<aside> 🤝 We transformed Fireart Studio’s SEO strategy, addressing critical technical issues and implementing strategic improvements that led to a significant recovery and growth in organic traffic to 33,353 monthly visitors.

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Before teaming up

Fireart Studio's previous SEO vendors used outdated tactics that no longer aligned with current best practices, such as keyword stuffing and page spinning. These methods not only failed to deliver results but also risked penalties from search engines.

At O-CMO, we came up with a new SEO strategy starting with the website audit that identified critical technical SEO issues:

• Canonical tag errors: Several pages had incorrect or missing canonical tags, leading to duplicate content issues. For example, some blog pages pointed to localhost:8080 instead of the correct URL, affecting indexation.
• Duplicate content and poor internal linking: Duplicate testimonials were placed in multiple blogs as text, and internal linking logic was inconsistent, showing irrelevant related articles across different categories.
• 404 errors and redirects: There were numerous broken links and outdated 301 redirects that needed correction to maintain link equity and improve user experience.
• Large image files: Many image files exceeded optimal sizes, slowing down page load times and impacting Core Web Vitals scores.

<aside> 🤝 Our job was to replace the ineffective SEO vendor, address these technical issues, and create a sustainable SEO strategy to improve organic visibility and performance.

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Project details:

<aside> <img src="/icons/clock_gray.svg" alt="/icons/clock_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Timeline: September 2023-April, 2024

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<aside> <img src="/icons/groups_gray.svg" alt="/icons/groups_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Team structure: 1 Head of SEO 1 SEO specialists 1 linkbuilder

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Results

• Recovered and grew organic traffic: Despite an initial drop in traffic due to the accidental closure of the website from indexation, organic traffic rebounded from 21.9K in December 2023 to 33,353 in March 2024.
• Improved US organic traffic: US-specific traffic grew from 2.59K in December 2023 to 4.38K in March 2024.
• Stabilized keyword rankings: The number of ranking keywords in the US increased from 13,939 in January 2024 to 14,864 in March 2024.
• Significant Performance Gains for Key Pages: Notable improvements were seen on high-priority pages that promoted the main company services.
• Domain rating maintained: Maintained a stable Domain Rating (DR) of 65 throughout the project.

What we did

Technical SEO Fixes

• Canonical tag corrections: Fixed all incorrect canonical tags to point to the correct URLs, ensuring proper content indexing and eliminating duplicate content issues.
• Improved internal linking and content quality: Corrected the internal linking logic to ensure related articles were relevant and in the same category, reducing bounce rates. Removed duplicate testimonials and improved content alignment with search intent.
• Resolved 404 errors and redirects: Cleaned up all 404 errors and updated outdated 301 redirects, preserving link equity and improving site navigation.
• Optimized image sizes and load times: Compressed large images to enhance page load speeds and improve Core Web Vitals scores.

Example of an SEO audit/recommendations.

Example of content quality analysis.

Enhanced Site Visibility After The Accidental Website Closure

During our cooperation, we discovered that for some period the website has been closed to search engines. Even a short disruption like this can have long-term consequences, but we ensured a swift response to mitigate damage.

Quickly identified and fixed the issue of the website being accidentally closed to search engines, which restored indexing and allowed for traffic recovery.

Blog Redesign and Optimization

• Redesigned the blog page: We overhauled the blog page structure to improve Google’s crawling and indexing efficiency. With over 715 articles, the previous blog format slowed down search engine bots from effectively crawling and indexing content.
• Clustered content strategy: Divided all articles into topic clusters, grouping related content under main pillar pages. This method improved internal linking, helped distribute link equity more effectively, and made it easier for search engines to understand and index content efficiently.
• Improved crawl budget management: By organizing content into clusters, we reduced unnecessary crawling, ensuring that search engines focused on the most important pages first, which improved overall site visibility.
• Revised the structure of a blog article: Added CTAs and microconversion banners linking to relevant blog posts, podcasts, and other owned media.

New informational structure for blog.

Before: 715 pages were placed in a single page, which prevented Google from fast page crawling

After: All blog articles were categorized into clusters with categories, subcategories, and tags.

<aside> <img src="https://prod-files-secure.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/f984c7e8-9043-4d73-b4f1-0d6ddc2b0fa1/277218b3-41b4-49a3-bf68-812c5fa5cf92/Mask_group_(1)_(1).png" alt="https://prod-files-secure.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/f984c7e8-9043-4d73-b4f1-0d6ddc2b0fa1/277218b3-41b4-49a3-bf68-812c5fa5cf92/Mask_group_(1)_(1).png" width="40px" /> Oleksii Andrusenko, Fractional Head of SEO at O-CMO: The traffic drop was primarily due to the website being closed from indexation, but that wasn’t the only issue. For years, Fireart Studio was creating content that didn’t convert because it was written without a clear understanding of what drives conversions. Tons of resources were spent on vanity metrics, focusing on traffic growth for its own sake. Our recommendation was to focus on a content conversion index to improve page quality, trust, and conversions from articles.

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On-Page SEO and Content Strategy

• Content optimization and refinement: Enhanced meta tags, headings, and overall content structure for all key pages, aligning them with high-priority keywords to improve search engine visibility.
• Focused on lead-generating content: Shifted the content strategy to focus on content that drives lead generation, rather than just traffic, aligning it more closely with potential client interests.
• Schema markup implementation: Added organization schema markup and ensured that all critical pages were included in the sitemap to improve crawling and indexing.

Strategic SEO management and monitoring

• Vendor replacement and team realignment: Replaced the previous SEO vendor, optimizing roles and strategies to handle both technical and content-driven SEO needs.
• Ongoing performance monitoring: Established a continuous monitoring system to track SEO performance, ensuring that fixes were effective and quickly addressing any new issues.