SEO Case study – Groupmail

GroupMail was an established product in the Email Marketing space with an enviable reputation and history. At the end of March 2013, Robert Martin from Infacta contacted SoftwarePromotions with a fairly common scenario.

Infacta saw an opportunity to further grow their business through a renewed focus on their search optimisation efforts. They contacted SoftwarePromotions to help fill in the technical and process gaps they were missing and help boost their marketing and sales efforts.

It also emerged that a fair number of the incoming links to the GroupMail website were perceived by Google as being of fairly low quality. This wasn’t down to anything that Infacta had done that was wrong, but was instead a result of Google constantly redefining what was legitimate and what might get a website in trouble. One example was Press Releases, something that was seen as a  legitimate means of pulling in attention from editors, columnists and search engines. Then in July 2013 Google sent a very clear message that links within Press Releases are considered “unnatural” and may be harmful to SEO rankings.

We put into place a three-step strategy. The first was to deal with all of the technical issues that a typical website has when it comes to SEO. The second step was to carry out detailed keyword research and begin working our way through the main pages of the website, optimising them for the most appropriate and relevant keywords. As always we were guided by our principle that our optimisation techniques should be almost invisible to the visitor reading the content, while simultaneously helping Google to understand the content of each page. The third step in the optimisation strategy was to try and remove as many of the negative incoming links as possible.

Because of the complexity of their situation, a great deal of work was required. Yet this proved to be enormously worthwhile.

On May 14th 2014, an email between Rob Martin of Infacta and Dave Collins of SoftwarePromotions said the following:

“… perhaps it might make more sense to now sit back and monitor what happens? I’d be happy to keep an eye on this for you (without charge) – you’re already in our systems?“

Five days later, on May 19th 2014, Google confirmed that they had released a very significant Panda 4.0 update, that included both an algorithm update and a data refresh. The moment the update launched, the benefits were clearly visible:

The results were incredible. The GroupMail website started to receive literally double the number of visits from Google each day. And unlike some of the standard fluctuations that all websites see over time, this volume of organic traffic not only remained steady, but actually started to increase further over time.

By the start of June, the volume of organic traffic had increased by 84%.

By the start of July, this had increased to 129%.

By the end of September this had increased by 185%.

This case study was written 140 days after the increase in traffic began, and the levels of organic traffic do appear to continue to rise.