Organic Traffic Grew 7 Times. The Number of Keywords in the Top 10 Increased From 1 to 92. Case Study of SEO Promotion of an IT Service Website

Who is our client?

IT Outposts is a company that provides DevOps and Cloud services for businesses of all sizes. Our experienced team specializes in the following:

IT Outposts offers its clients a full DevOps cycle from thorough audits and analysis to organizing workflows, updating documentation, and providing ongoing technical support.

Client Objectives:

Project Team

To execute this project, we have assembled a team within our company, which includes:

The project manager takes charge of the primary communication with the client. They ensure tasks are properly defined, monitor their execution, and facilitate productive communication among developers, SEO specialists, and the client.

Achieved Results

1. During our collaboration, the organic traffic increased by over 7 times, from 247 to 1,819 monthly visitors. The graph below illustrates the traffic growth.
2. Additionally, we have successfully ranked 8 key queries in the TOP-1 position within the same period, compared to none previously. We have also placed an additional 48 queries at the TOP-5 and added 92 more in the TOP-10.
3. The number of qualified leads from organic traffic and conversions into service purchases has grown in proportion to the increase in traffic.

How We Built the Website Promotion Process

After conducting an initial analysis of the industry, our client’s website and the main competitors, as well as search results and keywords, we proposed a two-phase approach to the client. The first phase involved analyzing and correcting existing errors in the technical and content components of the website. The second phase focused on creating new substantial content and promoting it across the search network.

Phase 1 of SEO

In the first phase, we conducted a technical audit of the website, created the semantics, developed a technical optimization plan for the website’s pages, and analyzed the link profiles of the main competitors.

During this phase, we identified critical errors in the website’s technical aspects and worked with the client’s team to fix them. The correction of these errors led to improvements in search engine rankings. The compiled semantics helped us develop the website’s structure and calculate the costs associated with search engine promotion, which is essential for achieving top positions in Google search.

Technical Optimization of a Website

The analysis of the problems in the structure and display of the site’s pages revealed the following main issues, as shown in the table below:

Problem	Solution
Duplicate Pages with and without a slash “/” at the end of the URL	Setting up 301 redirects from pages without a slash “/” to the website’s main pages. Updating all internal redirects to point to pages with a slash “/” at the end of the URL.
Duplicate Pages with two or more slashes “//” at the end of the URL	Setting up 301 redirects from pages with double “//” to the website’s main pages.
Duplicate Pages with mixed case characters in the URL	Setting up 301 redirects from pages with mixed case characters in the UR to the website’s main pages with lowercase letters.
Pages with 3xx status codes	Removing all internal links with 3xx status codes or replacing them with links that have a 200 status code.
Pages with 4xx status codes	Removing all internal links with 4xx status codes or replacing them with links that have a 200 status code.
Outbound external links from website pages to other resources	Remove or close all external links on the site pages with the “no-follow” tag so they do not reduce the “weight” of the site pages.

Addressing all the issues we identified helped the website improve its search engine rankings even before acquiring links and adding new content.

Page Loading Speed

The analysis revealed existing issues with the loading speed of individual pages on the mobile version of the website.

It was necessary to implement all the recommended optimizations and improve the loading speed to the green zone. After completing all the essential work, the speed was significantly improved.

Working With the Semantics 

When preparing the semantics, we suggested additional types of pages that could be used to expand the website’s structure and enhance the menu:

• Industry pages (Enterprise DevOps Services, Blockchain DevOps Services, DevOps Banking Services, and others)
• Consultancy service pages (Cloud Computing, AWS Consulting, GCP Consulting, …)
• Pages targeting specific geolocations (Cloud Services in Chicago, Cloud Services in San Francisco, Cloud Services in Detroit, and others)

This was the website structure before optimization:

And this is how the website structure looked after the work was done:

After preparing the semantics, we developed a plan for promotion by scoring and prioritizing the obtained data. We created a clear work plan based on client priorities, competitiveness, and traffic potential.

As a result, a comprehensive structure was created, comprising over 100 commercial pages.

Analysis of Competitor’s Backlink Profile

We gathered the main keywords and divided them into clusters. Then, for each cluster, we conducted a cluster analysis of backlinks based on the established priorities, forming our promotion strategy’s basis.

Optimizing Website Content

A technical task for OnPage optimization was prepared following the previously identified priorities. When formulating the task, we also considered the top search results and analyzed the presence of keywords and LSI.

Phase 2 of SEO

For this phase, we developed a specific plan for SEO, which involved an overall strategy and steps to improve the website’s position in search results. This allowed us to organize and structure a transparent promotion and content optimization process for the website and its visibility in search engine rankings.

The main steps of the plan were as follows:

• Developing an anchor plan for the main website pages and preparing tasks for writing texts for link building, ordering them, and ensuring their quality.
• Searching and analyzing resources for placing articles with links to the client’s website.
• Analyzing and writing technical recommendations for optimizing commercial pages and blog articles.
• Selecting article topics for blog writing and choosing relevant keywords for these topics.
• Monitoring the website’s performance and positions in search engine results, and if necessary, creating terms of reference (referred to as a “ToR”) to address any issues.

Development of an Anchor Plan and Link Placement

Once the anchor plan is formulated and approved by the client and the copywriters start creating the texts, we carefully select web resources based on their thematic relevance, industry alignment, and website performance indicators. We negotiate with these resources to place content containing links to the client’s website.

Here’s an example of an anchor plan:

Furthermore, our services include tracking each placed link, as there are instances where web admins remove links without prior coordination. For this purpose, we utilize a specialized tool for monitoring backlinks to the website.

If a link from one of the websites has disappeared, we promptly request a refund and offer the client an equivalent replacement.

Working With Articles and Blog

We advised the client to pay special attention to their blog. We created ToR to optimize the existing blog structure and individual articles. We agreed upon the structure and devised a plan for future blog growth. Additionally, we developed a ToR for new articles.

Here’s an example of ToR for a blog article:

SEO Results

Thanks to the collaborative efforts of our team and the client’s team, we were able to achieve the following results:

1. The organic traffic increased by over 7 times, from 247 to 1,819 visitors per month.

2. The number of qualified leads from organic traffic and conversions into service purchases grew proportionally with the traffic.

3.You can see the progress in keyword rankings below:

	Start of the project (number of keywords)	After 9 months of work (number of keywords)
Top 1 search ranking	0	8
Top 5 search ranking	1	48
Top 10 search ranking	1	92

You can view the increased search rankings over time in the screenshot provided.

Conclusion

Our company’s focus on working with industries such as IT products and services, our narrow specialization, and our result-oriented approach allows us to achieve significant results within limited time frames. The key to our success is also the close collaboration between our experts and the client’s team, as was the case with IT Outposts. This enabled us to increase organic traffic to the website by 7 times and secure top positions in search rankings.