52x organic traffic growth in 1 year

Use case www.autoklice.cz

Task

To place autoklice.cz on the 1st place in SERP and attract more organic visitors for the largest seller of car keys in Prague and the whole Czech Republic.

Solution

After a 180° rebranding of the website, I found that regardless of the age, authority of the page, and placement in the SERPs, the site did not have an adequate amount of organic traffic. To better understand this, an SEO audit was needed: on-page, technical, content, keyword and backlink analysis, mobile version and content analysis. After the audit, I implemented all the tools and after six months the average number of impressions increased from 3,000 per month to 31,000 per month.

SEO audit

I didn't reinvent the wheel in the SEO audit and followed the gold standards of the industry. Since this was an existing business that was already generating revenue, I had to focus on the quickest solution with the biggest impact. That's why I focused on on-page SEO.

Keyword research

What is the intent of the site users? Informational, navigational, transactional or commercial?
What are the main "seed" keywords?
What are the long-tail keywords?
What are the exclusion keywords to use?
What LSI keywords exist?
What is the search volume for seed, short-tail, long-tail and local keywords?
What keywords are competitors ranking for?
What is the difficulty of each keyword?
How does search volume change over the course of a year?
What is the business potential of the selected keywords?
What part of the funnel is the user in - TOFU, MOFU or BOFU?

Through keyword research and target audience analysis, I decided to create 95 landing pages for each car and motorcycle brand. Each page had relevant short- and long-tail keywords, LSI and content for both those looking for information such as how much a new car key will cost, and those looking for a dealer to do a car key for a specific car.

Keyword research also helped create targeted CPC ad campaigns with 200% ROI.

Using SEMRush and Ahrefs, I've been researching:

SEO content

For a quick search engine optimization result, I opted for the simplest solution.

First, I put together a team of 10 people - copy, graphics, publishing and on-page optimization of the article content. For the copywriters, I created a simple Google spreadsheet with different headings, links to foreign articles for inspiration, links to competitors for skyscraper techniques, a status column for better workflow between copywriters, graphic designers and webmasters, and a column with links to finished articles for checking content before publishing. The NDA restricts us from publishing full details, however, we have published >84 relevant posts with an average length of 1,500 words in six months.

On-page SEO audit

After an on-page audit with the help of Yoast SEO and Ahrefs I implemented:

Title tags in the range of 50-60 characters with the target keyword
Meta descriptions in the range of 150-160 characters with the target keyword
Titles (H1, H2, H3, etc.) with the main keyword for the page.Image alt tags
Optimization or compression of images using squoosh. appInternal linking - internal links to other pages within the site for better understanding of the site structure by search engines
External linking - links only to relevant and quality websites
Quality of content - is of high quality, well written and relevant to the main keyword of the page
Content length - long content tends to rank better in search engines, so copywriters have been tasked with writing articles of at least 1500 words and optimally 2500 words
Use headings, checklists and images to break up content and make it easier to read
Short and clear URL structure with keyword.
Example: "https://autoklice.cz/znacky/autoklice-mercedes-praha"

Technical SEO audit

I performed a technical audit using Ahrefs and Yoast SEO:

Creating a clear sitemap.xml
Setting up 301 redirects
Setting nofollow tags for external links
404 page check and redirects
Noindex and robots.txt tags
Setting up structured data for Rich Snippets in Google
Setting up semantic HTML

Result

After 2 months of implementing all the optimization steps, setting up the workflow for content creation, improving the UX of the site, speeding up loading and adapting to mobile devices, I was almost done.

Then it was just a matter of setting up social networks, local SEO, getting a few backlinks, returning the lost backlinks and for the next 10 months just watching the growth.Before that, the website had 3 times more direct visitors, i.e. people who directly entered the URL autoklice.cz.

Today, even though the number of direct visitors is 532% higher, the stats have done a 180° and organic traffic is 2.7x more than direct traffic.

Numbers

5232% organic traffic growth
2200% referral traffic growth
37% decrease of Bounce Rate
43% growth in engagement rate
12% growth of the engaged dwell time

What do these numbers say?

Typically, when old-school search engine optimization is done, traffic increases but dwell time (Dwell Time or Engagement Time) decreases and bounce rate increases. In usecase autoklice.cz this didn't happen and all metrics went up.

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