SEO Course Correction Results Case Study
2022-09-14SEO Course Correction Results Case Study
16 months ago, this website was underperforming for its core competencies. ALL of the traffic coming to this site was sending signals of indexation to Google for ALL the wrong things. Here is what I did to course correct.
It is also the definition of "SEO is a Marathon".
A section of a site was outperforming the rest of the website. Without removing content or redirects or anything at a granular level, I was willing to try a global course correct.
ROBOT.TXT Disallows
I DISALLOWED an entire directory. 😮 psycho move.
WHY???
This sends a directive signal to the search engine that while these pages are still valuable to indexation, they are NOT the primary value of the site and prevents them from further crawling, which preserves crawl budget and prevents the search engine from focusing on ancillary content versus primary content. Disallowed pages include campaign level pages, blog pages and long form content pages that were not hyper focused on the core competencies of the website and business all nested cleanly under a /sub-directory/.
Without losing the link juice and indexation value (NOINDEX), the DISALLOW enabled me to isolate this specific section of the site and direct the search engine to focus on all of the other content on the site that supports the primary mission.
Long story short, there is no voodoo here. I was willing to nuke the entire site, in order to harden the indexation and control the way that the search engine reads and ranks the website holistically.
THE DATA:
✳️ You'll notice the cliff around August 2021. ✳️ You'll notice the spread prior to August 2021 between the metrics. ✳️ You'll notice HIGH impressions and HIGH average Position, but LOW CTR and LOW Click engagement.
All the wrong content was being indexed and the metrics were showing all the wrong results.
✳️ You'll notice the sacrifice and the immediate impact.
For anything performing in an area of the site that I wanted to keep, there was NO IMPACT. If anything, I saw immediate lift in performance and durability of engagement.
Just over a year later, this website dominates the niche all the while the DISALLOWED content is still indexed and still performs for the business, the Search Engine now knows for sure, that the websites focus is elsewhere.
Happy Optimizing!!
