9,500+ Increase in Ranking Keywords
100k+ Recovery in Traffic
200+ Leads per Year Recovered
The Problem
A website that is legal and medical in nature was the #1 resource and ranking website in Google Search for decades until a broad core update in late 2010s wiped them out.
This brand immediately started to lose prominent rankings and qualified traffic leading to a drop of 200+ leads per year and thousands of keyword placements.
TechAudits Strategic Approach
It’s fairly difficult to deduce exactly why a website fell during or after a core update because, in many cases, you’re not penalized and others are just promoted.
A true penalization typically leads to a substantial amount of loss in rankings and traffic.
There is no secret sauce or “golden egg” to fix when it comes to these as they tend to hit several areas tied to quality or spam.
The team essentially rebuilt the entire website from the ground up, fixed all technical errors, removed low quality content and rewrote ~1,500 pages of content within 1 year.
The Results
We were able to recover all of the lost rankings, traffic and leads slowly over time as the brand kept getting promoted in every core update after the initial drop from our efforts.
This has led to a revenue recovery of ~$20M in yearly legal fees that they’ve been able to continue to capture even after working with our team members.
*Data in this case study consists of real numbers from our customer’s CRM and analytics platforms. For privacy reasons, we do not disclose the brand name in this case study.
Partnership Details
Awareness
This partnership consisted of us performing nearly every service we have to offer to help recover a website that saw a financial impact of >$20M a year due to an algorithmic penalty.
This effort required a lot of trust between us and the client as their business was quite literally in our hands. They believed in the work we were doing and we were very transparent with everything ups and downs and stuck through it with them and in the end the results were exactly what we wanted.
Key Implementations
- A brand new website build from the ground up working with their 3rd party developer.
- ~1,500 pieces of content were optimized or built.
- A full technical audit along with improving crawlability, structured data and more.
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THE STORY
Understanding the Penalty
This client was an industry leader before their entire world was flipped over by Google broad core algorithm update and they were given an algorithmic penalty. There is a difference between a manual penalty and an algorithmic penalty. A manual penalty is pretty straightforward as Google will tell you what you did wrong, you fix it and then submit a reconsideration request and they’ll usually put you right back. An algorithmic penalty is a lot harder to decipher as you’re not given any hints as to why you were penalized.
The first step in this process is to try and decipher what happened and we did that by isolating the pages and queries that saw the most impact. Then we worked through sitewide technical, content and equity (backlinks) audits to identify the key items we needed to address.
After we had a rough idea of what types of content were targeted the most, in this case medical content, we got to work. The team spent time going page by page to fully understand what information was missing, which facts were outdated and more to really up the quality of medical content.
All of this auditing led to a few key assertions:
- The website (product) was not up to par with what users and search engines were expecting from a design and performance standpoint.
- The content on the site was very outdated across the board and there was a lot more low quality supporting content than main content across hundreds of pages.
- There was an aggressive amount of overoptimization with internal links, metas and more.
- For example, they had a glossary of every “misspelling” possible for their main head term as an indexable page.
- Google had a hard time understanding if it was a legal website or a medical websites.
- The backlink profile was riddled with “blackhat” type links.
- For example, it was clear someone leveraged a scholarship program to get hundreds of colleges and universities to build links to them.
Strategic Roadmap
The team quickly turned the assertions, shared above, into an effective roadmap that consisted of a brand new website, ~1,500 pages of optimized content and the addition of more “brand building”.
Streamlined the Website
The design of the old website was very dated, looked very early 2000s, and every page was a custom build and it was super hard to manage without a true content management system. It was time to upgrade.
We worked through a full redesign to modernize the website and improved elements like page speed, reduced CSS/JS usage and more. It helped to clean up the “technical debt” that they amassed over the years.
Along with the redesign we standardized a lot of components in the system with creating established templates, modules and more to make it easier to update at scale and keep things consistent.
Content Quality
During the website build the team rewrote hundreds of pages of content to fit the new templates, reduce low quality supporting content and reposition them to focus on topics and keywords that mattered.
Establishing “E-E-A-T”
E-E-A-T, otherwise known as Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust, is something we believe in and something that Google is trying to layer into their core algorithms.
Focusing on Improving Links
This client was very stuck in the past with their link building tactics so we spent a lot of time educating and showing them better ways and better types of links to build. The links they were building weren’t necessarily harmful to them but they weren’t the “power links” they should be building. Based on our instruction they shifted away from resource placements, similar to citations, and started focusing on links from places like HARO, infographics and more.
Planning the Future
The team took the strategic roadmap we built and operationalized it for the customer so they knew exactly what to do and when and built out calendars for the customer to follow with their internal team.
The website began to slowly recover outside of core updates but the core update, when Google makes larger adjustments to their ranking system, is when we saw the most movement. It took roughly 3 core updates (18 months) to see a complete recovery of what they lost from the penalization.
The website still enjoys the top ranking placements we recovered today, 3-4 years later.