SEO for IT Company: How To Increase Website Traffic By 30% In Six Months

The number of IT companies is constantly growing, and the number of developers every three years increases by 3 million and may reach 27 million by 2023.

A huge market provokes intense competition and real wars for customer attention. Let’s look at the case study to see what tools promote outsourcing companies and what to expect from them.

Challenge: Improve Website Visibility

Last year, Promodo was approached by a large American IT company that had been developing, testing, and integrating eCommerce solutions for 20 years. The experienced in-house team came with a complete understanding of the processes and formulated tasks. The main one was to attract traffic to their website. The goal was to increase the visibility and recognition of the brand online.

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The key objective was to increase the volume of organic traffic by 15% after a quarter of cooperation and improve the visibility of the website on Google for key business queries.

Solution

The first stage is a technical SEO audit of the website

First, we conducted an SEO audit of the website and found technical errors that caused pages to rank lower in the SERPs or not rank at all. We collected all the recommendations, sorted them by priority, and passed them to the development team on the client side:

eliminate duplicates generated by the CMS;
eliminate duplicate pages on the website;
optimize images;
markup structured data;
improve internal linking (tags, manual, text).

The website’s CMS had limitations, so we could not implement all the recommendations and optimize the website loading speed to the desired indicators. But the work quickly yielded results and after fixing most of the errors, the website’s rating on Ahrefs rose to 89.

The second stage is blogging

In the IT niche, blogs and quality content play a critical role in website SEO. At the same time, content marketing generates three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less.

Content is the best way to drive conditionally free traffic to the website due to information thematic queries. For commercial ones in the field of development, the competition is very high.

And since the field of technology also involves a long decision-making journey, it is high-quality content that builds trust in a brand and helps customers make the final choice.

First, we prescribed metadata and gave recommendations for internal linking: configured breadcrumbs, created relevant blog categories and tags, and added text links. Plus, we selected topics for new articles based on a competitive analysis of the niche. Native English-speaking writers created the content on the client’s side.

Next, we optimized ready texts to get into Featured Snippets — answer blocks that respond to a search query and appear on top of all search results.

Result: a snippet from our article was placed in response to a popular query to test position zero in the SERPs. In the top 3 of the search results for relevant keywords, several more of our fresh articles were also included.

The third stage is working with the website link profile

Based on the competitive analysis, we formed a link strategy. We obtained data on which pages and how many links should be placed to reach the TOP-1 for relevant queries.

At the time of the beginning of cooperation, in July, the site had 263 links from unique domains, and in December, this number rose to 357. Therefore, we chose a strategy of gradual link building: registering the website on thematic directories, publishing on trust websites by outreach, and posting comments on relevant forums.

Final Results

From July to December 2020, website traffic increased by 34.26% (+6,465 sessions).
A total of 25,333 sessions were conducted, and 42 goals were achieved over the period.
The website visibility for the target queries increased: at the beginning of the cooperation, it occupied 0.9% of positions among all queries in the TOP-5. In December 2020, it occupied 2.99% in the TOP-5 and 6.26% in the TOP-10.
Positions in the TOP-100 doubled.

We paused our work with the client on these results, and now, the client’s team is restarting the website. We highlighted the main points of growth on which the in-house specialists will be able to work independently after the IT website relaunch:

optimizing page load speed;
expanding the structure of the website (creating relevant commercial pages and working with the blog);
further work with snippets.

From time to time, we monitor the results of our common work and see that the site’s visibility for search requests is increasing: in November, the site was ranked for 1857 requests, and after the update — for 3611.