Local Gold Shop SEO Case Study: 383% Increase In Organic Traffic

This is an SEO case study of how I managed to increase traffic and rankings for my local gold shop client by 383% comparing the last 6 months to the previous 6 months.

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 local gold shop in a province in Thailand, and approached me for a web design and monthly SEO service. His goal was to rank in the top #3 for the keyword + location in his area, and to build brand awareness about the shop nationally throughout the country.

Challenges

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

Starting from scratch: Even if it’s a local project with less competition, it was still a new site that still requires time to see results, not to mention that his goal was to expand for national reach which is more competitive.
Some keywords are difficult: Some of the service keywords are difficult to rank nationally due to the presence of some authority sites.

The Campaign

Here are the overviews of how I approached the campaign:

Web Design & Technical Optimization

The fist step was to design a technically-sound and user-friendly website that’s both functional, lightning fast, and SEO-friendly. WordPress was chosen as the CMS for the project due to its flexibility and SEO-friendliness.

Since it’s a simple local website, there wasn’t much to optimize in terms of technical SEO besides making sure the site loads quickly, has easy navigation, and there were no unnecessary pages created to prevent bloat index.

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
Keyword research, content creation and optimization

Keyword research was one of the first things I did to find potential keywords for services and blogs. Content creation and optimization here involves creating core pages such as home, about, contact, and blog roll pages, followed by individual pages creation that are designed to target keywords/topic, eg: gold buying page, gold jewelry page, etc.
Sentence-level optimization using semantically relevant keywords:

When it comes to each page content optimization, I made sure everything was done to the details. First thing was 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 services.
Keyword count and variation optimization:

Making sure that I have used the right frequency of each keyword on the page. For example, the word “Gold”, 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.
Google Business Profile optimization

Basic GBP optimization was carried out which includes business information with keywords, filled up all the details, added new photos regularly etc.

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 and social media campaigns to create the brand awareness and drive initial traffic and user engagement to help support the overall SEO strategy.
Review generation:

For his Google Business Profile Ranking, I also advised the client to ask for as many reviews as possible in a month. When it comes to Google Business Profile (GBP) ranking, the most important factor is quality, numbers, and how quickly you can generate reviews. Coupled with brand building, the profile also received lots of engagement which quickly skyrocketed the ranking.
Link building:

Next up was to start building high-quality links to the main page and some of the service and blog 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.
Viral traffic campaigns:

Throughout the months of working on the site, I also schedule viral traffic campaigns to periodically boost rankings for various pages across the site. This helps speed up the ranking process and amplify all of other things that have been done. To learn more about how this works, check out my viral traffic page.

Results

Here is the screenshot of the website comparing the last 6 months vs the previous 6 months and you can see the site gotten over 383% increase in organic clicks