When an east coast solar energy company launched their website redesign in January 2020, they faced two major challenges: recovering from a devastating dip in traffic and competing for attention in the midst of a pandemic. Doukas Media focused on recovery efforts and achieved results that far surpassed expectations, including doubling organic traffic and increasing organic phone call leads by nearly 300%.

Overview

When a longstanding solar company on the east coast was looking to refresh their look with a redesigned website, their team successfully created a visually-appealing collection of web pages. Unfortunately, a focus on aesthetics came at the expense of a cohesive search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, which led to every online marketer’s worst nightmare.

Almost immediately after the launch of the site redesign in January 2020, the company’s web traffic decreased dramatically. Compounded with the acceleration of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, the negative trend continued:

• Month-over-month, organic traffic dropped by 43 percent.

• Year-over-year, organic traffic dipped 41 percent.

• In the 60 days after launch, the number of keywords the website ranked for fell by 45 percent.

Goal

Seeing the obstacles that faced them ahead, but realizing the necessity of focusing energy on their business operations and product expertise in the midst of a pandemic, leadership enlisted the digital marketing know-how of the Doukas Media team. After consulting on this unique situation, and the multiple factors affecting it, the Doukas Media team set out to recover their monthly traffic, and in turn, help rankings rebound.

The Solution

In order to identify what specific changes to the website could be contributing to the traffic dip, the team at Doukas Media conducted a robust keyword and traffic analysis, and also performed a technical site audit to catch any additional technical barriers that may have been impacting the rankings.

Implementation of these processes confirmed that the drop in both traffic and keywords could be attributed to the homepage in isolation, which ended up being positive news, because it offered a clear starting point for where to focus efforts.

Through an audit, the Doukas Media team uncovered that large portions of content—in some instances, entire pages of high-performing content—had been removed from the site’s homepage during the redesign. This, combined with a reconfigured main navigation hampered the user experience for visitors, and subsequently resulted in the rankings hit.

Armed with this knowledge and committed to reversing this dip, the team went to work recovering the content that had been removed, and strategically reoptimize its placement. In collaboration with the client, old navigation links were reconnected where they were effective for both SEO and user experience. Technical limitations were addressed, such as building redirects to secure pages and hiding low quality pages from search engine bots, which resulted in significantly improved page speed and overall site quality.

Additionally, the team at Doukas Media took new steps to further optimize the entire solar energy site, including: researching and implementing meta data to boost page performance, writing new content to increase relevance and timeliness, and linking content pages within the site.

The Results

Improvement was sharp and speedy, and the client saw significant growth throughout the year, despite a global health crisis. As of January 2021, a full year after collaborating with Doukas Media to implement the identified recommendations, exceptional results were reported:

• 118 percent increase in organic traffic, year over year

• 51 percent increase in total keyword rankings, year over year

• 22 percent increase in page one rankings, year over year

  In addition to seeing improved traffic performance, it was clear that these adjustments were bringing in more qualified site visitors, as engagement on the website improved as well:

• 295 percent increase in organic phone call leads

• 77 percent increase in organic contact form submissions

Whether you’ve seen an unexplained dip in your site’s traffic, or are looking to find new ways to expedite growth, the Doukas Media team can help you create an SEO strategy that helps you realize your goals.