Case Study: Boosting Conversions 55% by Optimizing Blog Architecture

THE CLIENT

A student retention solution that helps colleges identify at-risk students


THE CHALLENGE

The client had a large number of pages sitting at the top level of their site architecture and the blogs were scattered, sitting at many levels of the architecture. Most blogs were improperly categorized and named by month, date and year (i.e. www.example.com/blog/2012/04/02/blog-title), leading to valuable SEO content being hidden in the deepest part of the crawl. Additionally, there were also hundreds of unnecessary blog tags indexed but not connected to the actual URL structure of any blogs URLs (i.e. www.example.com/blog/descriptor) which consumed a lot of link distribution equity. These blog tag pages, with no SEO value, were being crawled with more prioritization before the actual content.


THE STRATEGY

Because the client was planning a website redesign and many pages at the top folder level (shown in dark green in the above graphic) would be removed during this process, Statwax decided to focus solely on the blog URLs as all blog content would remain on the site following the redesign. Note: the client did not switch CMS systems during this redesign and migration process.

Because we chose to keep a limited blog filled with high-quality content (around 100 pages), we decided to keep all blogs at a higher-level folder and uncategorized. This linear approach to site architecture is most effective for small websites who do not publish content often. It signals to web crawlers that blog content is equally important and will all be crawled at the same depth.

THE RESULTS

After the URL migration, we’ve seen tremendous growth in organic traffic. Six months following the migration, the website has experienced:

      • 34.9% increase in new organic users YoY

      • 55% increase in conversions YoY

      • 33% increase from the previous six-month period

      • 4.19% increase in search visibility since implementation on June 2


Results from /blog pages:

  • Conversion rates increased 160% YoY

  • Goal completions increased 175% YoY

  • 2.6% increase in organic users YoY