The Challenge

Not all client goals are the same Datical came to Apogee Results with declining overall traffic. And while we were able to reverse that trend and keep traffic steady, we did not significantly increase it. Instead, we focused on the quality of traffic based on industry-specific terms the client needed to rank for. Because Datical is in such a niche area of database software, traffic quality is much more valuable than traffic quantity. That said, these terms are highly competitive in this software niche and this was no easy challenge. Given the client limitations and resources our efforts rose beyond the client’s expectations.

Implementation

Technical Remediation Included:

• Significant Schema Markup was created and added to the site
• Site Speed recommendations
  • Fully loaded time improved from 6.8 to 3.6 seconds
  • Time to first byte improved from 444ms to 301ms
• Implementation of missing canonical tags on 37 pages
• Internal 3XX & 4XX link remediation
  • 37 internal 3XX redirects fixed
  • 8 internal 4XX errors fixed

Content Restructuring and Subfolder Optimization:

• The client had a vast amount of content that wasn’t earning much traffic or desired rankings. Datical also had a large amount of highly technical content that needed to be retooled for SEO purposes.
• The Apogee Results SEO team took the route of revamping content and organizing it into optimized folders to target more “general” or short tail queries because these queries often have large amounts of user “uncertainty”. E.g. database dev-ops vs. database dev-ops automation software.
• In order to rank well for generic queries which could lead to many places in terms of other questions a user may need answering, Apogee Results restructured related content under short tail keyword buckets and then redirected the new optimized content to subfolders that only contained highly relevant content.
  • g. https://www.datical.com/blog/under-performing-post -> 301 -> https://www.datical.com/databse-devops/how-to-automate-database-releases (example URL)
• From there Apogee Results implemented optimized internal linking from these guide/resource sections that were made from previously underperforming content.

Off-Page:

• 10 articles were written and pitched on topics around database release cycles and automation.
• This yielded 7 links to client targeted queries in the goal list by using anchor text and contextual linking.
• The average domain authority (DA) for the earned links was 40.3. While DA is not a ranking factor, it is a decent identifier to determine how trustworthy a site could be.