SEO for an International Marriage Agency. Organic Traffic Increased from 6000 to 37000 Visitors per Month

Today we will walk you through the step-by-step process we used to increase our client’s organic traffic in the online dating niche from 6,000 to 37,000 visitors per month.

More specifically, we supported an International Marriage Agency for about 2 years and in that time we were able to not only increase the website’s organic traffic by 6 times but also rank the website #1 for the most competitive keywords in the niche.

Initial Project Data

Domain age: 8.5 years

Niche: International Marriage Agency

GEO: Primary region – United States

Organic traffic per month: 6,000 visitors per month at the start of the project

Backlinks: 883 unique domains and 16,221 backlinks

Technical Optimization:

The following are the various technical errors the website contained at the start of the project:

• The site did not set up redirects by URLs with index file extensions to the main site mirror;
• Sitemap contained pages that gave 4xx and 3xx server responses;
• Site had pages with uppercase characters;
• The ban on embedding the site through the iFrame was not configured;
• There were duplicates of title;
• Title and Н1 matches;
• Headings of the first level were absent or were in several copies;
• The structure of the headers was broken;
• The site had a lot of circular links;
• SSL certificate has not been configured;
• Images lacked alt-text;
• There were duplicates of description;
• Duplicated headings of the first level;
• Favicons were not implemented;
• HTML code needed some work;
• Site had a lot of redirects;
• The site had not been optimized for mobile devices.

Content: The was a lack of content on the main pages.

Link building: The client worked with a different company on link building and already had 3,500 domains in the disavow file.

Client Expectations

The most valuable keywords in this niche, the ones that bring in the most money, are extremely competitive.

If you are able to rank for these competitive keywords, once you come out on top, competitors begin to use negative SEO to drop your site as much and as quickly as possible. This means that getting this site to rank is only part of the challenge in getting organic search traffic.

As you can see, this is a pretty aggressive niche that is dominated by stable, long-time players.

Despite all this, our client’s main expectation was to rank TOP 3 for the most competitive keywords and to increase organic traffic to the site at least 2-3 times.

Here at SeoProfy, we like a good challenge and after 2 years of working on this project, we met the client’s expectations – their website ranks #1 for the most valuable keywords:

Organic traffic when we began working on the website:

Organic traffic after two years of work on the website:

1. Introduction

When we began working on the website’s SEO, our client just did a redesign and as a result the content quality was very poor. On top of that, competitors began to spam the website with bad quality links.

Here you can see what the spam from competitors looks like:

Here are some examples of the spam back links:

2. Project strategy

Our strategy for the project consisted of:

• Improving technical optimization
• Better optimizing the main pages
• Link building

The project strategy was delivered in 2 stages:

Stage 1

• Niche research
• Technical optimization
• Cleaning the link profile via disavow

Stage 2

• New pages structure implementation
• New unique content writing
• Link building
• Expanding the website structure: new landing pages, filter pages

3. Implementation

1. It was necessary to optimize the content on the priority pages of the site. We collected and clustered keywords in accordance with the structure of the site based on the analysis of top competitors in this niche. At the same time, we drew up technical specifications for writing content.
2. To build the link profile, we used sites not only with high quality parameters, but also with high traffic. Thus, we have achieved an increase not only in organic traffic, but also in referral.
3. We made an analysis of competing sites to identify competitive advantages and features that would be useful to users of our site. Based on this analysis, we compiled a list of pages and features that were successfully implemented on the site.

The above points allowed us to do the following:

1. The technical audit helped to identify errors, which we subsequently corrected pointwise: we eliminated duplicate pages and meta tags, due to which the site could not rank correctly, and we made sure that the resource was displayed correctly on mobile devices.
2. The link audit allowed us to get rid of spam links that prevented the site from ranking for certain keywords due to the fact that competitors were using them as anchors. This also helped to reduce the site’s spam rate.
3. Adding high-quality unique content made it possible to increase the visibility of the site for keywords and increase the website trust.
4. The analysis of the features of competing sites made it possible to understand why users choose these resources, what exactly attracts them and makes them stay there.

Additional work on the website that was done by us includes:

• Recommendations for the implementation of microdata markup;
• Analyzing the menu structure in the header and footer of competing websites;
• Instructions for creating filters for sorting profiles pages;
• Selecting priority pages to optimize content and structure;
• Analyzing the content and hiding the pages with no traffic;
• Recommendations for internal linking and implementation of it;
• Rewriting the blog articles that were missing keyword visibility and traffic.

4. Results

Here was the organic traffic to the site when it was handed over to SeoProfy:

Here is the organic traffic to the site after we worked on it for a little over 2 years:

Organic traffic by days before:

Organic traffic by days after:

Organic traffic by weeks:

Organic traffic by months:

Data from Google Search Console from the last 16 months:

Data from Google Search Console from the last 3 months:

Traffic from Ahrefs before we began work:

Traffic from Ahrefs after we began working on it:

Ahrefs organic keywords before:

Ahrefs organic keywords after:

Keywords visibility by Rankinity:

Visibility by keyword groups:

Main keyword position dynamics one year ago:

Main keyword position now:

5. Conclusion

The main aspects of our work that allowed us to achieve positive results and meet the client’s expectations are:

• Technical optimization
• Combating negative SEO from competitors
• Link building

However, as you can see, organic traffic from Google is growing gradually and the website hasn’t been impacted by any core updates this year.

In addition, we would like to add that our client does a great job at improving the product overall and implementing our recommendations. It’s a truly collaborative effort, which is an important aspect of achieving success when working with an SEO agency to improve organic traffic and Google rank.

Our work is not done yet! There is still a lot of potential to grow the organic traffic further for this website. Check back later for updates of how this website grows over time!

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments below!