Even the best SEO specialists and content strategists can't guarantee that your website will grow in traffic forever. As your site grows and gains more visitors, it might eventually level out. When your website traffic stops increasing and flattens out, try different strategies to break out of the plateau and climb up the search engine ranks. In this article, we'll talk about how we helped Eleken, one of our clients, to solve this problem.
Is this the end of organic growth?
In late 2020, Eleken, a UI/UX design agency, turned to Kaiiax for help with content marketing and SEO. After several meetings with Eleken's CEO, we developed a new strategy focusing on the SaaS market.
We assembled a team of writers, link builders and SEO specialists to started implementing our action plan. We created and published content as well as tested some hypotheses to define the best one for lead generation. As expected, Eleken's organic traffic started to grow and the client started getting more leads.
However, from October 2021 to March 2022, the website traffic did not change significantly. Since SEO is a long-term process, we couldn't determine what caused this situation immediately; we needed time to audit the website and move its traffic up.
In March 2022, we made some changes to our website menu, which resulted in a slight drop in traffic followed by a four-month plateau. Our team continued digging deeper to identify why the traffic wasn’t shifting and what should be done to overcome the plateau.
We went over website pages to define articles that had already brought leads and those that didn’t work at all. We also researched leads and analyzed what content they viewed and how they interacted with it. We looked at each keyword and link to come up with a better strategy. Finally, we defined the steps we should take to grow the traffic.
Overcoming the plateau
Here is what we did to get over the plateau on Eleken’s website.
Page optimization
After reviewing the content on our website, we chose specific articles to optimize. We updated keywords, added links, and expanded the length of posts to provide more topic-related information. After page optimization was done, we found out that traffic for optimized pages related to design services began to increase and that the traffic for non-optimized posts continued to fall down so we continued working.
Detecting and removing overspam
We kept searching for other ways to solve the traffic plateau problem and decided to update the website menu. However, after this update, we discovered one more issue ‒ the word “design” appeared too often in the header and footer of the website, which also influenced the website traffic. It looked unnatural and abnormal for the search engine, so it didn't rank such content high.
After researching the competitors, we defined an optimal word density for the pages and decreased the number of repetitions of the word “design”.
As a result, the traffic of all optimized pages began to grow.
Changing the publication date
Next, we updated the dates of publications to show the search engine that the information is current and up-to-date. It helped increase the relevance of content for specific queries and win higher search rankings.
Website speed optimization
When looking for ways to beat the traffic plateau, we assessed the website’s overall performance and discovered some bottlenecks. For example, the side menu of the Blog section contained script files which increased the page loading time. We also discovered that these menu items received fewer or no clicks, so we changed the Blog menu to improve the website performance and drive more traffic to the website.
Result: 43% traffic growth within 3 months
From July to October 2022, we managed to break through the website traffic plateau and boost traffic on optimized pages.
As a result, from August to November 2022, the organic traffic increased from 30,102 to 43,104.
