SEO fail? Content to the rescue!
A few years back, I helped save a client's SEO bacon – not with technical tricks, but with good old-fashioned content.
(Names & brands have been redacted to preserve privacy.)
Step 1: Fail
A junior marketing person misunderstood some directions, and turned off several of their best performing blogs. Their Google rank promptly plummeted over the weekend, as did traffic and visibility. (The speed astonished everyone.)
Their marketing manager quickly figured out what was going on and re-activated the blogs — but the damage was done. Rankings barely came back up, and certainly not to where they were before! Their modest growth was severely damaged.
At this point they called in my team.
Step 2: Failure analysis
We audited the blog's SEO performance and content. We found that the blogs which had been disabled had good content, but the writing style was incredibly hard to read. The basic structure of the content was also confusing – it made the reader work to connect the dots. (If your blog requires reading at the post-secondary level, you may want to work on that.)
These readability scores are exactly as bad as they look.
Step 3: Execute Operation "Good Writing and Readability"
These pages were somewhat old, which can work in their favor. Old pages aren't bad, in Google's view. But updated old pages are very, very good in Google's algorithms. They like canonical sources that improve over time and stick around.
I proceeded to completely re-write the worst-written blogs, then re-published them with a current date and a note about their original publication. We immediately saw rankings rebound. The first update lead to a sharp jump, and the second update kicked us far above where the site was before the debacle:
Red Diamonds indicate content updates
I continued working with the client to update content over the following weeks. We also did deeper keyword research and salted in relevant terms – while being careful to make them appropriate, correct and natural. From this we saw a steady, strong rise in rankings:
and in traffic:
While the traffic estimate is from SEMrush, it matched what we saw in Google Analytics
We even began stealing some ranking directly from their #1 competitor – gradually, but definitely:
No "black hat" or "grey hat" SEO techniques were applied to recover and grow. This was pure, 100% white hat SEO: Great, informative and easy to read content, with relevant keywords salted naturally throughout.
Services included:
SEO performance audit
Keyword expansion & refocusing
Competitive content review, with special attention to competitors
Re-write and edit quite technical cybersecurity content