Growing Organic Traffic by Over 100 Times for Layboard

Do you know how difficult it is to compete in a market with players that seem to have been around since the age of dinosaurs? Well, here’s the answer – it’s almost impossible unless you invest in marketing. But what if you have ambitions but can’t freely operate a budget? That’s right, the key is to approach the issue smartly and build a step-by-step, effective promotion strategy.

This is exactly what the Luxeo team did, together with the administration of the Layboard portal. Curious how we managed to bring the HR platform to the top of the search rankings? Just check out the following sections of this project case.

A Brief About the Client

Layboard is a job search portal in Ukraine and beyond. The platform offers thousands of various job vacancies. It helps employers find workers, while showing job seekers the best offers that match their qualifications and skill levels.

In this niche, competition is quite high, so the company needed help promoting the resource online. In the end, the client achieved the desired results.

Key Results

Since the project was broken down into several stages, the results scaled over time. Here are some key metrics you need to know right away:

In just the first year of collaboration, we achieved:

– Traffic growth from 3k to 56k. – Increased number of registered users. – Activation of service sales (job placements via the website).

After 4 years of work, the metrics significantly improved:

– The site’s audience grew by almost 14,000%. – The bounce rate decreased by more than 25%. – Sales and user activity time improved significantly.

How Was This Achieved?

1. A comprehensive audit of all website elements. 2. A high-quality promotion strategy. 3. A personalized approach to the marketing campaign.

Oh, it’s worth mentioning that we started with a limited marketing budget at the beginning of the project, so the first results were achieved with minimal investments.

Problem Statement

Look, Layboard is a recruitment site targeting job seekers and employers in Ukraine and beyond. Accordingly, the competition in the local market (and not just there) is very high. For example, platforms like Work, Robota (Rabota), Jooble, and Eurabota, even as of 2019, were key players in the segment with established marketing campaigns and leadership positions. In fact, they were virtually the only options.

Fairness demands mentioning that Layboard had already made attempts to promote itself online with another advertising agency, but these efforts were in vain. This was mainly due to a very limited budget. This, in essence, is the backstory to the beginning of the long and fruitful collaboration between Luxeo and Layboard.

And these were just the tasks at the start of the collaboration. Once the first results were achieved, the platform’s monetization significantly improved, and an additional budget was formed, which was reinvested into promotion. Step by step, over the next four years, this process led to the current results and metrics that Layboard enjoys today.

Solution

As you can already understand, the work plan was designed to be large-scale. Therefore, we conditionally divided the roadmap into several parts, including:

• Technical, for issues that required partial refinement by developers.
• Marketing, where the main focus was on the content component of the campaign.
• Analytical, which covered all aspects and helped control the effectiveness of the promotion.

Since we had a limited budget, the work plan was divided into smaller parts and implemented gradually. Initially, we focused on small elements that would bring income in the short term, then gradually scaled up, covering more components of the campaign.

By the way, this approach had additional advantages, such as:

• Reduced costs in the short term.
• Focus on truly critical issues.
• The opportunity to run several tests and identify effective models.

But that’s the theory. Moving from small to large, we were able to gradually promote the Layboard site and provide it with stable traffic and good conversion rates. How exactly did we do this? Through the following actions and stages.

Full Resource Analysis

To solve the problem, we first needed to identify it, localize it, and establish cause-and-effect relationships. Armed with tools like Google Search Console, SERPStat, and some others, we began a deep audit. We didn’t overlook the technical aspects, uncovering several nuances in the site’s page structure, resource map, and parameters that were factors limiting content indexing and platform promotion.

We also analyzed the actions of the previous team, who, for the most part, made correct decisions but, given the limited budget, tried to cover everything at once. We, however, chose a different path and divided the campaign into small but effective parts.

This is what the traffic dynamics looked like at the start of our collaboration. There was minimal activity, but even this had some conversion rates.

That’s why we decided to focus on trying to quickly generate leads – an initial boost with gradual stabilization and increasing traffic utility. And you know, the plan worked.

Site Optimization

The technical analysis showed that the site was quite concise. The structure was generalized, as were the pages aimed at generating a broad range of traffic without segmentation. Specifically, this is what it looked like initially:

Accordingly, the navigation element here is as simplified as possible. As a result, we end up with even non-targeted traffic that doesn’t convert.

What can be done in such a case? Right, expand the site’s structure by adding as many relevant pages and search clusters as possible. Why? To increase the “weight” of the resource, generate target pages, which will then bring in useful traffic.

A more complex structure and navigation map will also allow reaching a larger audience through personalized offers. And it will improve the site’s “readability” by search bots. How can this look? Here’s an example:

Does it look more interesting? Indeed, it also adds useful space to the site, where we can now publish relevant and optimized content. Even in the footer, it will improve indexing and the ranking of target pages by the Google search aggregator.

And no, the screenshot doesn’t show the full site map, as it continues to expand even now. Specifically, new pages are being added, focused on employment and job vacancies in certain cities (mainly those with demand and a sufficient concentration of offers). Thus, targeting GEO and medium-frequency queries allowed us to generate traffic with good conversion rates in the shortest time (around four months).

Outreach and Link Building

Of course, without external promotion, internal optimization will only work at half its potential. We started generating audience traffic by redirecting it from various thematic portals and websites. Just take a look at how the traffic dynamics changed during the promotion of the Layboard resource:

And this is just the traffic statistics from links placed on external websites, forums, and platforms. In less than a year, visits grew to over 30k. A significant result.

But that’s not all. Promotion on external resources also worked as part of the PR campaign, increasing brand recognition and reputation among the target audience. While there’s still a long way to go before reaching the market veterans, the company’s position has already strengthened significantly and continues to improve.

The main effect of the promotion came from trusted resources and traffic-driving blog articles. Fine-tuning the GEO, user profile, and their interests allowed us to target effectively, filtering out irrelevant traffic and attracting only the target audience.

SEO

As mentioned in previous sections, we paid considerable attention to the SEO of new pages. Specifically, we achieved significant results through the integration of medium-frequency search queries in the early stages of the project.

Later, when we reached a budget level that allowed us to scale the campaign, we focused on search optimization of the content. For example, we conducted an analysis of key clusters, new and promising directions, and then adjusted the promotion strategy.

Publishing relevant content with substantial semantic value and quality CTAs helped increase page visits and positively impacted the CTR.

Yes, it’s not the perfect figure yet, but it’s quite impressive for just one year of work on the project. Interestingly, the CTR turned out to be equally effective on both external and internal links.

A significant role in improving the CTR metrics was played by A/B testing of the design and snippet markup that appear in search results in response to clustered queries.

Note that we are currently talking about the structure and content of service pages specifically. Marketing materials play an important role in promotion, although they are placed in the footer of the page, where visitors typically don’t see them. However, integrating semantics into these blocks allows search bots to better understand the content and rank the section of the site more effectively. This, in turn, influences the appearance of pages in the top search results in response to certain user queries.

Content Generation and Indexing

While working on the SEO of key pages, we discovered a whole range of low-frequency queries. It wouldn’t be very smart to dismiss such an almost free way of promoting the site. Therefore, together with Layboard, we developed an algorithm for generating SEO pages in response to specific user search queries.

The unique feature of these pages is that they are automatically created and immediately filled with relevant content. They are also organically integrated into the site structure, working just like regular pages, providing quick lead generation, and ensuring stable conversion metrics. Here’s an example:

And this is just a small part that demonstrates the work of the algorithm for generating pages in response to user queries in the search engine.

Such pages make it to the top 10 search results, but only if they have properly configured internal linking, SEO elements, and content that is indexed and ranked by bots. There could theoretically be issues with the latter, but we anticipated and proactively mitigated them.

For example, each newly created page for a search query contains generated and optimized content based on templates. Accordingly, it is immediately indexed via the indexing API service. As a result, the user receives a relevant link to job listings that match their search query and context.

Blog and Forum

It would be nice if external links and optimization of service pages were enough to promote the site. However, this is a utopia far from reality. Under any circumstances, we must maximize lead generation using all possible methods. Therefore, ignoring the blog and forum is an unacceptable luxury, especially since these sections have been functioning on the Layboard platform for quite some time.

Well, the blog is easier, as it is designed to publish relevant thematic content with internal links and semantics. So, initially, we focused on updating and creating materials about job search, guides, comparisons, and reviews. These are standard components, but quite effective:

Additional traffic will be welcome, especially if it has stable and fairly high conversion rates. Yes, a few thousand more visits add confidence that we are moving in the right direction.

The forum is more challenging, as its main goal is to provide users with a space for communication regarding job openings, prospects, or resolving issues. Therefore, it is not easy to work with semantics, and link building is more difficult. Theoretically, since in practice we managed to do both:

+3.3k organic traffic from the help sections and indexed discussion pages? Easy. And these are just the initial figures. Currently, the forum is actively being filled with relevant content and native SEO elements, which ultimately increases the lead generation effectiveness of the resource.

Well, this case could have ended here if it weren’t for one small detail. The processes and actions described here were mostly carried out in the first year of collaboration. What did we do in the remaining three? We improved the results.

Strategy Update

Yes, the initial optimizations and fixes were aimed at building a foundation for the effective promotion of the resource in the future. So, after a year of work, we had the foundation we could work with and achieve greater success.

In particular, we focused on A/B testing, updating cluster semantics, and link building. Step by step, we moved towards our goal, and over time, we finally reached a competitive level that worked for the platform’s budget and guaranteed organic, i.e., effective traffic with conversion.

Result

From the first test steps to complete success in just a few years. Significant progress, considering the initial lead generation metrics of the platform.

Here are the visual metrics:

From fewer than 3 thousand site visitors to stable traffic of over 300 thousand users. An increase in the number of sessions by 19,000%.

Improvement in audience behavior metrics, with a 116% increase in the time spent on the site. 

Nearly 20x increase in the resource’s audience in less than a year of promotion with a limited budget.

100x expansion of the user base over four years of active development of the Layboard portal.

Pretty good results, don’t you think? Keep in mind — the work on the project continues, and we are currently implementing ambitious tasks. How much? You’ll find out soon.

Conclusion

What can this case teach us? For example, that we need to focus not only on acquiring traffic but also on its quality and increasing MQL/SQL metrics. This is why we believe that the key factors for the success of a promotion project are:

• Well-developed technical SEO on the site.
• On-page optimization.
• Expanding the website’s structure.
• Correct link building with a good pace of traffic generation from quality platforms.
• Constant search for new development paths and project expansion.

And the secret to success? Nothing other than the personalization of services and the expertise of the Luxeo team.

Want to achieve similar results? Find out how our team can help promote your site. Contact a Luxeo manager for a consultation!