SEO Case Study: How we brought 14 million organic visits in 2 years – starting from virtually scratch
In this case study, you will learn how we took a website similar to an ecommerce store and grew it to the top 32k of all websites in the world and the top 20k websites in the US according alexa.com – in only 2 years and starting virtually from scratch.

If you want to see how I log into Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, there’s a video at the end of the case study where I where you can see “live” the changes month after month – and other things like live visitors on the site.
This is how it all started
In June 2014, we were approached by a business owner wanting to take his business to the next level.
This caught our attention.
Why was it a challenge?
On one side, their competitors were well established businesses – 10 to 20 years of online presence. On the other side, because of the nature of their business, we were unable to create a blog, long form content, backlinks, or do content promotion – the foundation most ecommerce stores can use to grow (other than CRO, remarketing, and all that good stuff). What did we do? We said: “this seems pretty interesting, let’s have a look.”
There is one simple way to discover if the goals you have for your business are attainable:
If your competition is where you want to be, then it’s clearly attainable.
Do you want to grow your company from $10 million to $20 million?
If you’re the leader in your industry, all your competitors are doing $6 million and there’s no one in your industry making more than $8 million but you, we don’t have a validation.
Does that mean that we couldn’t grow it to $20 million?
NO.
But we don’t have the validation of a competitor doing what you want to do, therefore we cannot reverse engineer what they’ve done.
In this cases we look at other verticals… but that’ll be another article.
Studying the competition is our first step in every single project we take when doing
This was in alignment with the businesses we usually work with – medium and high competition – unless there’s a business that is in an untapped low competition market.
After what we discovered about the competition, it was time for THE question:
We engaged in creating a roadmap to lay out what would be the best options for the client.
This process usually takes between one and three weeks depending on the scope of the project.
It includes a discovery session, assesing priorities, planing and delivering the roadmap.
At the end of this process the client had a clear plan of action to use. They decided to move forward with the execution.
Then the roadmapping took place:

- $36 Million for Search.
- $16 Million for Internal Display.
- $8 Million for Online Video.
3- Digging Deeper into the Competition
Now that we were all on board and feeling the excitement that a new project brings, we went into deep research mode.
Some of the tools we used for this project were:
- Ahrefs
- Semrush
- Majestic
- Open Site Explorer (Moz)
- Link Research Tools
- Spyfu
- Similarweb
- Buzzsumo
- Screaming Frog
- Knowledge – not a “tool” “per se” but the most important part of the research.
We took the top 5 competitors we had previously analyzed on the surface and looked at what they were doing from an SEO and CRO perspective.
Some of the elements we analyzed were:
The look and feel of the website – design, mobile version vs. desktop version, copy, language, user experience, colors, buttons, trust-building elements, popups, engagement, blog, social sharing…
Structure of the website – categorization, silos, sections, breadcrumbs, internal linking, page size (word count), H tags and descriptions, website speed…
Monetization and shopping experience – mobile experience, price tags, calls to action, coupons, discounts, offers, checkout flow, shipping & handling, refund policies…
Audience – age, sex, marital status, education, income, hobbies.
Marketing – SEO, CRO, paid advertising, remarketing… (we already knew this was a purely organic search project).
After we wrote down what they were doing right and what could be improved, we outlined a specific plan that was created with the intention of helping our client “be the best.”
4- These are some specifics:
Increase the word count per page. The competition didn’t have much content on their “product pages.” Their low description word count could be improved to give more value to search engines and visitors.
Improve the internal linking structure. We built a framework to add link silo structures pointing only to pages within the same categories. A silo structure is basically links inside the website that point to specific areas of the website creating a framework.
Optimize Titles and H tags properly. Their competitors didn’t have all H tags on point. Some didn’t have H2 tags and some didn’t have them properly optimized.
Add a breadcrumb navigation to each page. Competitors had some but not all of them.
Optimize images. Competitors weren’t really taking advantage of this. Optimizing images can send additional traffic from the image section on Search Engines.
It doesn’t sound too complicated, right?
First Phase

It was time to put all the pieces together and execute.
The system that we designed would pull information from a database to automatically create pages that would include all the improvements previously mentioned. If you would like to learn more about the nitty gritty, keep reading. Otherwise, click here to continue without the specifics. * The right titles that were optimized and written with the correct keywords. They also utilized psychological triggers to “help” people searching online to click on the client’s website instead of the competition – compelling titles with the right keywords on them. * The right H tags with optimized keywords, synonyms, LSI terms (Latent Semantic Indexing), and variants that would cover a wide number of keywords within the group of keywords we wanted to rank for. * The right amount of content with optimized keywords, synonyms, and LSI terms. The pages would have at least 20% more content than the competitors with a higher word count across the board. * Optimized images that would contain keyword rich file names, metadata, and relevant alt tags that would add even more keywords relevant to what they represented. * The right internal linking structure so page links would point to the other generated pages within the same category. These links had exact match anchor text, synonyms, and LSI variations. Basically, links that contain words related to what we wanted to rank for. * Add Breadcrumbs: They add an extra layer of internal linking, help with indexation (we had a lot of pages to build), and create a better user experience. We also did some other things like adding multiple sitemaps.xml (50K pages per sitemap max) for pages and images, setting up everything in webmaster tools, fletching and crawling the website, etc.First Results
About 6 months after the first phase was implemented, the site started to take off.

Second Phase
Even though the traffic had plateaued, we knew we had created something very valuable: a proven framework that brought us excellent results. After hitting a plateau, it was the perfect time to push our framework to the next level: creating a new big segment of pages and categories. If we were right, this would be another growth stage. If we were wrong, this had the potential to turn into a big spoof. So, what happened? We deployed the second phase and we got yet another home run. We were back in growth mode. With up to 808,043 visits per month, we felt invincible.

Third Phase – Epic Fail?
In the third phase, we did something slightly different. We decided to translate the website into two additional languages in order to grow it three-fold. This was going to be the epitome of the project. We were expecting to create something impressive. However, not everything went as expected. Check the image below to see why:
