SEO Case Study

Situation

eBoost Consulting engaged with a client in the Science and Technology industry whose database-driven website was in need of a dramatic increase in organic search traffic. The company was not profitable because it did not have the visibility needed for the business model to work. The site was in need of a dramatic increase in organic search traffic.

On the bright side, the consumers that were using the site loved it. It was unique and served an important purpose within the industry. However, though the site had literally tens of millions of pages, when eBoost came on board, Google was indexing less than 70 pages of the site total!

Challenge

The website had a good number of inbound links from high authority websites. It was also a genuinely useful site that naturally attracted links on a regular basis. There were some assets to work with here. The main problem was that the search engines couldn’t find 99.9% of the site’s pages due to 3 main issues:

  • Dynamic URLs
  • Unspiderable Navigation
  • Under-optimized pages

eBoost had to figure out a way to get Google to index the pages by making the navigation spiderable without sacrificing design, while taking tens of millions of dynamic pages and turning them into static HTML pages that Google could see.

Approach

This was a unique situation – not your everyday SEO client. So we were really able to show off our customized approach to SEO. eBoost did the following to get the site’s SEO back on track:

  • Conducted a full keyword research process
  • Optimized key pages of the site for strategically targeted keywords
  • Redid the naming convention of the site’s URLs
  • Redid the naming convention of the site’s prominent HTML elements
  • Recoded the site’s navigation so it could be followed by search engine robots
  • Showed Google how to get to those tens of millions of dynamic pages
  • Controlled the process so Google’s spiders would not slow down the site’s servers, as had happened in the past

We directed Google to 1 million pages of the site at a time, waited for it to crawl the pages and then moved on to the next million. It was our hope that the number of pages being indexed would skyrocket along with the number of visitors and product purchases.

Results

Within three months, the number of indexed pages in Google had gone from 65 to over 467,000. While traffic stayed relatively steady from all other sources, organic search engine traffic saw a stratospheric rise:

  • Indexed Pages increased from 65 to over 467,000
  • Google Visits more than quadrupled
  • MSN Visits increased 806%
  • Pages per visit increased 12%
  • Orders increased 84%

Next Steps

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Did You Know?

42% of search users click the top-ranking link. 8% click the second link