Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Increasing Search Traffic By
20,000 Visitors Per Month Without Full CMS Access - Here's How...'
Posted by RoryT11This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the
main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The
author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz,
Inc. Trying to do SEO for a website without full access to its CMS is like
trying to win a sword fight with one hand tied behind your back. You can still
use your weapon, but there is always going to be a limit to what you can do.
Before this metaphor gets any further out of hand, I should explain. One year
ago, the agency I work for was asked to run an SEO campaign for a client. The
catch was, it would be impossible for us to gain full access to the CMS that the
website was built on. Initially I was doubtful about the results that could be
achieved. Why no CMS? The reason we couldnt access the CMS is that the client
was part of a global group. All sites within this group were centrally
controlled on a third-party CMS, based in another country. If we did want to
make any technical changes, it would have to go through a painfully slow
helpdesk process. We could still add and remove content, edit Metadata and
had some basic control over the navigation. Despite this, we took on the
challenge. We already had a strong relationship with the client because we
handled their PR, and a good understanding of their niche and target audience.
With this in mind, we were confident that we could improve the site in a number
of ways that would enhance user experience, which we hoped would lead to
increased visibility in the SERPs. What has happened in the last year since
we started managing the search marketing campaign has emphasised to me just how
important it is to implement well-structured on-page SEO. The client's website
is now receiving over 20,000 more visits from organic search per month than it
did when we took over the account. I want to share with you how we achieved
this without having full access to the CMS. The following screenshots are a
direct comparison of January 2013 and January 2014. Corresponding figures
can be viewed in the summary at the end of the post. Analytics When we were
granted access to analytics for the website, we got our first real insight into
how the site was performing, and what we could do to help it perform better.
By analysing the way visitors were using the site (visitor journeys, drop-off
points, most visited pages, which pages had highest avg. time etc.), we could
start to structure our on-page strategy. We identified how we could
streamline the navigation to help people find what they were looking for
quicker. We also decided it was necessary to create clearer call-to-actions,
which would shorten the distance from popular landing pages, to the most
valuable pages on the website. We also looked at the top landing pages, and
with what keyword data we had access to, we were able to define more clearly why
people were visiting the site, and what they expected when they landed on a
page. For example, the site was receiving a lot of traffic for one of its
products, with visitors coming into the site from a range of relevant short and
longtail keywords. However, they would almost always land on the product page.
We noticed by analysing visitor journeys from this page that they would leave
to try to find more information on the item, because the majority of visitors
weren't entering the site at the buying stage of the conversion cycle.
However, where this supporting information lived on the site wasnt immediately
obvious. In fact, it was nearly four clicks away from the product landing page!
It was obvious wed have to address this, and other similar issues we
identified simply by conducting some fairly simple analytic analysis. Product
Pages The product pages were generated from a global product catalogue built
into the content management system. They arent great, but because we didnt have
access to the catalogue or the CMS, there was not much we could do directly to
the product pages. Rewriting content I dont necessarily believe that there is
such a thing as writing for SEO. Yes, you can structure a page in a certain
formulaic way with keywords in header tags, alt tags and title tags. You can
factor low-competition longtail phrases and target keywords into the copy as
wellbut if you sacrifice UX in favour of anything that Ive just mentioned, then
Ill just be honest, youre doing it wrong. From looking at the data in Google
Analytics (low avg. time on site and a bounce rate that should have been lower),
and reading through the website ourselves, it became clear that the content
needed to be rewritten. We did have a list of target keywords, but our main
objective was to make the content more valuable to the users. To do this, we
worked closely with the PR team, who had a great understanding of the clients
products and key messages. They had also developed personas about the type of
visitor that would come to the client's site. We were able to use this
knowledge as a foundation to rewrite, restructure and streamline sections of the
website that we knew could be performing better. Another thing we noticed
from analysing the content is that interlinking was almost non-existent. If a
visitor wanted to get to another piece of information or section of the website,
they'd be restricted to using the main navigation bar. Not good... We
addressed this in the rewriting process by keeping a spreadsheet of what we were
writing and key themes in those pages. We could then use this to structure
interlinking on the website in a way that would direct visitors easily to the
most relevant resources. As a result of this we have seen time on site
increase by 14.61% for visitors from organic search: Working with the PR team
As I have mentioned, we also handled PR for this client. Luckily, the PR team
provided brilliant support to the search marketing side of the account. This
has proved integral to the success of this campaign for two reasons: 1) The
PR team know the client better than anyone. It might even be fair to say they
know more about the products and target audience than the client's own marketing
team. This helped us build a firm understanding of why people would come to
the site, what they'd expect to see, and what the client wanted to achieve with
its web presence. This was great in terms of helping us identify what people
would search for to find the site, which in turn allowed us to structure the
content rewrite more effectively. 2) By working with the PR team, we were
able to co-ordinate the on-page and off-page work we were doing, to align with
PR campaigns. For example, if they were pushing a certain product, or raising
awareness of a specific campaign, we knew we'd see an increase in search volume
in those areas. The SEO team would then also focus efforts on promoting the same
product. When the search volume increased, our site was there to capture the
traffic. Unlike in the previous example when the traffic was sent to a product
page, we were able to create a fully optimised landing page. With this
approach we knew we'd get a good volume of targeted traffic - we just needed to
be there to capture it and give a friendly nudge in the right direction.
Restructuring navigation The main navigation menu on the site proved to be a
source of great frustration. Functionality was extremely limited...we couldn't
even create dropdown menus as that wasn't built into the CMS. That meant we
needed to be really tight with our navigation options, as well as making it
obvious where each navigation link would lead. Again, we worked with the PR
team and the client, as well as using information from Google Analytics to learn
about how visitors were using the site, and how the client wanted them to use
the site. Armed with this information, we streamlined the navigation to
support user experience by creating better landing pages for the navigation
links and making the most popular and valuable pages of the website more
accessible. The result has been that although people are spending more time
on page than 12 months ago, they are visiting fewer pages. This has helped us
inform the client that navigation was working better, and visitors were able to
find the information they required more easily: Valuable content Theres a
vicious rumour circulating at the moment that quality content (no... not 300
word blog posts) can help drive SEO success. Well, we decided to test this for
ourselves As well as rewriting existing copy, we also created new content
that we hoped would drive more organic search traffic to the site. We created
infographics (good ones), product-specific and general FAQs, video and text
based tips and advice pages, as well as specific landing pages for the client's
three 'hero' products. We knew from looking at the analytics that there was
definitely opportunity to get more longtail traffic, but we wanted to combine
this with creating a genuinely useful resource for the visitors. Nothing we
did was hugely resource intensive in terms of content creation, but what we did
create was driven by what the data told us people wanted to see. As a result,
the tips and advice pages and FAQs have both pulled in significant volumes of
organic search traffic, and given users something of value. The screenshots
below illustrating this are taken from the middle of August 2013, when the pages
went live, to the end of January 2014: Fixing Errors With the site plugged
into Moz, we were pretty shocked to see the crawl diagnostics return 825 errors,
901 warning and 976 notices. This equated to almost one warning and one error on
every single page on the site. The biggest culprit being duplicate page titles,
duplicate page content and missing or non-existent Metatags. The good news
I got to spend tonnes time doing what every SEO hates loves handcrafting new
metadata! The bad news the majority of errors were caused by the CMS. How it
dealt with pagination, the poor integration of the product catalogue and the way
it handled non-public (protected) pages. As part of our initial audit on the
site, we noticed the site didnt even have a robots.txt. As you know, this meant
the search engine bots were crawling every nook and cranny, getting in places
that they had no business going in. So, as well as manually crafting new
metadata for many pages, we also had to try and get a robots.txt that we had
written onto the site. This meant going through a helpdesk, where they didnt
understand SEO and where English wasnt their first language. A gruelling
process but after several months of trying, we got that robots.txt in place,
making the site a lot more crawler friendly. Now were down to 122 errors and
377 warnings. Okay, I know it should be lower than that, but when you cant get
change how the CMS works, or add functionality to it, you do the best you can.
Conversions The client does not sell directly through its website, but through
a network of distributors. The quickest way for a customer to learn about their
closest distributor is to use the 'Contact Us' page. Again, admittedly, this is
far from the best system but unfortunately, it is not something we're able to
change at this stage. Because of this, we made people visiting the 'Contact
Us' page a conversion goal that would be a KPI for the campaign. We have seen
this increase by over 21% in the last 12 months, which has helped us prove value
to the client, as these are the kinds of visits that will have a positive impact
on their bottom line. It's good to know you're not only driving a high volume of
traffic, but also a good quality of traffic. Off-page The reason Ive saved
off-page to last is that I really dont dwell on it. Yes, we did follow
traditional 'best practices'; blogger and influencer outreach, producing quality
content for people to link to but we didnt do anything revolutionary or
game-changing. The truth is, we had so much work to do on-page, that we kind
of let the off-page take care of itself. Id in no way advocate this approach
all the time, but in this case we prioritised getting the website working as
hard as it could. In this case, it paid dividends and Ill tell you why.
Conclusions - Play to your strengths Managing an SEO campaign without full
access to a CMS undoubtedly poses a unique set of challenges. But what it also
forced us to do was play to our strengths. Instead of overcomplicating any of
the more technical SEO issues, we focused on getting the basics right, and using
data to structure our strategy. We took an unfocused, poorly structured website,
and shaped into something valuable and user-friendly. Thats why weve seen
20,000 more unique visits per month than we were having when we took over the
campaign a year ago we did what many people would consider 'basic SEO' really
well. I think this is what I want the key takeaway to be from this case study.
It's probably true that SEOs are experiencing something of an identity crisis,
but as Rand eloquently argued in his recent post, we still have a unique skill
set that can be incredibly valuable to any business with an online presence.
What we may consider 'basic' still has the potential to deliver fantastic
results. Really, all were trying to do is make our websites more
user-friendly and more crawlable. If you do that, youll get the results.
Hopefully thats what Ive illustrated in this post. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a
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Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
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