THE PROBLEM
In July 2014 a major North American transportation company’s site was negatively impacted by Google’s Pigeon update, which resulted in the loss of the majority of their non-brand organic rankings. Organic traffic and revenue plummeted year over year as a result. Direct Agents, supported by the BrightEdge platform, took over this company’s SEO campaign in early May 2015 to help regain the lost rankings, traffic, and revenue.
THE SOLUTION
The loss of sales, rankings, and traffic was also attributed to the increased organic efforts of OTAs (Online Travel Agents) which were pushing down the client’s site in valuable Search Engine Results Pages. A large focus needed to be placed on detail-specific pages that were very relevant to the brand’s offering and had a high search intent, but were also not going to automatically lose out to OTAs.
The idea was to find niche terms that had enough combined search volume to generate highly qualified organic traffic that could and would convert to counteract the loss that the client had seen prior to Direct Agent’s SEO engagement. With the use of BrightEdge’s Data Cube, they performed a Keyword Gap Analysis and identified underutilized keywords on which competitors were ranking.
THE RESULTS
Direct Agents built out evergreen content around route pages based off of the competitor keyword data. After a few months, they began to see impressive results. Year-over-year organic keyword ranking for the site increased consistently as new pages were optimized for the key route terms, driving significant increases in traffic for those specific pages.
The site gained 242 new organic Page One rankings with a combined monthly search volume of 181,470 and an average increase in rankings of over 157%. Organic traffic for new route pages increased by 679% and revenue increased by 431% between September and April. There was a direct correlation between the amount of organic keywords ranked, their rank increasing over time, the amount of traffic that was brought in, and the revenue generated from it.
Utilizing BrightEdge's Data Cube to discover keyword trends can make a huge difference in generating organic results.