The Business Challenge
Due to COVID-19 the client in the life sciences training industry was faced with organic traffic drop and revenue loss, as many of their potential customers were shifting to online courses from the typical training sessions held at training venues around the world. The client had to adapt to move their training programs online. In addition, their website was outdated, and unable to provide a great user experience on mobile devices, potentially missing out on online registrations and new business.
SEO Challenges
- Organic traffic drop
- Website redesign & migration (important to maintain any current ranking)
- Redirects (important to maintain any link equity and DA acquired over the years)
- URL structure not optimized
- On-Page optimization issues
- No structured data for FAQ and online courses
- Missed opportunities for Internal linking
- Content not optimized for long-tail queries and user search intent
Solution + SEO Responsibilities
A brand new, mobile friendly website, enabled to provide a great user experience to visitors, and manage online course registrations. (Note website was designed by the agency I worked for. My responsibility was to provide SEO strategy and roadmap)
SEO Responsibilities:
- Performed technical audit of the existing website using ScreamingFrog.
- Identified all URLs with link equity and redesigned the URL structure for the new website
- Performed a competitive gap analysis to understand the current ranking picture and identified low-hanging fruits (keywords that have real ranking possibility in short-term)
- Performed extensive keyword research and competitive keyword analysis, and identified focus keywords for the money pages, including all keyword variations.
- Performed SEO audits of the existing website, to identify top-ranking pages/posts and uncover internal link-building opportunities
SEO Strategy
The strategy was to grow monthly organic traffic by 100% in one year, online conversions, and revenue. To achieve this we would involve 4 team members, create 24 long-form articles, build 15 additional landing pages, refresh or rewrite content that was not performing, and acquire 5 backlinks each month. We also set to fix all SEO technical issues in the first two months.
SEO Tactics Deployed
- Analyzed organic traffic for the current website using GSC, identified underperforming pages with low CTR, and provided the necessary guidance for improvement.
- Researched the industry and competition, identified the most used search queries, user search intent behind each query, and built a content calendar for 6 months.
- Created content briefs and outlines, optimized and published content on website/blog
- Used content pruning to improve crawl budget, and made use of all missed ranking opportunities
- Worked on backlink strategy (HARO, Guest Posts, backlinking opportunities from industry websites, unlinked brand mentions)
- Analyzed organic rankings every month, and provided reporting
Results
The graphic below shows an increase of close to 185% in organic impressions for the client from July 2021 – March 2022
The graphic below shows the organic traffic growth from July 2021 to March 2022. In the middle of July 2021, the website was averaging about 653 visits per month. In the span period of 8 months, the organic traffic grew by over 450% to 3000 visitors per month.
The SEO work done on the client’s website in the span of 8 months paid off when the client was awarded a $650K, 5-year contract to provide life science training to FDA professionals.
(Note: Due to the agreement I have with the agency I provided SEO services, I am unable to disclose the client’s name)