The biggest trend of 2013 is fresh, relevant content that is useful to the consumer as well as the search engines.
In the rest of this article, we will outline a case study which illustrates the results that can be achieved by sprucing up your content and strategy with just a few minor tweaks to stay in line with Google's algorithm.
In the past, it was an SEO professional's challenge to focus the content on a specific set of keywords. The method was to repeat those keywords throughout the text in key places to provide relevancy for the queries we were targeting.
Those days are behind us now and we get to be a little bit more natural in our content. So what happens to a slightly older site when we tweak the content to remove instances of "keyword stuffing"?
For this particular client, a few tasks were performed to align this website with the new algorithm:
- We added fresh content, relevant to the discussion on the page (1st week of October)
- We updated the keyword strategy in key locations on the page. We removed instances of "keyword stuffing" (1st week of November)
The impact below is a direct result of on-page optimization, not off-page promotion: no paid ad campaigns were running during the time periods referenced below.
1. After removing keyword stuffing, we saw an increase in visits from November to December in organic traffic only – December being a down season:
2. From October and on – we saw an increase in organic visits from the fresh content:
3. Summary of metrics coming from the site as a whole (Dec-Jan v Oct-Nov)
This is a wonderful case study that demonstrates how content optimization and moving with the trends can help your website. We must move forward in a different but exciting direction with our strategies. Less focus on keywords and more focus on fresh, relevant content that reads well will help your website to receive positive results.
Contributed by Cassie Vignieri, Sr. eStrategist/Account Manager
Milestone Internet Marketing
