‘Poof! … The traffic was gone, like magic
To cut the story short. The previous agency had been building low-quality links, very rapidly!
Which can work for a short period of time, but is most definitely, not a medium to long term strategy.
It can yield fast rewards but these rewards are short-lived and when gone, the proverbial puff of smoke left behind will leave you wide-eyed.
The SEO agency didn’t manage to persuade Robert they weren’t to blame (Roberts a lawyer by trade, he can smell a lie. He has told me) he fired them on the spot.
Option A or B?
Not all pages lost traffic, but the most important pages lost around 80% of their traffic, which correlates with the previous agency focusing their efforts on these pages.
One thing I noted after analyzing the backlink history. The previous agency had not factored in ‘link velocity at all when building out links to the website.
They were building out links in an unnatural manner, from a variety of low-quality sites. This appeared to be the primary reason for the manual penalty.
Robert had 2 options.
Start focusing their efforts and resources towards PPC (pay per click) or find a way to undo the damage caused to their traffic i.e the manual penalty.
The PPC cost at that time for their best keywords was between $80 – $250 per click… That was not a mistake, I said $80 – $250 per…click.
The ‘Law niche’ is incredibly competitive…
This kind of PPC marketing is not like some niches where you have mum and pap businesses asking their teenagers to take a weekend PPC course and start bidding on keywords.
Robert chose option B delaying potential immediate rewards and opting for delayed gratification. That is removing the manual penalty and fixing this mighty mess.
So Much to Learn…
One of the main reasons I wanted to work on this file was to have access to all the data that made up this fascinating case study.
Analyzing how and why a website receives a manual penalty is incredibly interesting! I find that all the lessons to be learned lie in the tiny, granular details.
Going through each link in a given time frame, for example. Is comparable to analyzing grains of sand for some evidence of foul play at the beach…
It’s fun!
Where I came in…
Robert and I shared a mutual friend. When this mutual friend learned about Robert’s troubles he called me and shared Robert’s situation.
I was happy to lend a hand and obtain a reference in the process.
Robert and I had a chat. I told him what I needed and he gave me his permission to carry out a full site/link audit.
Regaining traffic after a penalty isn’t an overnight job, it comes down to the experience of the SEO specialist working on the file.
The plan i laid out to Robert and personally followed is detailed below.
Step 1: Determine the extent of damage that needs undoing. Analyze back end with Google search console and analytics.
Provide strategy: How to recover in 6 months
The 1st thing i did was to analyze all the links in ‘search console’, then cross-reference with my suite of advanced SEO tools.
I had to manually go through each and every link to assess the quality and decide if any specific link was hurting the site.
It’s a tough call because I didn’t want to remove links that seem legitimate, but at the same time, my priority was removing the manual penalty.
Understanding that my goal was to reverse the manual penalty, first and foremost.
I took a harsher approach and blacklisted anything which could be negatively impacting the site in the eyes of google.
Now that I had seen the proverbial forest from the trees. I had a good idea of the work ahead.
Step 2: Remove all ‘low quality’ and ‘potentially’ harmful links
I created & imported a list of ‘low quality’ links into the google search console and began disavowing them which is essentially me telling google that we want nothing to do with these links.
When I performed the link audit I noticed that the majority of the links they had built were low-quality links from comments, forums, etc.
Not only that, but the agency had been building links from unrelated niches like ‘carpet cleaning’ for example. This is another signal to raise red flags with Google.
All these signals combined led to Google triggering a manual penalty and this led to the demise of their rankings and thus their lead pool drying up.
Step 3: Analyze Competitors & Remove Low Quality & thin content/pages
With the biggest culprits removed, I began to look at the quality of the content scattered across the site pages.
I cross-referenced these pages against our competitors who were succeeding with their SEO efforts.
I created a list of low-quality pages and set about either removing them or tasking our writers to add value and structure to them. (Structure them, in the sense of the marketing funnel, every page should have its place within the ‘stages of awareness’ process).
Step 4: Submit Reconsideration Request.
Approval received. Move forward
Confident in my work, I submitted a reconsideration request and it worked. Google came back with a thumbs up good-to-go message. They removed the manual penalty.
Step 5: Write quality content that delivers more value than competitors. (This is also done with link outreach in mind as a primary goal).
I created a list of items for my writers to ensure that the content they created would provide more value to readers than our competitor’s content and set them to work creating these assets.
Knowing that email outreach for quality links was a priority, and built into the brief i provided to Robert.
I asked my writers to ensure that the content subconsciously invited other webmasters to feel a strong desire to link to our pages.
Step 6: Activate an Email outreach campaign searching for high-quality links.
Actually, the step of automating our email outreach was done as soon as articles became ready in order to save time and be more efficient.
After month number 3 we started seeing positive results, the number of search keywords started to increase:
This was an important factor, as the number of keywords, correlates with increases in traffic.
Measuring an increase in the total number of keywords being ranked, allows one to estimate with some accuracy future increases in traffic.
By month 6 we recovered around 35% of the lost traffic.
There was some volatility in traffic but this was due to algorithmic updates.
The traffic rapidly returned to its previous level and then began trending upwards.
Within 12 months we were at 80% of traffic before the manual penalty.
With the traffic trending upwards and being 100% confident in our strategy and approach. I knew that the traffic would continue to grow month by month as would Roberts leads.
Just so long as they remain competitive and keep providing value in the SERPs.
In summary when you take on an SEO agency to boost your position in the rankings and obtain more traffic.
Ensure that your agency tells you how they plan to do this and ensure they provide analytics to back this up.