I have always been interested in Website Development and SEO; specifically with Google Search and how to stay relevant. As a small business with one Marketing employee (me), these nuances were not “low-hanging fruit” and frequently fell to the wayside.

However, I always kept my eye on this area and did the bare minimum to stay mobile-friendly and relevant in the eyes of Google.

 

Getting Mobile-Friendly

As an Associate at Transmet Corporation, I informed the IT group of the Google Mobile-Friendly “Mobilegeddon” in 2015, sparking a redesign of the website. This also included a spot of “This Site is Hacked” and finding spam hidden deep in our website code.

 

Implementing SEO Best Practices

After being promoted to Marketing Manager in 2016, I took on increased responsibility for our WordPress website.

I made a point to spend a short period getting our website up to speed with my knowledge. This was not something I did full-time as an Associate and an IT group managed most of it. I narrowed the outline of our site and removed duplicate content to make it easier to read, both by users and by Google.

In the final months of 2016 leading into 2017:

• Removed/consolidated duplicate content
• Wrote new page titles and added missing page descriptions with Yoast
• Revised page structure and added missing title tags
• Submitted Sitemap in Google Search Console
• Compressed/optimized Images and PDFs with ShortPixel

 

Organic Traffic Growth Results

In 2017, website users grew 412% (to 34K), from ~500 monthly users in January to ~9,000 in December. Total pageviews in 2017 were over 100K (328% growth).

 

Zoomed out to look at website users per quarter in 2015, 2016, and 2017 gives a broader look at the impact these changes had on our traffic.