Last week I started doing some work for a customer on his website, and he agreed to be part of my mini case study. The goal was to see the impact of adding content to a website that has no history of back links or social media since its creation. We all know that it works, and we all think we know how this can impact a site but most of this is untested. A lot of SEO’s focus only on off page optimization with an emphasis on back links. So just to be clear, the site that we are using for this case study:
- Has never been linked to
- Has poor SERP rankings
- Has no social media activity
- Has not changed its content since its creation
- Has a basic site structure 5 pages: home, about, etc
That being said, we all know that Google has been giving out points to websites that add content regularly. This really is nothing new, but it has been much more important over the last 1 year to add content to your sites than ever.
Goal
The main goal of this case study is to see if the website we are using will move up in the search engines. As a result of this, we have our secondary goal which is to see if adding content will increase traffic and drive sales. Our hypothesis is that it will increase SERP movement by 2-3 pages (est.)
The Plan
What we did was create a “Blog” page on their static site, with about 3 paragraphs of text. Over the next 3 weeks, we would add 1 article of about 200-600 words of text every 3 days, and that is exactly what we did. We mainly added newsletters, howtos, and general information about the site. We made sure that there was proper on page SEO including factors like title tag optimization, meta tag optimization and threw some keywords in there within the pages. We also added several unique images to our texts, with proper SEO attached to them as well.
We made sure that there was proper interlinking WITHIN the site (still no backlinks) and a few out links to some authority sites to show Google we know what we are talking about. We optimized the images for key phrases and made sure that there were no code validation issues within the site, we also made sure that it passed the plagiarism checker just to be sure.
We also made sure that the existing pages had proper SEO within their respective pages, with the titles, metas, etc.
The Results
Well, ya’ll know we are not going to post a case study on our blog with bad results :). We were very happy to see what happened. Within 1-2 weeks, the amount of visitors and impressions to the site made a huge spike.
- It doesn’t take an MIT graduate to see that content drives traffic
As you can see there has been under 50 visitors to the site for the past year or so, but right around April 15th, the site started to spike, and then April 19th it made a huge jump and has continued to do so for the past 4 days. Basically what happened was this:
Before adding content: less than 50 unique visitors per day
After Adding content: 100-300 unique visitors per day.
SERP Movement
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Keyword 1 original position - 35 end result - 3
Keyword 2 original position - 43 end result - 5
Keyword 2 original position - 17 end result - 1 -------------------------------------------------------------
This is simply a wonderful example of the power of content in today’s Google algorithm. People spend time and money every day on backlinking and other methods that most of the time end up in a penalty or getting involved in a situation that will possibly hurt you in the future.
If you have a site that has no link history and you are trying to get it ranked, do yourself a favor and add some fresh, relevant content to the site before you go getting links to the site. I would love to continue to follow this site to see how it does over the next few weeks. I fully expect this trend to continue over the next few weeks, as these numbers are a direct result of an organic traffic stream from its SERP placement.
Get Social!