Client: Arakis Company
Subject matter: engineering services in Russia
Cooperation period: from 2020 to 2021
Services: comprehensive SEO-promotion, SEO at the development stage, domain selection service.
In August 2020, Arakis Engineering Company approached us for comprehensive SEO. They provide services from selecting a land plot for construction to commissioning the facility. The project provided services across Russia, but the main location for work was Moscow and the region.
At the time of cooperation, the main goal of the client was to increase the number of requests from the site. The site was brand new, earlier we helped the client to choose the right domain for better ranking in Runet. We moved to comprehensive SEO with organic traffic indicators on weekdays within 45-70 visits per day, and on weekends - 10-20 visits in the search engine Yandex.
In this case study we will tell you how we developed the project, who was responsible for the sharp drop in traffic and how our SEO specialists resuscitated the site in a short time.
We began our work by expanding semantics and searching for new queries for commercial traffic. In this way we managed to create about 20 landing pages for the client's services. After adding to the semantic core, traffic began to grow:
Established a process for the preparation of expert content
The subject matter of the project is complex, it has many nuances and a copywriter could not write high-quality expert material on his own. To make the articles useful to the reader, we divided the preparation process into several parts:
- Created a separate document with topics and a selection of keys by frequency, demand/trend. Once approved, the SEO specialist prepared a list of questions that the specialist would need to ask to uncover their topic.
- The expert on the client's side answered questions in a voice message format and then this data along with the terms of reference was passed on to the copywriter.
- After proofreading, revision and optimization, the article was checked by a company representative and only then published on the blog.
In this way about 10 articles appeared, traffic to which is still growing:
Also, in order to make the articles more credible to the search engine, we optimized their appearance. For each article was added:
- author and the ability to go to the author's profile;
- DATE OF PUBLICATION;
- time to read the article.
For each author, a profile was created on the site with information about the activities and experience of the specialist. His social networks and a list of articles are specified. The author's profile is one of the ranking factors. With the help of it, the search engine understands the reality and competence of the author. The higher the credibility of your author, the higher the probability that your material will enter the TOP.
So after adding authorship to the site, the dynamics of growth of traffic to the blog from PS Yandex increased, while Google grew a little 1-2%:
The project had a minimal budget, so in order to get link weight, we purchased links on directory sites, catalogs and thematic forums. Later we added to them article links from trustworthy thematic blogs and media:
Corrected technical errors
Worked through the following items:
- Moved all pages of the site from http to https (version gluing); Thus, the search engine saw that the site will protect user data and began to trust it more.
- Eliminated duplicate pages;
We found garbage pages with the same metadata in the index. To prevent them from clogging the site and pulling traffic, we removed them. Otherwise, the search engine would perceive them as identical and leave one of them in the index, at its discretion. While you need to emphasize the promotion of a particular page. - Uniqueized Title, Description, H1 on pages and prepared metadata templates for case study pages.
- Optimized the images on the site. Compressed them to 100-200 KB for fast loading.
- Filled in the ALT attribute to give the search engine information about the content of the picture.
Improved site loading speed
We managed to optimize the loading speed of the site quite well.
To do this, we:
- Enabled caching so that site content can be saved and loaded when needed;
- enabled file compression to make data smaller and therefore faster to transfer over the network;
- removed non-working CSS styles and JS scripts. For example, there were old Yandex.Metrics counters in the code;
- optimized web vitals CLS (on-page content shift) and LCP (main content load speed) metrics;
- implemented Lazy Load. With Lazy Load, images are not loaded until they are needed by the visitor. Loading starts at the moment of scrolling or clicking, depending on the setting.
As a result, it was possible to raise the loading speed from 22 points to 72 points for the desktop according to the PageSpeed Insights service:
And for mobile devices from 14 to 45 points:
Did not pass Yandex assessors' check
Getting hit by Proxima
As a result, after all the work done for six months, we managed to grow traffic ~ 4 times in Yandex PS, and ~ 10 times on Google:
But further on we faced a serious drop. In March-April 2021, traffic collapsed heavily in PS Yandex and in May 2021, traffic on Yandex returned to the level of September-October 2020:
Queries from the top 10-20 began to sag rapidly:
For quite some time we couldn't find the cause of the collapse. We assumed
- "Spreading" our content. However, those resources that copied content from us were ranked in TOP 30-50 and simply could not steal traffic.
- Re-optimization. The subject of construction and engineering implies references to regulations and legislation, which is changing. Taking into account this and the drop in queries from the top 20 positions for 3 months, we decided to rewrite and optimize the texts. On most pages of services and articles we replaced the text, selected more unique images from free stock photos, rewrote Title, Description and H1-H3 headings.
After updating the content on the commercial pages of the services, got these results:
After updating and pre-optimizing content on sagging articles:
After the traffic on the pages never recovered, we continued to search for the cause. During another detailed analysis of the metrics, namely the "Sites" report with referral traffic sources, we noticed such transitions from January to March 2021:
The correlation of the drop in traffic on these pages was obvious:
After that I immediately remembered the update of the main Yandex algorithm in March 2021:
Taking a closer look at the major changes in this update, we found out that the Proxima metric has been updated.
Assessors (reviewers) pay attention to the authors of articles, check their profile, the presence of scientific papers or other articles with similar topics. The author must confirm his competence: scans of diplomas, photos, social networks, and links to research on which he relies must be added to his profile. All of this is checked manually, by Yandex.Toloka assessors or by rate assessors.
Once we realized the cause of the sag, we immediately offered the client a list of improvements that would help bring traffic back:
A checklist of improvements for recovering traffic after a fall
- Finalize the authors' pages. Add certificates, attestations, awards of specialists, contact information/social networks, author's rating.
- Create expert profiles on Yandex.Q. Answer questions on behalf of the expert that correspond to the topic of your site to understand the significance of the author.
- Place publications on authoritative external resources on behalf of the expert. Refer to the author on other resources, use quotations from his works.
- Confirm your expertise through social media. Activity in social networks, your own youtube channel, a blog on the topic - all this affects the search engine's perception of the author.
- Create a section on the website with the company team. Add all the authors to bookmark their place of work.
- Use factchecking for articles. Check your materials for "fakeness" with the help of services or order a professional to proofread your article. Inside the article, make a note "fact-checked by a professional" and add a link to their blog or social networks.
- Connect turbo pages for Yandex. This will allow you to get additional traffic. We have implemented this item, and the results from this task are there to this day:
In the end, the client decided to switch to another source of traffic - contextual advertising - and did not make our changes. Thus, thanks to redesigning and updating the content on the pages of the site, we managed to recover a little bit of traffic, but we were not able to return it completely to the level of 200 visits per day.
Bottom line
In 1.2 years of working on the project:
- We managed to grow traffic 4 times in Yandex PS and 10 times in Google PS and significantly increase the coverage of keywords on the site in the first half of the year.
- Faced with a serious drop in traffic due to the update of the Yandex algorithm.
- Recovered some traffic by reworking content on old pages. Over time, the new pages started bringing in traffic.
The project has potential, the topic allows you to attract even more traffic. However, you need more involvement from the client's team. There are many projects with similar themes on the market now. Compared to our competitors, the age of our project's domain is small. Therefore, it was important to show search engines and users our expertise in every possible way. Trust in the site not only increases the position in the output, but also affects the loyalty of visitors. If you implement the tasks on our checklist, you can get traffic back and reduce the likelihood of being penalized by algorithms again.
OTHER CASES
- How to increase traffic by 300% in Yandex and return the indicators after sanctions Proxima: SEO for the website of an engineering company
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- SEO for a UK vitamins website on Shopify. How to increase organic traffic by 182% for a monobrand
- Promotion of the RainViewer weather application website. Traffic growth by 98% over a year
- Optimizing a trucking service website: how to outperform niche competitors from scratch
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