Process
Step-by-step actions
Traffic recovery was just the beginning of this project. After that, we laid the foundation for long-term growth. We moved seamlessly from fixing the site to a growth strategy for an already healthy site.
The strategy for responding to the increase in low-quality links was a complex process. It involved the use of waiver tools and manual link control without negatively affecting real backlinks.
1
Comprehensive SEO audit and technical optimization
We started by crawling the client's site with Sitebulb to detect technical problems. Among them were: duplicate content, images with missing alt text, duplicate headers and incomplete meta descriptions, insufficient page speed. The site had too few categories (5) in relation to the number of articles (530). Therefore, we added 20 additional categories and expanded them by another 35 in a later phase of the project.
2
Analysis of the penalty
Shortly after the client acquired the site, it gained almost 600 new links. This is very unusual in such a short period of time. Link building should be steady and linear - as it was before. This attack was probably meant to damage the site's authority, especially since most of them came from (blatantly) toxic websites.
3
Keyword research, content and link strategy
The goal was clear: to identify keywords that, despite their lower search positions (positions 11-20), had the potential for rapid growth and new opportunities. Based on this, we created a solid content strategy combined with high-quality SEO-focused copywriting. We also developed a link building strategy that increased the site's authority in the Home & Garden niche.
4
Spanish version of the site
We introduced the Spanish version of the website using programmatic SEO based on artificial intelligence, supported by WPML. After machine translation, we began a gradual proofreading process. This ensured that the content did not contain grammatical errors or unintelligible wording. We monitored the performance of the content in Spanish. The same was true for the efficiency of the translation, which we constantly monitored.
5
Additional monetization
The site was making money only from display ads. We started to reposition the ads on the pages. We added affiliate links and implemented affiliate marketing through Amazon. We suggested other ways to increase revenue and long-term growth of the site such as direct ad sales, upselling/cross-selling, drop-shipping, and opening a YouTube channel.
