Process
Step-by-step actions
The client earned about $2 million in fiscal 2019 and was hoping for a similar result in 2020. Unfortunately, instead of an improvement, there was a decline, including about 20% less revenue. The 2021 tax season was almost as good as 2019.
However, between May and September 2021, the site lost nearly 35% of its sessions and users. According to estimates, if this trend were to affect tax season, the client could expect a drop in revenue of more than 40%. For perspective, at $2.5 million in revenue minus 40%, we are talking about a potential loss of a MILLION dollars.
1
Performance analysis
We collected all the keywords using Ahrefs and Google Search Console tools. We started analyzing them to see where the biggest losses were. The next steps included: adding link information for each URL. The next was to compare the link profile and formulate conclusions based on observations of sites that achieved higher rankings (or were in the TOP 10) and recommendations for each individual URL that lost traffic.
2
Keyword and content plan
The next step was to look at the keywords and conduct a word study focused on revenue recovery. For this, we used the Content Gap option in Ahrefs. Based on this, we created a spreadsheet with a list of keywords, the difficulty of acquiring them, a cluster and search volume. Finally, using the keyword list, we developed a content plan and link building strategy.
3
Link building
We had just over 900 referring domains, and the closest competitor had more than 1,500 of them. According to our estimates, most competitors had about 50% low-quality (i.e. junk) links. We created a Link Requirement Plan document. Since, on average, links need 4 to 9 weeks to take full effect, we focused as much budget as possible on the first 3 months of the link building campaign.
4
Optimizations
Due to time constraints, we had to prioritize all work. We focused only on optimizations that we could implement on a site-wide scale or those that were significant oversights. We implemented a whole bunch of fixes. For example, we cut out a lot of content. What applied to 2020 and earlier was removed or updated to the current tax regulation. We indexed a LARGE number of entries that were causing the index to become too bloated.
5
More optimizations
The work included continuing to publish new content, a couple of updates to the site template, smaller and medium sized fixes that we had previously missed or didn't want to risk. Although the prognosis was good, we again conducted similar research to last year and applied content creation and link building strategies based on it.
