In this case study you’ll learn how in 1 month we helped recover a website from 2 years loosing 32% of its revenue and 24% of it’s organic sessions year on year. Here’s what we were able to achieve:
- Stop the slow bleed of the website with worth $111.750/year
- Stop a 32% annual decline in revenue and 24% decline in organic sessions.
- Improve organic visibility by 42% over 2 consecutive google updates (from negative to positive trendline)
- Improve clicks and visibility for Non Branded Queries which were non existent
How we Reversed a 2 Year 32% Decline in Annual Revenue in 1 Month?
A thorough technical analysis of the website revealed a massive amount of self inflicted technical and UX issues.
- Identified and removed 8 path-relative internal links throughout the mega menu and internal pages
- Removed home page canonical link pointing to a 404 page (not self referential)
- Removed empty category pages returning 200 status code
- Removed links to 404 pages from navigation and mega menu
- Removed 404 pages from the website and fixed broken internal links
- Removed internal redirect loops
- Removed 301 redirect links from navigation
- Removed duplicate pages
- Improved page templates to include H1 headers on key pages
- Removed broken link hidden within the footer code
- Other minor technical SEO issues
The Challenge
The steady and consistent decline in organic sessions, clicks and impressions is commonly associated with google algorithmic penalties.
After 2 years of declining organic performance, the business was suffering the consequences of consistent and compounding loss in revenue over time, which started to creep into their ability to keep staff employed as well as made them very dependent on paid traffic sources.
Trendlines
Trendlines are helpful to cancel spikes or tanking of metrics due to market shifts (Christmas period) or other marketing activities (for example the launch of a collection). As you can see the situation for the 2021 – 2022 period wasn’t ideal:
| Sessions Trend | Revenue Trend | Transaction Trend |
| -24% | -32% | -35% |
| 1628 | $15,785 | 75 |
At this rate of decline (trend), a month from this year compared to a year ago would show
- 1628 less sessions
- 75 less ecommerce transactions
- $15,785 less revenue
- Similar trends were found for 2020 – 2021 period
Absolute Values
Annual Metrics
| Organic Performance | Sessions | Revenue | Transactions |
| 2021 – 2022 | 41,837 | $213,402 | 772 |
| 2020 – 2021 | 52,407 | $325,155 | 1245 |
| Total Loss | 10,570 | $111,754 | 473 |
| Monthly Avg Loss | -881 | -$9,313 | -39 |
| % Loss | 20% | 34% | 38% |
Monthly Metrics
When taking a deeper look at key category page performance for given months we quickly realised the decline was generalised and across all important pages of the website, suggesting a site wide issue.
| Sessions/Month | General | Home | Cat. Page 1 | Cat. Page 2 | Cat. Page 3 |
| Oct 2021 | 4360 | 2161 | 445 | 90 | 74 |
| Sep 2022 | 2778 | 1222 | 202 | 46 | 27 |
| Difference | -36% | -43% | -55% | -49% | -64% |
There is no hard rule on how to reverse such a long decline besides fixing as many issues as possible as quick as possible.
Additionally our intuition told us we were also working against the google clock to try to get the changes implemented before a possible google update that usually happens in last couple of months of the year as technical issues are usually resolved quickly by google updates.
The Results
After thoroughly analysis and inspecting the technical and UX issues of the website our suggested changes were able to:
- 42% increase in impressions mostly from non-brand queries (pure organic visiblity)
- Create a stable positive response for the end of the year google update and the following google core update
- Complete reversal of the previous 2 year decline in organic sessions, clicks and impressions
It’s important to mention that even though technical changes can make big difference quickly, we were lucky we got them implemented just before a google update happened.
This definitely made the website respond literally as quick as possible as the changes were fully picked up almost as soon as they were implemented.
This is something a website who’s been penalised would normally take longer to recover.
Key Insights
- Self inflicted technical issues can add up and generate real business issues over time
- Untrained marketing teams and developers can often impact the bottom line heavily in a negative way due to their standard operating procedures and the ‘way of doing things’
- SEO and technical awareness and education is often overlooked in small/medium sized businesses. Credible up to date knowledge and coaching seems valuable for marketing teams