Chameleon-Decorators Case Study

    How to increase organic traffic by 34% in 7 steps

    Case study of the British website Chameleon windows restoration and decoration.

    Who will benefit from this case study:  business owners and service marketers for local businesses in the UK.

    About the client's business: restoration of wooden windows in the UK.
    Before the work started: complicated, unfinished structure, unstable link profile growth, significant ups and downs.

    SEO promotion goals:

    • increase organic traffic to the website.

    • increase ranking in Google search results.

    For those who are too lazy to read.

    Before SEO: a 50-page website of window services in the UK

    This is what we did for Chameleon windows restoration and decoration:

    1) collected full keyword data, and analyzed competitors;

    2) added new landing pages for services in specific regions and optimized them with keywords and internal links;

    3) found bugs in the code as well as technical problems, and wrote technical tasks for resolving them. We have been controlling technical issues of the site every month.

    4) Developed a link-building strategy (guest post links, blogging, crowd marketing) and increased the number of backlinks gained every month.

    After SEO: There was an increase in organic traffic by 34%  The average position in the Google UK search results doubled (from 28 to 14). Please read the step-by-step description of the promotion and useful notes for business below.

    What we are doing and why we are doing it

    1. We are trying to understand the specifics

    We immerse ourselves into the business niche to build the right promotion strategy. This step is simple but necessary. If the SEO specialist does not understand what exactly the client is doing, then the promotion is doomed to fail. To understand the customer's business, we at Idea Digital Agency can apply an integrated approach:

    • we ask our clients to fill out an SEO brief, a short form with questions about their business. We ask about their goals and who is working on their site, who their competitors are, and what experience they have when it comes to  SEO promotion;

    • we study the clients’ website by reading the information about their company, reading reviews, and, if possible, trying the customers’ products or services;

    • we have regular calls and constant correspondence with the client to clarify questions about their products or services.

    This helps us understand the client's business "from the inside." An SEO specialist becomes a good employee of the customer's company if he understands how the business works and what problems it may face.

    Dmytro , the Marketing manager of the client's company, willingly told us about his business. The company has been in the business of restoring wooden windows in England for many years. They restore broken windows by glazing and painting them. Please see the photos below to see how Chameleon windows restoration and decoration  restored a damaged window back to its former glory.

    Chameleon windows restoration

    The British have always been trying to maintain their windows to preserve their beauty and that’s why restoration services are popular in the UK. SEO specialists had to do some research on the local geography to understand the different architectural styles of many regions of the UK. We have also studied the classification of wooden windows in order to do the keyword research correctly.

    2. Approving target keywords and phrases

    We have done complex keyword research for the website in order to understand what keywords users type into Google to search for a service, how often they search, and in what city or region they search. The search queries help us understand which regions are the best places to promote our services, how to develop the structure of the site, and where to concentrate the link-building efforts.

    After collecting enough keywords, we separate the commercial phrases from the informational ones. The commercial ones will be used in the content and promoted on the main category pages. The informational ones will be used for content marketing in blogs.

    Useful note: it would be better to promote website pages not only with high-volume keywords (more than 100 searches per month) but for low-volume ones as well. The less searched the query is, the more likely it will be the one that the visitor is really looking for.

    3. Analyzing competitors

    We explore similar sites from the TOP of Google to understand who our competitors are. This process allows us to find out the strengths and weaknesses of similar companies and to understand the way how our competitors build content and link strategies.

    Helpful note: Did you know that search results can vary from region to region? The same keyword can give different results in Ukraine and, say, London. To correctly identify your competitors, you need to set up a search by priority country. You can do this by configuring your Google settings or using online programs such as BrightLocal.

    The window restoration service niche is highly competitive in the UK. The TOP sites have a "strong" backlink profile and content. It has become clear that it is not so easy to get into the TOP (first positions on priority keywords). It has become necessary to understand what opportunities competitors are missing and to adopt successful strategies.

    4. Developing a promotion strategy

    We have agreed on a promotion strategy. The main thing was to create local landing pages for each region and city in which clients can serve their customers. The more quality pages on the website for each region, the more keywords you can promote and the more "trustworthy" the website becomes for Google.

    Helpful note: Google's guide mentions that it's not the number of pages on a site that matters, but it's the quality of the site that matters. If you have a lot of "junk" pages on the site (thin content, non-optimized metadata, no internal links, etc.), then the search bot will end up reducing the "credibility" of your site. In addition, pages such as those will not be useful for your audience as well.

    5. Analyzing and fixing technical bugs

    We have done a technical audit of the site to find errors. We found "orphaned" pages on the site map, "broken" links, heavy images, and other critical issues. Problems such as those are very common on most sites, so let's briefly describe what should be done:

    • "orphaned" pages — these are pages on the site that are not connected by internal links, but are still found in the sitemap.

      Ject Octopus Technical audit for Chameleon

      Technical audit report from JetOctopus crawler

    A page becomes "orphaned" when all internal links to these pages are removed and the bot continues to visit those pages. If you need these pages, and you think they will be useful for your visitors, then you should return them to the site structure.

    • "Broken links" are links to pages that have been accidentally or intentionally deleted. The bot and the user follow the links and see the “code 404” page (Page does not exist). Such links should be replaced with correct ones that will lead directly to the desired pages.

    • Images that are larger than 100 KB can slow down the site. Because these images are there, the page will load slower.

    Screaming Fron images over

    Image analysis in Screaming Frog crawler

    You should choose the right image format, that is, use JPG for photos and PNG for graphics and screenshots. We advise you to compress the images before uploading them to the website and also be sure to add the Alt text (description) of the file.

    6. Link-building strategy

    We have created a backlink and anchor strategy and launched a link-building campaign to increase the number of high-quality links to the website. The more high-rated and authoritative web sources link to a site, the more “trustworthy” the website becomes for Google. The following types of links were included in the strategy:

    • links from topical articles;

    • Crowd-marketing comments (references to the site on question-and-answer websites, social network platforms, etc.);

    • site registration in local business directories;

    Useful note: When you post articles with links to other resources, you should think about the anchor  (clickable link text) that will lead to your site. There are three different types of anchors and they are as follows:

    - branded anchors with the name of the site (for example, Idea Digital Agency),

    - anchors with keywords from the search query research (for example, SEO website promotion in Canada) 

    - anchorless links, such as https://ideadigitalagency.net/cases/seo-testelium/. Different types of anchors should be used. You shouldn’t place only one type of anchor on websites since this will look suspicious for a search engine.

    7. Analyzing the results

    We have collected analytics to check the results of our efforts. The following are the results:

    After working on the site for three months, the number of users from the organic search has increased by 252%.

    Here are the dynamics of rankings for requests from the search query research: at the start of SEO works, the site appeared in the TOP-3 positions for 20 keywords; by October, the site appeared in the same position for 60 keywords. The average position has jumped from 28th place to 14th place.

    Top visor rankings

    Useful note: the graph shows that 159 keywords have increased in position, but we also see that 19 have dropped. There may be several reasons for this: bugs in the pages’ code, competitors have released better content for the same keywords, search engine updates, and more. It is impossible to ignore “signals” such as those even when everything is fine with most keywords. It is necessary to identify the possible issues of the drawdown and fix bugs/add content/find out what has changed in Google's algorithms to optimize pages, and so on.

    In three months, the number of technical errors on the site has decreased from 71% of critical bugs to 12%.

    crawl list

    The dynamics of referring pages: since August, the number of linking pages has grown by 26 quality websites.

    dynamic website

    What's next?

    So, organic traffic can be increased in 7 steps:

    1. Understand the specifics of the business by studying the peculiarities of the niche;

    2. Collect and cluster all keywords;

    3. Study the strengths and weaknesses of competitors by adopting successful SEO solutions;

    4. Develop a promotion strategy and prioritize tasks;

    5. Find technical errors on the site and fix them;

    6. Create a backlink strategy and launch link building;

    7. Analyze the results of SEO tasks.

    In SEO, the best thing to do is not to stop even when the traffic and rankings are growing. Competitors and search engine algorithms are always evolving, which means that your online business should keep up with them. It is necessary to constantly conduct SEO experiments and analyze the results by looking for new ways to promote them.

    We have many plans with Chameleon windows restoration and decoration: including the development of individual domains by region, link building, blog optimization, and brand promotion.

    How things have gone since the last six months up to now (January 2022)

    Traffic growth has increased more than 7 times

    Last year (from January 1 to December 31, 2021), we increased organic traffic from 88 to 656 (at the peak) users per month:

    organic traffic

    To attract traffic to the site, we optimized and updated commercial pages and made sure that the site blog is regularly updated with useful and informative articles. Blog articles bring the most amount of traffic to the website because commercial keywords have low volume for the most part. Therefore, we linked all the informational materials with commercial pages.

    The growth of referring domains has increased by 4 times

    Last year, we continued to increase the number of linking domains from 69 domains and 531 links in January 2021 up to 273 domains and 1244 links in December 2021.

    number of linking domainsThe growth of referring domains

    What links do we choose?

    We continue to build quality backlink profiles. To do this, we select relevant sites with a high degree of trust. Website topics include design, renovation, and architecture. All of these sites are strictly regional and refer only to the UK.

    What else do we do for external optimization?

    We always pay special attention to recommendations of our site on other resources: reviews, questionnaires, forums, business directories, and other websites where there is information about us. We regularly work with responses to reviews, both negative and positive. We carefully monitor any kind of information and where it appears about us.

    We monitor links that have disappeared for different reasons and we try to return or replace them. We also monitor links that appear without our knowledge in order to reject malicious links in a timely manner.

    Google My Business Optimization

    Since our business is local, it is very important to create, organize, and maintain a Google My Business account.

    There should always be up-to-date information and news about the company.

    information and news about the company.

    We try to make all the reviews in the account to be as relevant and natural as possible.
    Competitor analysis and strategy update

    From time to time, we re-analyze the niche to understand which players have appeared on the market, how they develop, and how they win. 

    We do this to apply their results to our project and update the promotion strategy. How do our competitors develop their sites? How do they build internal and external optimization strategies? What pages are created and how they are designed? Which donors are chosen for their link profiles?

    Analyzing competitors to find growth points

    We regularly monitor our competitors to find what would be useful to our users as well. So we created a Paint Calculator that helps users calculate the amount of paint needed for repairs or search the site:

    monitor our competitors to find what would be useful

    The technical "health" of the site on a monthly basis

    One of the reasons why the project is growing so well is because the technical “health” of the site is regularly monitored. Every month, we analyze the site for technical errors that may arise due to ongoing improvement by adding pages, updating the CMS, etc.

    If you are ready to boost your organic traffic, get more leads and enhance your brand awareness, you are at the right place. Fill out the form below and we will be in touch shortly with an offer!

    Brief for the project

    What are you looking for?
    Contact information
    Tell us about your project