web Vitals (following Google's announcement on November 10 of last year). Image optimization (resizing, compression, and adding width and height attributes) helped us resolve CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) and LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) issues to a very large extent. Configuring a caching system and adding async attributes to non-critical scripts and third-party widgets helped us eliminate render-blocking resources, improving load times and overall site performance. In summary, the website underwent a thorough optimization overhaul, and all the on-page, structural, and technical changes implemented began showing their effects from the very first month. What is more, we developed a solid off-page SEO strategy to support all the other efforts. The off-page plan included a range of strategically aligned activities, such as contextual link building, content marketing, social media sharing, and much more. We are not claiming that we have already achieved the ultimate goal, but the results we have achieved in just five months already prove the effectiveness of our strategy.

Results

The number of clicks increased by 130%, and impressions grew by 170% over the last five months (through February 2021).

Core Web Vitals and mobile usability issues were resolved, and the website began to gain visibility for Rich Results, such as FAQs and the Sitelinks Search box.

Many high-potential keywords, with monthly traffic exceeding 10,000, began ranking on the first and second pages of Google organic search results. These are highly competitive keywords that perform exceptionally well from an ROI perspective.

Our strategy helped increase average monthly traffic by +85% (according to SEMrush analytics).

This is a huge difference compared to where the website was in the past. The dramatic increase in organic traffic was made possible by over 2,000+ keywords gaining momentum through our focused SEO efforts.

The average number of sessions (daily) from organic traffic increased by 89%.

The website's organic visibility (from tracked keywords) increased by 150% (according to the Ahrefs analytics tool). As new keywords began ranking on the first pages of organic results, the site's click-through rate also improved proportionally. A five-month period is a very short time to run an SEO campaign - especially when the market is competitive - and yet we managed to achieve outstanding results. Currently, the organic channel is the largest source of traffic (96%), and the number of new sessions and new users per day continues to grow steadily.

This is an ongoing project, and there is still much more to achieve for our client. If you would like us to collaborate on your project and achieve a similar level of success, contact us today. We will walk you through our process and explain how achieving 500% growth in under six months is possible.