SEO Case Study
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009We bring you our first case study of 2009, we uncover the processes needed to increase Organic traffic and conversion rates, which increase a website’s return on investment (ROI).Website: www.christiandating.co.za. The search engine optimisation and conversion marketing campaign ran for 6 months. When we first began the Pay per Click (PPC) campaign, it had a low Return On investment (ROI).
l 66% of the traffic with a bounce rate of 54%.
l Direct traffic was 21%.
l Organic traffic (achieving incoming links naturally) was only 7%.
The goal was to decrease Pay per Click (lower costs) and increase organic traffic, subsequently increasing the Return on Investment on the marketing budget.
How did we do this? We focused on on-site optimisation and user experience.
On-site optimisation was all about:
l Choosing the correct keywords in the title tag,
l meta description and,
l alt tags
They were inserted into the correct positions so as to get the correct keyword density, focusing on the highly competitive keywords but also not forgetting about the less competitive, long tail keywords.
We changed the domain name from www.bornagaindating.co.za to www.christiandating.co.za to target the appropriate keywords. To pass on the link juice a 301 redirect was used for bornagaindating.co.za, which gave a slight boost in page strength to christiandating.co.za. The 301 redirect forwarded both traffic and search bots to christiandating.co.za.
The original design template was blue colour-based. However, we made a bold move to a red template. For an online dating website to become successful it needs to be filled with love so naturally we chose to use red, the colour of love. The new warmer, less busy, slick lined template encouraged visitors to come back.
l The percentage of new visitors to the site dropped from 65% to 26%.
This may be recognised as a poor ratio but in a niche market it showed that people now wanted to come back for a revisit.
l Returning visitors grew from 35% to 74%.
l The average time spent on website went from 6.5min to 10.1min.
l The average amount of pages per visit went from 8.3 pages per visit to 13.2 pages per visit.
l Organic traffic increased from 7% to 46%.
l Pay per Click traffic decreased from 66% to 2%.
l Direct traffic increased from 21% to 45%, which showed that people were remembering the URL and revisiting the website.
l Overall bounce rate decreased from 42% to 11%.
l Overall traffic decreased by 31%
With the bounce rate decreasing from 42% to 11% the traffic level was maintained, even though overall traffic decreased by 31%. So, why are we happy with this decrease? Despite the fact that there was a decrease in traffic, the quality of visitors increased. This can be seen with the overall page views, which increased by 9% despite the decrease in traffic.
In maintaining the traffic levels and decreasing the percentage of new visitors, as well as flipping the percentages around for Organic vs Pay per Click traffic, we have succeeded in increasing the Return on Investment for Christiandating’s online marketing campaign. We have achieved a #1 in Google for “christian dating” searches.
We did this all without having a link building campaign but by relying instead on people wanting to link to you, this is Organic Linking. In SEO there is much talk about having a link building campaign but if you focus more on on-site optimisation and user experience, Google will still reward you.
If you have any questions regarding how you can increase your website traffic and conversions please contact IDS.
- Post brought to you in association with WebGrowth.