I would like to talk about a case study for a large start up I worked on for over eight months in the Australian and US market. This client originally came to the company with the typical link building and SEO problems. They had been using a SEO company that had an extensive link network and was using less than impressive SEO tactics and methodologies over the last 12 months. The company was also losing considerable revenue as a direct result of this low quality SEO work. So, I had to scramble and develop a revival strategy for this client.

First, I will show you a quick snapshot of the traffic uplift, which yielded an additional 400,000 unique visitors from organic search traffic on a monthly basis. Then I will explain to you the steps in which we took to get the client to this level. I have also tried to keep this quite general so everyone can adapt their own situation to this case study.

The graph shows January 2012 v.s. January 2013 and the uplift in organic traffic only; this is an example of the type of uplift you can have from removing low quality SEO work and implementing a high quality SEO strategy with high quality linking building and content creation.

Now I will show you the steps I used to increase the clients traffic, I have kept this to ten key steps from the overall process.

Step One: Link Identification and Analysis

So, you realise you have a problem. Google Webmaster Tools has provided a warning or you have had manual action taken by the web spam team and you realise your prior agency has been using some less than impressive link building methods. How do you identify your links?

The tools I usually use can be the following:

1. Majestic SEO (Paid Tool) http://majesticseo.com
2. Ahrefs (Paid Tool) http://ahrefs.com
3. Open Site Explorer (Paid Tool) http://www.opensiteexplorer.com
4. Google Webmaster Tools Link download (Free) http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

For our client: We used a mix of Majestic SEO & webmaster tools data in a .csv format to provide analysis from this file.

Step Two: Detecting Which Links are Bad and Good?

So, you have downloaded your links profiles on a CSV and you now have an extensive list of all your linked domains. If you have been doing SEO for 8+ years like me you can probably just know from analysis which links are bad from a TLD and URL point of view. If you do not know too much you can use tools such as Link Detox: http://www.linkdetox.com/ to complete analysis of your link profile. I would always consult the advice of an expert SEO in this instance because it is easy for these tools to mistake good and bad links.

Another tip you can use is just reach out to the prior agency and say something like the following: “We realise you were using link networks for our website which has resulted in a Google penalty and loss in business. Can you please remove my website from any link network you have built?”. If the prior agency is decent, they will remove the links from the network.

For our client: As I have been looking over link profiles for years, I was able to use my experience and knowledge determine the low quality links. We also contacted the prior agency and were successful with removing over 2000+ root domain network links, which was a huge success for the company.

Step Three: Removing Further Links

We reach the next step, where possibly the prior agency has been naughty and does not want to remove links or they have removed only a section of links. So, what do you do? You can do the following:

Reach out to the website owners and ask them to remove the links. In today’s market most website owners want payment to do this, which is annoying. You can do this by using Whois data website or onsite website contact forms.

My advice is to try everything to get links removed before moving onto the Google disavow tool:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1

For our client: We were lucky enough to remove most from the prior agency outreach, we also went directly to many webmasters in which we wanted to remove links. We did not use the Disavow tool as it was not around when we completed this link cleanup, but we all know it has been said that if you are going to use the Disavow Tool to use it with caution.
 

Step Four: Writing a Reconsideration Request to Google

Google is currently been inundated with reconsideration requests from webmasters all over the world. On public holidays the Search Quality teams do not look at reconsideration requests. See below analysis. From my experience it can take anywhere from 15-30+ days for Google to respond to reconsideration requests; during peak periods it can even take longer.

Image Credit: Brian White (Google Web Spam Team - SMX Sydney 2013)

Now in your reconsideration request make sure you are honest and tell Google everything that the prior agency was up too. Be sure to include all Excel information of removed links and say you are going to make an ongoing effort to remove everything negative. It is common knowledge that Google may not accept your first reconsideration request, so it may take a few times.

For our client: We sent a comprehensive reconsideration request, the first time it was knocked back, yet we were successful on the second attempt. Make sure that you emphasise the fact that you plan to remove all non-natural links if possible.

Step Five: Implement a High Quality Content Creation Strategy

So, Google has accepted the reconsideration request, you can now move forward with creating high-quality link building and a content creation strategy. I see every one creating threads about great content marketing examples, but the problem is that most of the time these are big business examples. SME’s and start-ups do not have big dollars to do such things, so the next best thing is to is to create a content market calendar for your clients. 
Work out all the events coming up in the year and work out how you can align these with the business. As an example, here are seven content ideas to get you started:

1. Valentine’s Day Content
2. Easter Content
3. Mother's Day Content
4. Christmas in July Content
5. Talk like a Pirate day Content
6. Christmas Time Content.
7. Any significant birthday your company has, i.e 20 years in business.

Work out which content strategies your selected client can use and plot it all in Excel (example below):

My advice is to also get everyone involved in this process, even the receptionist. Great content ideas can come from anywhere in the business. Creative agencies will charge you $1000’s for a “brain storming” session, but you can do it for free with your immediate team.

For our client: We rolled out numerous new pieces of content onto their blog and news section; we aimed to make the content creative and funny. As the client was in the careers space we made use of “funny interview questions” and “technical interview questions” style articles. It was amazing that one of the articles even made it to the first page of Reddit. We also pushed out content which was related to various holidays in that year and also specific to the client’s industry and also current trends in the market. 

Step Six: Implement a High-Quality Link Building Strategy

Tie in your link building strategy with your content marketing strategy. Work out how you will be building high-quality links via outreach and also by integration with your content strategy.

Link building in the last two years has changed dramatically. Gone are the days of building forum links and social bookmarking links. In today’s market if you want to stay ahead you have to be creative with your link building. Here are some ideas for link building in today’s market:

1. Make sure you always include related links in PR that you push out.
2. Make sure you always look for suppliers or affiliates of your business that you can reach out to for links.
3. Track your competitors using tools such as Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO, listed above in this post. Work out how your competitors are getting links and create content assets that are the same as your competitors.
4. Go to local events or Meetup events and connect with bloggers in your industry. An example of an event I run to connect with bloggers and people in the online marketing word is: http://www.meetup.com/Online-Marketing-Sydney/. Make friends first and then try to gain guest posts later. I am not really a fan of websites which are flooded with guest posts one after another; it is the type of thing which Google is just waiting to target.
5. Look for high-quality directories which you can obtain decent links and traffic from. I would go for directories which ask for verification processes such as phone verification and not ones who allow you to add your site in seconds. The harder the site is to get a link on the higher quality the link will generally be. 

Further ideas of higher quality link building can be viewed here: http://backlinks.com.au/10-surefire-link-building-tips-for-2013/

For our client: We only used a smaller quantity of very high-quality link building each month. So, for example we only built 40 of the best links each month to supplement the work we were doing on the content marketing front. We also invested heavily into tracking competitor backlink profiles, using Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer. We worked out how the competitor's acquired specific backlinks, then by using outreach and content creation we obtained these links.

Step Seven: Implement Schema Markup and Rel=Author

This is a crucial area. If you do not have schema markup and rel="author", you are costing your business money. It is as simple as that. As an example, say I want to make spaghetti (pasta) for dinner I search for “Spaghetti Recipe” and instantly I see some great markup in play, but one competitor has no markup and no rel="author" they are losing business in my eyes. Wouldn't you agree?.

Google has been pushing rel="author" at events and I would endorse it 100%. You can set up rel="author"; the basic set up can be found by visiting the following link:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986

Google is also pushing Schema along wiht Bing. For Schema markup information all the data can be found using the following website: 
http://www.schema.org

For our client: We rolled out a successful implementation of rel="author" for the three in-house content writers the company had. The client had over 300+ articles made by these content writers over the years and it was possible to implement rel="author" for all the aged articles. I advise anyone who has a large section of content to do so as it will only benefit the website. We were also in the process of rolling out further schema markup to the site's course content as it only has a benefit for CTR.

Step Eight: Look for Big On-site Technical Wins

Many legacy websites usually have some big on-site technical wins. Some examples of huge technical problems I have seen in the past and fixed are:

1. Someone had completed a site move in the last year and they did not 301 redirect the correct URLS; they have missed plenty of key URLS which are now 404 errors. 
2. Someone has built a whole section of linked categories in JavaScript and search engines cannot access the content effectively.
3. Someone has blocked specific sections of the site in robots.txt for no specific reason.
4. Someone has used the same rel=canonical to only one page across all the website pages.
5. Someone has built internal indexed pages as PPC landing pages and copied all the content.

Fixing things such as the above can have a really great impact on the website. I have come across these and many more over the years.

For our client: It was a case of reducing the 404 errors on the website, reducing the number of 302 redirects which were not passing correct link value and also monitoring other areas of the website to improve the speed of the sites content pages.

Step Nine: Use Advanced Keywords Research and use your Paid Search Data to Implement a Effective Long Tail Strategy

Using your paid search data to its full extent is an area of SEO where many do not delve into. My advice is if you are not using your paid search data to assist your SEO campaigns you need to start now.

Some fantastic articles on how to use for paid search data for Keyword Research and analysis can be found here: https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/ugc/advanced-seo-keyword-research-tips-and-ideas-14216.

By using paid search data and advanced keyword research you are able to pin point areas where you have a competitive edge and where you can drive revenue to the business. It makes business sense that if you are not implementing these key areas then you are missing out!

For our client: We took the top PPC terms based on conversion and worked these keywords into existing pages on the website. We also created new high-quality content-based pages from these conversion terms. This type of strategy can work very well in assisting overall conversions on the website and driving more revenue. We also conducted a large-scale keyword research project for the client which yielded in uncovering many areas of opportunity for content development and targeting. 

Step Ten: Monitor Everything and Continue Doing High-Quality Work!

Monitoring what is happening with your domains is crucial and you can do this using the following tools:

• SEOmoz Campaign manager: http://www.seomoz.org/tools
• Webmaster Tools Analysis: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/?hl=en

I would advise you to complete analysis on a daily basis if the site is large and if the site is smaller than check the metrics several days a week.

I would also advise to monitor your competition sign-up to their RSS feeds and stalk their social profiles; see what they are up to and see if you can generate further ideas from your competitors for work moving forward.

I would also advise to continue doing what works. If something you have rolled out generates great traffic and links bring out a new version of the content, for example the 2012 version worked effectively bring out the 2013 version of the content. Another effective strategy is to make the piece of content into an evergreen article which you add to over time so it is always up to date.

For our client: We monitored everything on a daily basis. If something came up, which needed to be fixed, we were quick to implement it with the development team at the business. We also rolled out numerous campaigns multiple times as they worked effectively the first time around in generating significant traffic so it was second nature to do the same thing twice.

Overall, these were ten of the key elements which assisted our client in reaching this growth in organic SEO traffic. I hope this guide/case study can assist webmaster's who have been targeted by recent updates over the last 12 months. If you want to learn more about these tactics or have any questions feel free to contact me via Twitter @ https://twitter.com/connections8 or leave a comment below!