Deleting 50%+ of a website to increase organic traffic

– CASE STUDY –

How deleting over 50% of a website reversed traffic erosion and increased sales.

– THE FEEDBACK –

“We knew there were SEO issues; our traffic was eroding rapidly.

Luke worked to find the issues and although some were hugely drastic changes facing heavy resistance; Luke worked with us and got his much needed buy-in. We had full confidence in Luke’s skill.”

The results speak for themselves – it was great working with Luke.”

Maya Moufarek, CMO, Chemist Direct

The brief:

Chemist Direct were seeing significant erosion of both organic traffic and sales via search engines, which was responsible for driving almost half of all ecommerce revenue.

A full audit of the website was necessary to determine the root causes for the erosion of organic traffic and also organic sales. Once external factors were ruled out (change in demand, search intent changes etc) it was clear that this was more likely to be a technical SEO issue.

Finding the issue was straightforward in comparison to getting buy-in from the stakeholders and execs to make such a substantial change. Positioning the solution correctly was critical.

Key challenges:

  • Getting buy-in and approval from key stakeholders and decision makers
  • Successfully de-indexing over half the website without impacting UX and further compromising sales
  • Working alongside developers to target the necessary URLs and configure redirect rules

The results

  • Reversing the erosion of organic traffic by removing poor quality content and bloat URLs; a traffic increase of ~20%
  • Driving a bounce-back of sales from the organic traffic
  • Instilled a new found confidence in SEO after some poor experiences with prior agencies
  • Freed up budgets for more SEO initiatives and accelerated additional SEO projects/tickets.
  • Reduced dependency on paid search to close the gap that organic had previously opened up increasing profitability

How did I lead the reversal of organic traffic and sales erosion?

Identifying the URLs / pages contributing to traffic losses

First, by seeking out URLs that were accessible to search engines yet received negligible levels of organic traffic were shortlisted.

The quality of the content on these pages were assessed and deleted if the content was poor or inaccurate.

Additionally, duplicate and automated bloat URLs were also ring-fenced and these were canonicalised, redirected or handled accordingly.

Defining robust redirect rules to drive organic recovery

Simply deleting in excess of 20,000 pages without redirecting respective URLs is a sure-fire way to further aggravate the problem being addressed.

It was therefore critical to ensure that each of the URLs deleted were 301 redirected with as fewer hops as possible and are individually routed to their best possible destinations.

Building a case to get stakeholder confidence and buy-in

Proposing to delete in excess of 50% of any website is naturally going to be met with resistance and will require constant reassurance.

Building a case that focussed on aligning the change to growth, communicating KPI-centric benefits and effectively discussing the risks of failing to take action went a long way to securing buy-in and getting authorisation to make the necessary changes.

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