A brief overview of the client's situation
The client owns a gun store locally and operates an online presence that sells firearms nationwide. Some of the key challenges on this project as we started to work with this client were that the site design and UX were completely outdated and the site had issues with stability and site speed. The site was consistently going down every few weeks and staying down for days on end while the developer at the time worked to resolve the issue to no avail. The site also experienced load time that exceeded 60 seconds when traffic increased.
How we resolved these issues
- In order to resolve these issues, we took the existing website and completely redesigned the UX and look and feel of the site to a more modern look.
- We took the base website which is built in Word Press analyzed the build, removed unnecessary plugins, and stabilized the build.
- We moved the site to a stable hosting environment on its own server as it required resources that would not be available in a shared environment.
SEO Campaign Objectives
Once the site has been stabilized and all technical SEO objectives had been achieved we began a link-building campaign for this client. The objectives of this campaign is to increase authoritative links to the site overall as well as key pages that the client is looking to gain more traffic on.
Background
- Client profile – The client owns a gun store that primarily conducts business online.
- Initial state of the client’s online presence – The initial online presence was unstable as well as the UX on the site was not user friendly.
- Specific issues affecting their search rankings and visibility – While the client had decent rankings they were struggling with keeping rankings stable and ranking on certain keywords they deemed most important to the business.
Objectives
- Increase organic search traffic overall
- Improve keyword rankings for gun and rifle-related terms the client wants more visibility on.
- Increase the client’s link profile by looking for authoritative links for the client by doing outreach and backlink research based on the client’s competition.
Challenges
- Finding quality websites that would link to a gun site
- Competing in a market that is dominated by giant websites as well as strong competitor sites looking to rank on the same terms as the client.
Strategy and Implementation
Technical SEO
- Site speed optimization
- Mobile responsiveness improvements
- UX improvements
- Achieved Site Stability
- Fixing crawl errors and improving site structure
Off-Page Optimization
- Link building strategies – This project once the site was stabilized is strictly a link building project. We used a combination of link building strategies to increase this client’s link profile and boost rankings and traffic overall.
Results
- Increase in organic search traffic (52% increase in a 6 month period)
- Improved user engagement (30% increase in 6 month period)
- Growth in online visibility (impressions improved by 26% and clicks by 53% in a 6 month period)
This project was quite challenging as we had to overcome technical challenges to get the site stable and user-friendly. Once we achieved stability and implemented technical SEO fixes. Since the client handled all of the on-site SEO internally, we took on the work of building links to the client’s site to improve their rankings and visibility in search. We are also currently working with the client to build a custom site using enterprise-level technology.
The long-term impact of what we have done is yet to be seen. The client has a stable and SEO friendly website, and the link profile strength is increasing as we continue to work with them. If the current snapshot at the 6 month mark is any indication we expect this client’s visibility to continue to grow overtime.