I have been doing SEO for many years now. I got an unusual start in this business as I began as an author and I still am. But after progressing to “Freelance Writer” and then learning more about website creation, I became a self-styled SEO Expert. It’s never easy to describe the process of SEO case studies. Countless books have been written not he subject of optional SEO and there are millions of guides out there as well. This is further confuse by the fact that each project is different and requires a completely different approach.
To show you what I mean, here are a few of my most troublesome projects, along with the things that I did in order to make them work.
This was one of my trickiest projects and it serves as a great reminder to all that while some SEO can be straightforward, others can be incredibly difficult. This one combined local, regional and national SEO. It needed high turnovers and big leads, yet the market was tiny.
It began by advising on the creation of a simple FAQ. As you can see in the link, it includes questions that everyone needs the answer to at some time. This helped to take a niche site and market into the mainstream. But increasing traffic is one thing, how do you make sure that the traffic is high quality? And how do you do this for a site that should have minimal content?
For this, we created a legal blog, that discusses very specific content that would only be relevant to potential customers and we also launched an eBook to attract the general populace and to catch their eye with key legal services. From there, it was a simply a case of making sure that each blog post had relevant backlinks.
So, for the bankruptcy services, we made sure they got links on major financial sites. For the estate planning we focused on real estate websites. To cap it off we made sure that the blog was mentioned on key blogging websites such as Shout Me Loud and HowtoStartaBlog.com. After that, ParvinLaw.com became one of he biggest in its niches and that remains to be the case.
This was a very tough site to write for but one of the ones I am most proud of. The problems with this site is that it covered all kinds of subjects that were really difficult to write about (see this article to see what I mean). However, it proved a good point, which is that good SEO is as much about well written content and LSI as it is about big keywords.
For this, we ignored all major keywords. We stripped everything back and we focused entirely on research and entertainment. We paid an expert in robotics to take a look and to provide us with some key information, quotes and stats, and I then personally went over this and turned it into content that was easy to digest.
Every SEO “Expert” has that moment when they create a project and are not sure it will work and this was mine. I had no choice but to cross my fingers and hope for the best, but it worked. Before long, we were ranking at the top of Google for long-tail keywords, sometimes as long as 10 to 15 words.
The site didn’t do much with off-page SEO in the beginning, but once we began to add that and strengthen the site, it made those pages rank for the single word keywords as well.
This site was based on a simple premise and the goal was to find a way to make that premise work. This was basically backwards SEO because I began with the keyword and then worked everything around it. The fact that I was afforded the chance to do this from a clean slate helped, but it wasn’t easy.
Simply put, I discovered that the majority of searches on Google use the plural “Reviews” instead of “Review”. However, the average blogger offering their opinion is providing a “review” not “reviews”. As a result, there was, and still is, a gap in the market for anyone who can cover the plural.
The easiest way to do this is to be cheap and just use “Reviews” in place of “Review”. But it sounds wrong and Google will not look fondly on you. Instead, I made sure that the site was run by a team of reviewers and that the information used to create a review came from the users as well. As a result, these were “Reviews” and not a “Review” and Google looked far more fondly on it.
After that, it was a simple case of getting off-page SEO to sync up with the products and services we were discussing. But after going through all of that, that was the easy part!
