Today we are bringing you a case study from Pat Ahern, a digital marketer and growth hacker from Inter-Growth marketing agency. Together with his team, Pat was able to recover an affiliate marketing website that lost 80% of its traffic because of a Google penalty and helped it grow by 124% in just 6 months.
In this article, we are sharing the tips and strategies that Pat’s team used to recover the website’s traffic and boost it further in such a short period of time.
The Problem
The team at Choose Wheels approached Pat with a problem that their site had been hit with a manual penalty from Google and their traffic was on the decline.
Choose Wheels is a website that provides comprehensive guides on personal transportation devices like electric scooters, electric bikes, and so much more. Their business model focuses on building affiliate partnerships with companies that sell these devices and collecting a commission from each sale that they help to generate.
Choose Wheels isn’t like most successful affiliate marketing websites. They don’t have a massive monthly ad spend and they don’t rely on sending people to landing pages through Facebook Ads to make money.
However, they rely on creating great content through writing informative product reviews and other useful guides. Their affiliate program focuses on partnering with online retailers like Amazon and collect affiliate commissions when they help their customers to make an informed purchase. As a result, 70% of their total site traffic comes from search engines.
The current owners of the website had purchased it from a seller and after some time, they discovered that the previous site owner was involved in a private blog network (PBN) which was uncovered by Google’s webspam team several months after the current owner took over.
In the next 2 months, Choose Wheels lost 80% of their organic traffic.
This was when Choose Wheels approached Pat to help them recover some of their lost organic traffic. Pat was and his team was able to recover this site and grow it further by implementing the following strategies.
Marketing Strategy
Pat started with a discovery process to learn about their business goals, primary competitors, and more. During the initial analysis, he identified 3 primary issues with the Choose Wheels site (in addition to the PBN penalty):
- It had a much weaker backlink profile than its 3 major competitors
- Much of the content on the site was becoming outdated
- On-page metrics like bounce rate and average session duration were underperforming.
From the looks of it, this seemed to be a tougher project. So Pat and his team came up with a content marketing strategy that consisted of the following action plan:
- Short term:
- Writing monthly blog articles that targeted long-tail search phrases to drive more qualified visitors while rebuilding the site’s authority.
- Revamping existing posts on the site with the greatest search ROI potential to maximize organic traffic and website conversions.
- Long term:
- Focus on building the site’s authority through targeted link outreach to relevant publishers in the niche.
- Writing quarterly premium blog articles that targeted high-value search phrases with a high search volume to drive significant long-term search ROI as they scaled the site’s authority.
The Implementation Process
- Preparing the SEO foundation
Pat analyzed the website’s competitive landscape to learn about the search positioning and top-performing content of the largest competitors. He then explored Reddit and Quora to see what topics the target customers were most interested in. And With this, he built the editorial calendar for the first 6 months of content.
The team optimized the 15 pages on the site with the highest potential for organic traffic improvements. They did optimizations like:
- Re-writing the title tags and meta descriptions
- Incorporating term frequency, inverse document frequency (TF-IDF)
- Enhancing the website’s speed, and so much more.
- Strategic content creation
Pat and his team then started the content creation process by targeting long-tail search terms that the Choose Wheels website would see immediate traction on.
They analyzed top-performing content for each topic to identify the key success factors for each post and then published long-form articles which were promoted across relevant social media communities.
After doing just this, the articles immediately started to outrank authoritative sites in search results for high-value search terms.
- Managing link outreach
Pat and his team launched the first link-building campaign to drive high-quality backlinks and boost the site’s authority. This consisted of reaching out to 1 000 industry-leading bloggers who had written about or linked to content that was similar to that of Choose Wheels.
They started discussions and asked 10 of those bloggers to link to various articles on the site each quarter, and dozens more to share our articles on social media.
- Revamping underperforming content
The next step that Pat and his team took was revamping underperforming content. To recover this, they had to make an analysis and fix the following underperforming metrics:
- Low Click-Through Rate
- High bounce rate
Low Click-Through Rate
To fix the issue with the low Click Through Rate, they used a CTR calculator to identify the pages on the site that were losing the most organic traffic. The team found the pages that were receiving fewer clicks than the industry average for their given position in search results.
They then re-optimized the title tags and meta descriptions for each of those pages to maximize the ROI of each of these rankings.
High Bounce Rate
The team then looked out for the pages with a high bounce rate or low average session duration. Here, they revised outdated content to improve readability and usefulness to their target audience.
The Results
Initially, the organic traffic continued taking a dip in the first 2 months as the team was building the SEO foundation and kicked off the first quarterly campaign. However, everything started coming together in the 3rd month after the implementation of the SEO foundation, publishing the optimized blog posts, revamping underperforming content, and launching the first link-building campaign.
The organic traffic climbed to 20.2% by the 3rd month and it was clear that everything was going in the right direction.
Pat and his team continued to implement their initial strategy for the next 4 months and here were the results.
- Target keyword visibility (how well Choose Wheels ranks for their top-priority keywords) increased by 459%.
- Monthly organic traffic increased up to 121%.
By the end of the 6 months, the website’s traffic had increased by 124% from an 80%.
One important thing to note is that a massive increment in organic traffic often results to lower-quality site visitors. However, this didn't happen to Choose Wheels because Pat not only fixed the organic traffic but also the bounce rates, average session durations, and conversion rates.
- Website’s on-page performance.
This way, Choose Wheels’ on-page performance saw massive improvements as the bounce rate and average session duration improved by 15% and 40%, respectively. All the goal conversions increased by 526%!
Conclusion
By implementing these strategies, the Choose Wheels affiliate website was able to recover from the ban that took its traffic down to -80%, making it grow back to an even level and growing it by 124%.
These strategies implemented by the Intergrowth team can be used to recover any content site that loses traffic, even though it's by Google penalties as Choose Wheels had.
If you are our reader and you’re facing such issues of losing website traffic, following these strategies will help you rise back and even grow furthermore if implemented for a longer period of time.
