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Case study: Escape games in Ostrava. Increasing traffic from search engines by 939% in 12 months

case-study-image

We were approached by the owner of an escape games company, who intended to locally (Ostrava and its vicinity) advertise his website EXITDOOR.cz. SEO management lasted only for three months, and with the minimum possible budget as well. Therefore we decided to concentrate on less competitive queries and a basic website improvement to get the most out of the given budget.

The initial state of the website

  • Age of the site: aprox. 6 months.
  • Organic traffic: 87 unique visitors per month.
  • Rich Snippets or anything which could encourage clicking on the given search result was missing.
  • Unsuitable headings and meta tags lacking any keywords. Usually only a page title was displayed.
  • Internal linking was missing.
  • There was only 1 entry page on the website.
  • SSL Certificate was missing.
  • The website had very few quality backlinks. Most of it was spam.
  • Texts were missing from the page.
  • There was no option to either pay by card or to buy gift vouchers anywhere on the site, which was a missed opportunity to increase profit.
  • The site was loading slowly. Saving into browser cache wasn’t set correctly.
  • Webpage pictures weren’t optimised.
  • There was no system by which to measure conversions on the page. The client had no idea, how much does 1 conversion cost him on average.
  • Redundant and technical pages were indexed.

Our work on the website

Our team made many changes to this website. We’ve identified its shortcomings which could be remedied quickly and with little effort, while yielding the biggest results after being fixed:

  • Based on the keyword analysis we’ve optimised the existing pages, while creating multiple new ones.
  • We’ve optimised webpage pictures.
  • We’ve sped up page loading and correctly set the browser caching.
  • We’ve written attractive meta tags containing the keywords and also optimised H1 headings.
  • We’ve connected the important sites via internal linking to improve their search engine position.
  • As a bonus, we’ve optimised the client’s profile on Google My Business. We’ve filled in all the information and explained to our client that it’s important to motivate customers to leave a feedback on Google Maps.
  • We’ve finished the Rich Snippets (stars and breadcrumbs), which increased the click rate in search engine results.
  • We’ve set up conversion measurement based on the required user interactions.
  • We’ve prevented redundant and technical pages form indexing.
  • We’ve set up a blog on the page and wrote articles about escape games, which were based on informative key words.

Linkbuilding

  • We’ve analysed the link profile of our client’s competition and managed to find some interesting websites suitable for placing backlinks.
  • We’ve managed to gain multiple links for our client from the same websites, which were referring to our client’s competitors.
  • We’ve made a list of local listings / websites suitable for linkbuilding.
  • We’ve outlined a plan for writing forum posts containing backlinks to diversify our client’s link profile – this also helped to serve as a direct sales promotion.
  • We’ve diluted commercial anchor links with non-commercial and non-anchor links from blogs and forums.
  • We’ve created more authority links with necessary anchors leading to important entry pages of our client’s web.
  • Non-functional links leading to the site have been repaired or redirected to other, functional pages of the site.
  • We’ve placed thematic articles containing links to our client’s web on authority websites.

With each passing month, our client’s web ranked better for more and more relevant keywords. The graphs shown below illustrate the growth of organic traffic as wells a the number of keywords which make the web visible (the data were taken from Ahrefs)

 

The result

  • By 31. 10. 2018, the organic traffic at exitdoor.cz reached 904 people during the previous month, which represents a 939% growth in 12 months.
  • The website practically ranked among the top 5 positions for all the relevant, local queries.
  • It’s necessary to point out that our SEO work lasted only for 3 months. The web reached its position owing to the considerable momentum of the resulting effects and also thanks to the fact that there’s not a very huge competition in this niche in Ostrava.

The graph below shows that more than 80% of the total web traffic comes from search results. The source of this graph is Similarweb.com.