SEO Case Study: Growing Daily Website Traffic by 250% Within 3 months Share: Khepri Digital Score Awaiting client review n/a Date Published 20 May 2023 Reading Time 11-Minute Read Here are some steps and strategies that Khepri Digital took to improve an elderly care service website. If you’re starting a new website from scratch, let us share with you some steps and strategies that the Khepri Digital team took to grow a relatively new elderly care service website by 250% in just 3 months. Our content-driven strategy is used for many of our current clients and can be used to deliver some quick wins. From this case study, you will learn about these SEO quick wins: The Content Strategy roadmap is broken down into three parts: building topical authority, covering all possible user intents, and E-A-T (important for a health website) Internal linking for the correct website structure Building local relevance with citations and local blogging partnerships The Challenge Our client operates an elderly care service in Singapore. They provide all types of elderly care but are generally considered to be a type of nursing home. Our client came to us expecting the following. We should get them to Page 1 for at least 30% of their keywords in a year. They should be regarded as the experts in the elderly care niche. Their Search engine optimization strategy has to be algorithm-proof. Because they came to us completely unoptimized and without any long-form content or blog posts, we were essentially taking a website and trying to help it rank well almost from scratch. In this SEO case study, we tell you the step-by-step process of how we generated the organic traffic volumes for this website. The Solution Search Engine Optimization Mantra 1: Topical Authority When websites come to us with ranking difficulties, the most usual reason is that Google does not recognize your website as an “authority” in your subject. Remember that the goal of Google is always to answer a searcher’s question or intent, so it always wants to match searchers with websites that have answers to a searcher’s questions. An “authority” is someone whom you ask a question, and will likely have the correct answer. The more developed content you have, the more likely it is that you have an answer to a searcher’s question. For Google to recognize a website as an authority, there are a few prerequisites. This may be an oversimplification, but the prerequisites are summarized as follows. How much of the topic do you cover? How deeply do you cover a topic? Are these contents easy to navigate? We’ll have a step-by-step guide on on-page SEO for topical authority soon, so look out for that! Step 1: Identify Topics in Your Niche Our client already had a clear niche in the nursing homes industry. However, they didn’t want to rank well just on pages for nursing homes in Singapore. Rather, they also wanted to position their business as an outstanding authority on Singaporean nursing homes in general. Because of this, a true expert on the nursing home industry would also have to provide useful information on: nursing home costs homes for elderly people in general nursing home financial aid. Hence, for our client’s website, we broke down the content strategy into the following manner: main landing page – nursing homes in Singapore blog article 1 – guide to nursing home costs in Singapore blog article 2 – financial aid for nursing homes in Singapore: types of aid available and how to apply for it blog article 3 – elderly people home vs nursing home: is there a difference? Each blog article could also have supplementary blog articles. If you’re struggling to think of topics for such supplementary articles on your website, you can easily find new topics and their corresponding keywords by doing a Google Search. The “Also searched for section” is a good section for you to look at when considering what others are looking for. Then, you should be able to generalize the topics you should be focusing on. You can help your SEO strategy by recording these “Also searched for” queries into a Google sheet. You can create a column in the Google sheet named “Topics” so that you can assign topics to each of these queries. This will help you visualize any recurring topics you might see in your keyword research. You might also want to consider using keyword research tools, such as Ahrefs. Step 2: Create Supporting Blog Articles For Your Chosen Topics You should already have a collation of “Also searched for” queries on Google, along with assigned topics. Once you’ve got these, use your keywords to run more Google searches to generate more examples of topics that you can use. You should group keywords with similar themes so that an article can be optimized for multiple keywords. Step 3: Create Internal Links from Supplementary Articles to Your Main Page This is the issue that 90% of our clients have. Google finds your home page and a subpage or two that link to it – but nothing more beyond that. To increase the visibility of your website, you should always link your articles to the main page that you want to rank for, which for many businesses is their home page or another major page on their site. Your internal links must be contextual. Contextual internal links are: logical usually positioned in the middle of the article on a page use anchor text that relates to the subject of the main page. By keeping these points in mind, you’ll be making it clear to Google that your supplementary articles are reinforcing your main page for a given topic. Examples of anchor texts that could lead to a nursing home landing page could be: ✅ Keyword rich: nursing homes in Singapore ✅ Keyword rich: nursing home in Singapore ✅ URL: site.com/nursing-home Bonus: User Intentions and Covering More Traffic One thing that can help boost your SEO is the use of different articles for different intents. By ‘intent’, we mean a searcher’s motive for running a search. For example, if I type “list of nursing homes” into Google, do I expect information on 1 nursing home, or do I expect an article summarizing the best nursing homes available in Singapore? There are three kinds of search intents to cover. Informational – The user wants to get more information. For example, he would search for “How much does a nursing home cost”. Informational keywords will have the 5Ws 1H: Who, What, Where, When, Why and How Commercial – The user is researching for more information about a service or product. They want to know what the “best”, and “cheapest” services are. Transactional – The user is ready to buy the product or service right now. You should go back to the Google Sheet that you’ve prepared for your earlier queries, create a new column called “intent”, and assign an intent for each keyword you identified. This should help you pare down the specificity of your blog post. Search Engine Optimization Mantra 2: Search Engines Care about Your On-Page SEO On-Page Monitoring When you publish your blog articles, you should always keep a record of the on-page content of your website. The on-page is usually summarized into four sections Meta titles (Yellow Box) Meta descriptions (Blue Box) Headings URL Meta Titles The title tags (appearing as is in the Yellow box) should: Be about 65 characters Have primary keywords near the start of the Title Not be repetitive In our case study, for the nursing home client, we do not want titles like “Best Nursing Home in SG, Nursing Homes for Singapore | nursinghome.com”. It’s long, repetitive and loses clients easily. You want something short and succinct that highlights the benefit of your business, such as: The Best Nursing Home in Singapore | Express Admissions Now Meta Descriptions Meta descriptions (which appear in the blue box) have not been shown to help websites rank, but the copy which you use in meta descriptions can help attract readers to the website. The meta descriptions should: Summarize your page content Include the keyword at least once in your description because Google highlights those keywords in the descriptions Squeeze an offer business selling point into the description. Headings The Headings are the titles of the page itself (not on the Google Search Engine Results). Headers also summarize the page for users, allowing them to go to where they want to quickly. These are some guidelines that we used for our Headers. Each page should only have one H1 Heading that is keyword rich H2 tags can be dispersed on the page but should be matching with long-tail keywords. URLs One of Google’s most important success factors is the URL slug that is used for the page. These are the guidelines that we used. User-friendly URLs – for example, nursinghome.com/ang-mo-kio and not nursinghome.com/ang-mo-kio-block-4967-10-536 Have a consistent convention – for example, nursinghome.com/location The SEO Nirvana for Organic Traffic 3: Technical SEO strategy For this client, we helped to: Clear out technical errors Improve site structure Technical Audits A technical SEO audit must be done for all our clients. Google has a limited crawl budget, and hence we take it quite seriously to ensure that our website is accessible to Google. An SEO optimized website should have no major errors, such as: Site speed 404 Page not found Robots.txt blockage errors This article would be too long if we talked about it here, so we are preparing a Technical SEO checklist a little bit down the line. For this client, the site speed was not an issue, but the broken links were a huge issue when we started work. You can easily check for Technical Errors using the Free Version of Ahrefs’ tool, or Siteliner. If it shows up in the tool – fix it! Site Structure How each page of the site is connected will determine whether your page shows up on the first page. Websites with deliberate structure should be able to push users to their desired answers quickly, while also helping Google bots to crawl their website. When we checked our clients upon onboarding, there were lots of orphan pages – that is, pages that were not linked to anywhere, or take more than clicks to reach. You can use an automated tool to do so, and Screaming Frog is a good free one. If the tool turns up orphan pages, what you need to do is quickly link from a blog article to that affected page. Search Engine Optimization Mantra 4: Backlinking and Citations What we realized was that this website actually had a lot of press releases pointing to it, but most of it was from overseas. Therefore, this wasn’t an issue of not having enough powerful links, but there was simply no local relevance in the backlinks pointing to the website. Outreach to local bloggers would have taken some effort, so for short-term wins, we decided to focus on Local Citations instead. Local Citations Business directories in Singapore contain the business information of companies that could be helpful to potential searchers. Hence, for a company in Singapore, it stands to gain that its reputation is directly linked to the number of directories it appears in. Visibility as an authority in the Singaporean market means that a company should be mentioned by others – bloggers or directories. While not necessarily bringing high volume sales, citations are usually the first step to solving a locality relevance issue. We realized that a big problem for the client was that it wasn’t creating listings, and neither did it want to generate reviews for its service. We changed that. What we did was to drip in 50-60 citations across 2 months, being careful not to do it all at once. We also ensured that these business directories had high reputations (such as Yelp, and Yellow Pages) and had a low spam score. The Result Our client managed to: 👍 Double their daily traffic 👍 Get about 15-20 solid leads from businesses a day (from phone calls to emails) 👍 Comparing year-on-year data, they increased their traffic by 55% 👍 30% of their selected tracked keywords were on page 1 of Google’s SERPs. The Conclusion You can now see how you can improve traffic quickly with some quick wins. So what else can you achieve if you have more time and more analysis on your hands? The content strategy forms the first part of an SEO strategy, and the technical on-page activities that follow will support it. It’s a simple mindset to have. Want to get a similar strategy done for your company? Check out the performance guarantee we offer for our search engine optimization services.