Recovering the Organic Traffic & Improving Conversions of a Downloadable App Through Commercial Queries

So long as there’s a good SEO content strategy, the traffic to any website can be improved.

At Embarque, a downloadable software program sought our services to help with reviving traffic for their website. After a period of high growth in 2021, the client’s traffic dwindled over time.

Working closely with the client, the team managed to recover the traffic from a mediocre 5,000 monthly organic traffic to over 20,000 in under 6 months.

In this case study, we’ll show you how we did it, by examining the following:

How we helped them build a new SEO content strategy
How we improved their content quality
And how we helped them revive their dwindling site traffic

The Problem - Free-Falling SEO Traffic

Being a software program, most customers discover the client’s website via Google and other search engines.

Around the start of 2021, the client experienced a period of very high growth. At its peak on February 27th, 2021, the client saw 41,562 organic searches per month. But over the next year, this traffic quickly declined. By February 16th, the site only received some 4,406 search clicks for the period.

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After unsuccessfully hiring various freelancers and agencies, the client decided to try out our services for our expertise and reputation in the industry. Today, they’re on a long-term contract thanks to the results we’ve provided.

Our team got to work and identified many issues with the client’s SEO strategy:

The existing content on the client’s website at the time was sub-par
The client was focusing on topics outside of their niche
Traffic wasn’t commercial
Poor internal and backlink quality
There was no internal linking structure
The last article was published all the way back in 2021 (we started work in 2022)

There were many issues that had to be addressed. It wasn’t just the quality of the content that needed improvement, the client would need help developing a totally new SEO content strategy, as well.

The Solution - Producing High-Quality SEO Content and Developing a New SEO Content Strategy

When we took over the client’s website, their SEO content strategy didn’t fit their specific needs, so we needed to draw up a detailed plan. Here are the steps we took to that end.

Target commercial topics: Most of the content on the client’s website wasn’t written for commercialization. This led to low conversion rates and a poor SEO ranking. Embarque remedied this by targeting two types of content users search for when they look for software programs similar to the client’s: Landing Pages (LPs) and product listicles.
Rework the links: The client had no internal linking structure, and the quality of all existing links — both internal and external — wasn’t sufficient. We made sure to target relevant and related topics that could be internally linked with each other
Provide niche-relevant backlinking: We helped the client expand their backlinks through guest posts, link-swapping, and niche edits from domains in video editing and downloading. This helped to give them relevance within their niche, which search engines started to recognize.
Update and republish content: Most of the content on the client’s website before hiring us was poorly written and outdated (the last blog articles were written in 2021). Our team updated the old content to improve its quality and optimized it so that it could rank better.

The Result - Recovery of 50% of Peak Traffic After Half a Year & 6x Improvement in Referring Domains

The client’s organic traffic recovered to 20,000 - 25,000 monthly searches by the end of 2022 after starting at 4,000 - 5,000.

By implementing numerous backlinking strategies and creating link-bait pages (pages that are likely to be linked by other websites and companies), we also increased the client’s referring domains by six times, from just 367 on February 27th, 2021 to 1,789 on January 2nd, 2023.

Our new direction for the client’s content also worked out well. Every article has been reworked to a higher quality standard. They’re also optimized using relevant secondary keywords to rank and convert better.

All pages we’ve updated and written currently enjoy a steady stream of organic traffic. New content also benefited from this momentum by ranking in less than a day.

Takeaways

Understanding the right keywords to target leads to a successful strategy. One of the major reasons why the traffic to this client’s page stalled was that their content didn’t target the correct keywords. Not only did it hurt their SEO ranking, but it also affected their conversion rate. The dramatic revival of traffic after the right keywords were used speaks volumes.
Build topical authority for long-term fast growth. By picking the wrong keywords, the client’s content was indexed by Google in the wrong topics. As a result, the pages’ rankings were pushed down by Google because they didn’t have high topical relevance or authority. This led to a slowdown in traffic growth and, eventually, a total drop in traffic. This is why writing relevant, high-quality content is so important for long-term growth. Today, most of the client’s pages rank within a week of publishing.
You need high-quality content and backlinks to rank. Embarque revisited old, low-quality content on the client’s website and gave them a top-to-bottom update. We also pay extra attention to external links to give the site an extra boost. The pages (and the client’s traffic) ranked much better afterward.

Rewrite & Scale Your SEO Strategy with Embarque

This isn’t the only client that Embarque has helped over the years. We have also aided many other clients with solving their SEO problems, and 100% have come out on the other end satisfied and with positive results.

If you also seek to improve your organic traffic and boost your revenue, Embarque can help you, too.

Interested in hearing how we can help? Email our founder today (julian@embarque.io), and our team will come together and work out a content marketing strategy tailored just for you!

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