Case studies of SEO success

Background: This top-ranked e-commerce brand was challenged by growing competition during a period when both product demand and brand interest were slipping. Additionally, Google was implementing high numbers of both confirmed and unconfirmed algorithm updates, which caused historic levels of instability and churn in Organic Search results. The client was also struggling to prioritize Engineering resources for search engine optimization, given competing demands for development on what was an outdated, overly cumbersome tech stack.

SEO strategy: I prioritized Organic Search tactics that delivered the biggest site impacts while requiring low lift by Engineering. I emphasized improving discoverability of the website’s product categories through a combination of technical enhancements and keyword retargeting. The technical enhancements addressed things like improving page speed & Core Web Vitals, XML Sitemap cleanup, reducing site errors, and moving e-commerce categories higher into the site navigation. The content enhancements involved keyword research that was plugged into optimizing existing pages’ category positioning, creating new, previously unrepresented category pages, and using search-volume data to reprioritize the site’s parameterization/canonicalization logic code.

Low-lift, high-ROI tactics benefitted the entire website, resulting in heightened search engine awareness of new and old categories and individual products.

676 new #1 ranked keywords & 623 new #2-3 ranked terms YoY, increasing Organic traffic to the website via these high positions that traditionally garner much greater percentages of clicks.

Improved -0.82 avg. positions for mobile & -1.52 for desktop YoY, with the overall website benefitting from the holistic strategy (9.14 average mobile ranking and 14.87 average desktop ranking).

Background: The business is a widely known, highly adopted marketplace used by ~80% of users in the targeted demographic in the United States annually. After Google announced a forthcoming major algorithm update (approximately six months in the future), I immediately understood the imperative to address Google’s requirements across the organization in order to at least preserve current Organic Search traffic, if not to also gain on competitors that might not be serious or proactive about what promised to be potentially disruptive algorithm rollout.

SEO strategy: I first socialized the Google announcement and our current performance limitations among the C Suite, primarily getting sign-off from the chief technology officer and executive vice president of product. Once approved, my initiative became a high business priority. I analyzed the website, assessed recommended KPI targets, and discussed proposed tech stack fixes and optimizations with leads in Engineering, Product, UX, and Marketing. Over several months, we made iterative progress in scheduled site deployments until successfully reaching target KPIs right before Google’s scheduled algo rollout.

Unprecedented organization-wide collaboration that demonstrated ownership of performance improvement across teams and involved some very creative problem-solving in order to meet our shared website KPIs.

Organic sessions grew 24% YoY immediately following the completion of Google’s algorithm launch, which was especially impressive given our primary goal of simply breaking even and not losing Organic sessions.

The SEO strategy unexpectedly became a collaboration model that I was able to return to and evolve numerous times in the future for other brands as Google preannounced other planned high-impact algorithm updates.

Background: The website of this landmark American brand was saddled with an old, convoluted tech stack, gaps in retained Engineering knowledge, and a bureaucratic, cumbersome approach to website decision-making. As a result, its ongoing website redesign ranged from being stalled to being slowed down to being setback multiple times. It was 1.5 years behind schedule. The business benefitted greatly from lofty brand awareness, which contributed a great deal to online viability in spite of its technological disadvantages, which included numerous missed best practices regarding SEO.

SEO strategy: I was responsible for setting search engine optimization requirements for the website redesign (as well as to work SEO needs for the live website). Some highlights of changes I specified in order to bring the content, e-commerce, brands, magazine, and teacher sections of the redesigned website inline with current SEO best practices included changing nonsensical URL syntax to a keyword-centric structure, updating site-filter parameterization selections to load related page content upon application, setting the 301-redirect strategy for old URLs, and much more. The end result was a vastly improved, modern website that launched successfully and to great fanfare.

Smooth sailing site launch, with follow-on updates planned to quickly address issues arising in production for a migration of this size and complexity, and given the institutional-knowledge gaps that we knew could be a factor.

Organic sessions grew 18% YoY, along with engagement given the new website’s emphasis on keyword usage in headings and SEO components, which increased time-on-page and decreased bounce rate by -15% YoY.

A new 301-redirect logic for the redesigned site that took it from a manual, resource-intensive method to a programmatic approach that was a lighter lift for Engineering and minimized redirect loops.