Re-thinking User Experience
The Brief
Even on established website who have held strong rankings for many years, there is room for improvement. Websites hoping to retain strong rankings for competitive keywords must adapt alongside Google updates and new competitors entering the market (or old competitors who up their game). This was the case for Click4Reg when they experienced a steep drop following the June 2019 Google core update.
Click4Reg operates in the highly competitive private number plates niche and has ranked top across multiple keywords for many years. They have also struggled to retain rankings following a couple of the core Google updates. Previously, a steep drop following one of the core Google updates could be attributed to some shady guest blogging and pingback links which had been built by a previous agency working on the site. After submitting a disavow file and building some high-quality digital PR links, they recovered fully.
With the June 2019 update the site lost top positions across many of their target keywords. We knew that links weren’t the issue as we had already disavowed any low-quality ones pointing to the site and earned dozens of white hat links through active digital PR work. This meant the issue could be found onsite. We set about auditing the site to identify any new technical or optimisation issues.
Our Strategy
It quickly became apparent there was not just one issue holding the site back, there were several issues. We noticed that the site was not particularly user friendly and did not encourage users to spend a great deal of time engaging with it. Also, we found that thousands of pages did not effectively cater to the searcher intent behind the keywords they were targeting.
We worked with the Click4reg team to make the site more user friendly and engaging (particularly when it came to their search result pages of which there were thousands). We also addressed key E-A-T concerns to make sure all onsite elements matched the level and quality of the links being earned to the site.
The Results
We expected results to take quite some time considering the issues involved effected thousands of pages. With an effective Digital PR link earning strategy in place alongside our onsite improvements, we now just had to wait for Google to re-crawl old pages and take the updates into account.
Most of the fixes where implemented in the first half of September 2019 and within weeks the site started recovering and eventually secured top positions across many target keywords with over 100,000 searches a month each. The client has also retained top 3 positions across these keywords for the past few months.
""THIS CASE STUDY DEMONSTRATES THE GRADUAL CHANGES IN GOOGLE’S ALGORITHMS WE HAVE SEEN OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS WHICH HAVE MADE THINGS LIKE USER EXPERIENCE, SEARCHER-INTENT MATCHING AND E-A-T THAT MUCH MORE IMPORTANT.""
The results
