Automotive SEO Case Study: 0 to 10K Traffic After 6 Months

This is an SEO case study of how I managed to increase the traffic for a car dealership website bringing it from less than 10 clicks per day to getting over 10K in 6 months through my monthly SEO service.

Like any other of my case studies, I won’t reveal the website and keywords for security and privacy reasons. But in this article, you will find some of my overview process of how I went about achieving the results, along with various screenshots as proof.

Project Background

The client runs a car dealership (showroom) type of website in Thailand selling only one automobile brand (can’t be revealed) and he approached with his new WordPress website with a goal of ranking on the first page for the car brand name along with generating as many traffic as possible to different car models.

Challenges

Here are a few challenges faced while working on the project:

• New website: Since it was a new website with no authority, everyrthing needed to be done right from the start making it more challenging compared to most of the competitors whoe are already well-established.
• Competiting against the brand and its partners: Since it’s a vehicle brand, there’s obviously the brand itself ranking along with their various automotive partners ranking for the same keywowrds.

The Campaign

Here are the overviews of how I approached the campaign:

Technical Optimization

The first step was to get all the technical SEO optimization done. Since there are some categories and taxonomy structures and service-based pages, I mainly focused on these areas:

• Optimize the site for page speed.
• Blocking all the unnecessary tags and pages from getting indexed.
• Make sure to either merge or delete duplicate or near-duplicate pages.
• Adjust the site structure and menus to be more user-friendly ane easily accessible.

On-Page Optimization

Next up is to focus on the on-page obsessively. What I mean by “obsessively” here is to optimize each and every detail to the tee.

This includes things like:

• Heading (h1,h2 & h3) optimization
• Content creation and optimziation
  
  The client already had some content in place, so I initially focused on optimizing existing pages and also create new supporting content around those topics he alrady had.
• Keyword research and page creation:
  
  After optimzing existing pages and creating supporting pages, I also performed keyword research to find new keyword opportunities and create new pages. These include new categories, vehicle models, pricing details, etc.
• Sentence-level optimization using semantically relevant keywords:
  
  By making sure that each sentence is properly optimized using semantically relevant keywords based on reverse engineering the competitors and using a proprietary tool that I created. You can use on-page tools like Surfer-SEO to help with the process. This step is applied to the homepage (which targets the main keyword) and other sub-pages and categories.
• Keyword count and variation optimization:
  
  Making sure that I have used the right frequency of each keyword on the page. For example, the word “Car”, I made sure to check the competitors’ average and see how many times I should use this word. You can again, use tools like Surfer SEO, but there’s really no hard rule for this. I’d like to keep it a little lower than the average to avoid over-optimization.
• Design refinement and connection
  
  One thing I’ve also done after the web design process was to refine the design elements on the page to make sure they are consistent in the flow and all the sections and areas are connected without breaking the semantic connection from one area to another.
• Internal linking
  
  Lastly, after all the page creation and optimization steps were carried out, I also made sure to do proper internal linking – connecting from one page to another using relevant anchor texts and keeping in mind the quantity.

Off-Page Optimization

Once the on-page of the site is ready, the next thing is to start looking into off-page factors.

• Brand building:
  
  The first step in the off-page SEO that I asked the client to do was to start running for some Google Ads to create the brand awareness and drive initail traffic and user engagement to help support the overall SEO strategy.
• Link building:
  
  Next up was to start building high-quality links to the main page and some of the vehicle and category pages. For this, I mainly focused on high-quality PBNs and some guest posts sprinkled in in a strategic way and focusing on branded-anchors.
  

Results

Here is the screenshot of the website starting from less than 10 clicks to now having 10K of organic traffic after 6 months, and it’s also growing exponentially every month:

Want To Get Results Like This?

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