SEO Case Studies
A collection of SEO campaign examples and case studies from my work with clients in the past 3 years. Showcasing the mistakes, problems, and solutions that contributed to the decline, success or total failure of various clients who have done SEO in house or outsourced it to a former SEO agency to grow their online presence and drive significant traffic and revenue. From large global brands to smal businesses and startups, these case studies highlight the unique strategies and techniques used to improve their search engine ranking, increase visibility, and engage their target audience. Whether you’re just starting out in SEO or looking to hire an SEO consultant to improve your current SEO efforts, get valuable insights and inspiration to help you achieve your goals. Sign up for an SEO Audit by clicking on the green button above.
Browse SEO Campaign Examples by Problem/Solution
Case Study #0: Test Theory for Recovering Sites That Tanked
Thanks to the 20+ site owners I am helping to test my recovery theories, I've updated my spreadsheet to look like this:
Sheet1: $2,000+ keywords
Sheet2: Problematic pages
Sheet3: Spam links to disavowThere are 7 ways you can fix "problematic pages" ranking for "$2,000+… pic.twitter.com/b2VMbGDAnt
— Taleb Kabbara (@TalebKabbara) June 16, 2024
Case Study 1: Writing Articles without Doing Keyword Research
Trying to optimise and rank content already published on website by clients who never performed any keyword research is different from working with clients who want you to write well-researched SEO content for them. Make sure you do not commit to ranking website pages and posts that are not written for SEO. This client was kind enough to allow me to rewrite that article to cater to the right target audience.
Case Study #2: Writing High Ranking Articles using Google Search Console
Finding new blog topics using Google Search Console has never been easier. This client ran out of blog topics to write about so he hired me to analyse their Google Search Console to find gems that are worthy of ranking. All I had to do is find high search impression queries that are not directly relevant to the main keyword of written articles and write a new blog post on that search query.
Case Study #3:Â SEO Audits and Making Small Changes to your Website
Most startup founders love to multitask and do everything with their own bare hands. Isn’t it why they are entrepreneurs? No doubt about it. This startup founder hired me to conduct a quick SEO audit to help him make small changes to help him drive more traffic to his website from organic search. Teaffic almost doubled in less than 6 months.
Case Study #4: Refreshing Old Content to Improve its Ranking
I have seen many clients writing hundreds of articles on their website, and most of these articles are either no longer indexed or no longer crawled by Google. There are many reasons for that of course, but I found that most content that get deindexed and non-crawled recently are the ones which are outdated. Few refreshes here and there, and few internal links from high ranking pages, and off it shoots off. But as you can see, it’s a long journey to be resurrected.
Case Study #5: Finding Low-Volume, Low-Competition Keywords to Rank #1
Ranking for highly competitive, high-search volume keywords is almost impossible for small businesses. It is a long shot and takes ages to try to rank for seed keywords. Also, long tail keywords are getting a lot of competition lately from smaller websites. I ended up somewhere in between. I found low volume, low competition keywords in Google Search Console, plugged them in Ahrefs to confirm the low competitiveness, then tested their intent in Google search, and boom, found the sweet spot.
Case Study #6: Drop in Traffic and other Search Engines Positioning
I’ve seen some clients surviving Google search algorithms updates without any significant changes. That’s basically because I do not work with clients who have engaged in acts that try to fool Google. However, I’ve noticed some clients’ pages drop in traffic, impressions, number of keywords, and rankings without them engaging in any breaches or violations. The reasons are so many and this is one of them: Keyword Cannibalisation or in simpler terms, the same keyword is ranking for multiple pages on the website, which confuses search engines. I came up with this google spreadsheet to make things simpler for clients to understand what’s causing any drop in their numbers month by month. It’s a helpful client dashboard.
Case Study #7: Pages Crawled but not Indexed, or Discovered but not Crawled
Most of my clients churn content without any prior research or audit of what content already exists on their website. They outsource the content to a content or PR agency and it publishes content regularly without any concern for similar articles or related articles there on the website. If any attention is given to this, what they do is install a widget that shows related articles on the sidebar. This doesn’t help much with indexing or crawling as these sidebar widgets are not given high priority as when you hyperlink in the content to other pages. This client clearly had an issue with internal linking, therefore the pages are not crawled as often as they should. Some get deindexed if it’s thin content or outdated.
Case Study #8: SEO Audit for Agency Clients
There’s a point in time where you as an agency owner need to audit the performance of your SEO team for your clients, and for that you need a third-party SEO auditor with an objective eye to report. This is an SEO audit of a website design agency having 52 clients. They have design their websites but not offered them any SEO services. I was hired by this agency to audit their clients’ SEO and see if we can collaborate on providing SEO services to them.
Case Study #9: SERPs Analysis For Actual Search Intent for Every Keyword
Ever tried to rank for a keyword and found 10/10 listicle blog posts ranking on page 1? Frustrating, I know. Often you’ll find yourself wrongfully ranking an informational keyword for a service page and a commercial keyword for a blog post. I was surprised that some keywords are classified illogically by Google when it comes to search intent. I found keywords that are supposed to have informational search intent, but the Search Engine Results Page is showing landing pages for commercial intent. I created a google spreadsheet to plug in all your keywords and see what search intent the actual SERPs show. When clients ask me why are you creating a blog post and not a product page, this sheet comes in handy to provide logic behind my decision.
Case Study #10: SEO Planning 15 months Ahead Prior to Big Events
Planning for the World Cup in Qatar started perhaps 8 or 12 years ago. In SEO, we usually plan between 1-2 years prior to a huge event like World Cup. We planned approximately 15 months ahead (August 2021) for this global brand to be ranking high enough to get as much organic search clicks from worldwide visitors to watch the World Cup in Qatar in November and December 2022. This client managed to get 6 times more organic traffic and 48 times more revenue from organic search alone. I was very proud of these results and proud that this is my second World Cup project after I worked for a global social media campaign for McDonald’s as the official sponsor of the World Cup 2014 in Brazil.
Case Study #11: SEO Pays Off with Hard Work, Patience and Not Giving Up
I worked hard for this global brand client to scale their e-commerce SEO especially for their Arabic websites in the GCC region. The websites were poorly translated so I took it a challenge to fix the keywords at least and pick the right local dialect search keywords for each market in the GCC region. After 15 months of not giving up, SEO took off and organic traffic shot up. In just 30 days, the keywords tripled in number. I call this the SEO bamboo effect (minus 4.5 years).
Case Study #12: SEO or Google Ads? You Judge…
Instead of telling you it depends, here are actual performances from my clients who I do both Google Ads and SEO work for. I show you in this charts below how enquiries from organic search are important for B2B on one hand, and how ecommerce orders from organic search are also huge for B2C. But all in all, I would say both work hand in hand together.
Case Study #13: The Power of Local SEO
This is not a case study per se, but I want to include it here to show how powerful Local SEO is. I reviewed this restaurant back in Oct 2022 (inlcuded a photo) and it has been viewed more than 10,000 times already (last time I checked on 14th Feb). The reason I am writing about this here is to show you if you have a brick and mortar shop and not working on your Google Business Profile and Google reviews, you’re missing a lot. These 10,000+ views are all organic This is the power of Local SEO.
Case Study #14: PDF vs Text Pages for SEO
My client loves to upload case studies in PDF format. I wasn’t happy with this because I can’t optimise PDF content for search engines. I managed to convince the client to convert these PDF pages into html text ones. Results are amazing. Impressions almost doubled and clicks almost tripled in less than 6 months!
Case Study #15: Finding Keywords in GSC that Could Rank Higher
Most SEOs would scour SEO tools to find those easy keywords that could rank higher. Nothing wrong with that, but if you want better results, find keywords in Google Search Console that are trying to rank for a page with the wrong search intent. I found a gem of a query sitting weirdly in the list of keywords ranking for this article. I managed to convince the client to write a detailed article on that query alone. In the past 6 months, impressions x 10 and clicks x 10. Talk about 10x SEO content.
Case Study #16: How Writing Guides Helps with Ranking
Found people searching for a keyword related to a governmental service. The governmental website wrote thin content about it in their website and they rank first. I asked the client to write a full guide on the topic and it took 5 months before it gained ranking and started generating traffic. In the past 6 months, it has 10x more clicks and 20x more impressions!
Case Study #17: e-commerce SEO: Sales Quadrupled in 60 days
Nothing pleases an e-commerce SEO client than making more sales from organic search. This client used to spend thousands of dollars on Google Ads. When they hired me to work on their SEO, their dependence on SEO for revenue became a priority for them. In just 60 days, their revenue quadrupled from organic search. SEO is beautiful, isn’t it?
Case Study #18: Client Gave up too Early on SEO
Most clients approach Marketing agencies and consultants too late in the game. This client wanted quick results in a short period of time. I have no problem with that if I am doing Google Ads, but SEO is a different ball game. It takes some time. We started off with a content plan of 52 blog posts to be written for the year. Client gave up on SEO at article 12 saying nothing has moved the needle yet. Six months later, SEO took off. Then client launched a new website and this project took ages. Later in January 2023, he republished the 12 articles he wrote and organic traffic started taking off again. If only they were patient enought to write 52 articles!
Case Study #19: Upselling Existing SEO Clients Using Performance Data
After 6 months of hard work, I wanted to upsell my client on doing SEO for all the markets they operate it. Created this chart below showing the revenue generated from organic traffic for markets that I do SEO for, versus traffic and revenue generated from markets that I don’t do SEO for. Client said yes!
Case Study #20: Tripled Average Monthly Organic Traffic in 14 months
Your Money Your Life (YMYL) clients are very sensitive when it comes to SEO. You can’t fool Google or try to game the system. Every piece of article written for this website was carefully handled by Subject Matter Experts. The blog topic briefs were coming from me as I was handling the keyword research for this client. This is one of the best clients I worked on because I could come up with blog topics in a matter of minutes using the data gathered in Google Search Console. Organic traffic tripled in 14 months of hard work.
Case Study #21: Arabic Translation and SEO Work Hand in Hand
When it comes to translating website content to Arabic, always work with at least two professionals: an Arabic Translator and an Arabic SEO. Working only with a Translator (or Google Translate, or AI translated tools) could pose serious issues with ranking and organic traffic if the translated content is not matching with what people actually search locally. This client doubled their organic traffic in just 30 days. All I did was analyse the Arabic translated content, and replaced the Arabic terminologies used in the content with with actual keywords searched locally in every market. Organic traffic doubled, number of orders tripled, and revenue almost tripled! The client couldn’t be any happier!
