Client: RainViewer.com weather app website
Work Period: December 2021 - December 2022
Promotion Region: Worldwide
Topic: Weather app
Services: complex SEO-promotion
- Client's goals, strategy to achieve goals
- What we did to achieve the goals. Technical and internal aspects of the project
- We got rid of duplicate map pages with get-parameters
- Optimized existing radar pages and got rid of pages with low quality content
- UX refinement and conversion improvement
- Optimize the main Weather Live Radar page
- Create new map pages
- What we did on external promotion
- Deployment of new multi-language versions
- Conclusion
Client's goals, strategy to achieve goals
Ukrainian project RainViewer is a weather application with its own website, where you can learn online about the current weather conditions in different regions.
The client wanted to increase the number of app downloads by users who would find the project site in the search engine results. The goals were quite ambitious - a 100-200K increase in organic traffic after six months of work.
However, during the preparation of the commercial proposal, we determined that we would not be able to achieve such results in half a year. We should immediately note that the niche is very dependent on climatic events and seasons, which mainly fall on the period of spring-autumn, but we did not take this into account in the calculations, because we saw that you can squeeze out more in the off-season (late fall - early spring).
Thus, at "rough" calculations offered their forecasts for traffic growth (only for 12 months), taking into account the implementation of the prepared promotion strategy:
As a result of the strategy development, 4 main points of growth for the project in SEO were identified:
- Multilanguage, to attract users from different regions. Since the radar coverage by country allows to deploy a rather large pool of language versions:
- Optimizing the current coverage pages as the pages had no additional information other than the weather map.
- Work with the blog of the site. Collection of information requests + analysis of competitors and preparation of TOR for writing new articles on the blog, since the subject matter is very much informational (articles, wikis, news).
- Create new pages with forecasts/maps of fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides, ozone holes. Since in potential, such maps, together with multi-lingualism, should start to bring the main share of traffic to the site.
What was done to achieve the objectives. Technical and internal aspects of the project
The first thing to do was to analyze and put all the technical points in order. Thus, a set of the following technical works was carried out:
- Fixed broken links, images, scripts
- Correct 301 redirects are set up
- Correct canonical addresses are configured
- Eliminating duplicate pages with get-parameters
- Fixed "Bad content type" error
- Added correct robots.txt file
- Added attributes nofollow, target=_blank for external links on the site
- Customized hreflang for multi-language versions
- Eliminated duplicate meta tags and H1 headings
- Getting rid of Low Content Page type pages (low quality content on the page)
- Optimization of images on the site was carried out
- Security headers are configured
- Basic types of micropartitioning is set up
In the following, we will elaborate on the most significant points.
We got rid of duplicate map pages with get-parameters
An important technical point was the elimination of duplicate pages with get-parameters like "loc". They looked as follows:
- https://www.rainviewer.com/map.html?loc=52.2691,20.1292,6&oFa=1&oC=0&oU=1&oCS=1&oF=0&oAP=1&rmt=2&c=5&o=80&lm=0&th=1&sm=0&sn=0
- https://www.rainviewer.com/map.html?loc=35.9342,-78.7913,15&oFa=0&oC=1&oU=0&oCS=1&oF=0&oAP=0&rmt=3&c=0&o=82&lm=0&th=1&sm=1&sn=1
- https://www.rainviewer.com/map.html?loc=25.6358,-80.2524,10&oFa=1&oC=1&oU=0&oCS=1&oF=0&oAP=1&rmt=1&c=1&o=80&lm=0&th=0&sm=1&sn=1
There were quite a few of these pages in the Google index, where the only difference was the location coordinates on the map, and everything else was duplicated and with the canonical addresses set to themselves. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that there were 2 main map pages:
- https://www.rainviewer.com/map.html - this type of url is generated by embedding the code to your site, via the "Embed this map" function:
- https://www.rainviewer.com/weather-radar-map-live.html is the url of the main map page linked from the main menu on the site.
So we decided to close this type of pages at the level of meta noindex, but with the condition Index If Embedded:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex" />
<meta name="googlebot" content="indexifembedded" />As a result, in the first months after the implementation of noindex there was a significant drop in traffic, as pages began to fall out of the index, that is, the main page https://www.rainviewer.com/map.html stopped receiving traffic:
Eventually, after a while, Google started crawling these pages anyway, despite the ban.
Thus, the final solution was to open the pages to the index, BUT having previously reconfigured the canonical addresses on such pages to the main page https://www.rainviewer.com/weather-radar-map-live.html.
Optimized existing radar pages and got rid of pages with low quality content
The second significant point on the internal part of the project was the elaboration and minimization of pages with small amount of content, and at that time it was the main part of pages on the site, because on all radar pages like https://www.rainviewer.com/radars/argentina.html, there were maps and a set of radars, without description.
As a result, a full-fledged semantic core for the project was assembled. On its basis it was decided to write some text templates that we could reproduce and give users additional information on where they had gotten to and how to interact with it.
Next, a copywriter was given the technical task of preparing 10 such templates. Then the texts were multiplied, unique and implemented on the site.
In parallel, titles, descriptions, h1 were further optimized and added to the site.
After implementing to the site and re-indexing the shows of these pages, traffic to them increased almost 3 times:
Detailed comparison of radar page readings during the rainy season (periods 2021-03-01 to 2021-06-27 and 2022-03-01 to 2022-06-27 by GSC):
It can be seen that in general all indicators (clicks, impressions, CTR, average position) on these pages have increased due to their optimization. However, work on filling and improving the pages continues.
UX refinement and conversion increase
Also, to improve the user experience on the site and to help increase conversions, we finalized the following points:
- When entering the site from different mobile operating systems, the site detects the OS of the phone and adapts the landing for this user. So, for example, for an Android phone, the user will see only Google Play buttons. And links to the app in other upstores will be in the form of anchors, not pictures. So as not to distract from his platform.
In the header, as you can see on the screenshot, there is a button "Get the app". It too takes the user to a landing page with a selection of all appstores. https://www.rainviewer.com/get.html
For iOS - App Store, for Android - Google Play, for Huawei - AppGallery.
And also there is a QR code, having scanned which you can get to the appropriate store for your device to download the application:
- When going to https://www.rainviewer.com/weather-radar-map-live.html, the user automatically opens a map with radars according to their geolocation (if any).
Optimization of Weather Live Radar main page
The next important step was optimization of the main map page https://www.rainviewer.com/weather-radar-map-live.html. Meta tags, text description and linking to radar pages were introduced on this page. Thus, it contributed to the fact that in the rainy season of 2022 we were able to increase 2.5 times more traffic, compared to the same period in 202. And also due to optimization, we were able to minimize the traffic sag in the off-season (December-March):
Creating new map pages
In parallel with all the works, technical tasks for creating new tracker maps of hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, floods were being prepared and submitted for development. However, we were able to realize only one page for the hurricane map:
As a result, this page has become one of the top pages that generate traffic on the project. The page has also been translated for different language versions, which also plays an important role at the moment.
The creation of new maps has been hampered with the onset of full-scale hostilities in Ukraine, so for now we are very much hoping and waiting for the release of new pages.
What was done on external promotion
Embedding the Rainviewer map into external resources was a major source of gaining link mass:
This is a fairly natural process, so we just needed to maintain the link profile, diluting it with various press releases and useful article links. In this way, the number of backlinks increased quite smoothly and organically.
The dynamics of the reference profile looked as follows:
What were doing for it:
- We tried to contact directly with media resources with the proposal to place our script, for additional value to their users, but the result was not effective, as there were almost no responses.
- Worked on publishing press releases and useful articles on trusted media and techno blogs.
Deployment of new multi-language versions
In our opinion, the main point of growth was to be multilingualism, as the radar coverage of the project allows us to cover a sufficiently large number of regions. Thus we prepared the ground for the creation of multilingual versions:
- Analyzed the width of the audience, how many people speak these languages in these countries, and their ability to pay (GDP per capita).
- Provided a list of countries with the number of native speakers (as in some countries, can speak more than one language + some countries have the same language).
- Prescribed and approved correct URL's for the language versions of the site.
- Prepared a list of ready-made hreflang strings.
Then we started to gradually realize our plan and in the end about 10 language versions were created on the site:
Important points on the multi-lingual version of the site:
- Separate sitemap files were created for each version.
- For each version, a different Google Search Console view was created with a link to the right region.
- For the main traffic-generating page of the site (radar map) we made it to be centered on the terrain depending on the selected language version on the site. That is, if the user is on the Italian version, the map should open with radars of Italy.
- Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the radars that collected data in rf were disabled and the multi-language version for this country was removed. Then it was redesigned for the version of Russian-speakers in Ukraine by hreflang - https://www.rainviewer.com/ua/ru/. Since this version previously brought a good share of traffic, respectively, it was lost, but eventually we were able to increase traffic at the expense of other language versions.
To give you an example, in the last few months the pages of the Italian version of the site brought 6k clicks/visits. So, practically from the very first language version we saw the result and went further.
With the expansion of the list of countries/languages, there was a small snag, which was that for multi-lingual versions where the language is duplicated (e.g. Mexico, Spain, Argentina), we needed to uniquify the meta and headers on such pages, which we did.
We also need to prepare new unique text snippets that were not duplicated on these three versions. However, we have not been able to realize this yet.
Conclusion
As a result, even with incomplete implementation of the strategy for 1.3 years of work on the project we managed to achieve the following results in terms of traffic (we provide open data on Ahrefs and Serpstat).
According to Ahrefs data, we were able to get a figure of 200K visits in the off season (late fall - early spring)
It is worth noting that due to optimization and filling the site with new pages we managed to avoid the slippage in the off-season and get peak traffic of about 250K visits in August 2022.
Detailed traffic and keyword data according to Ahrefs:
We managed to increase the number of keywords in organics, which gave an increase in traffic. According to Serpstat data, we managed to increase the number of keywords in the TOP from the start of work until today by almost 2 times:
OTHER CASES
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