How I Grow Monthly Website Traffic by 71.6% & Reduce CPA by 450~% – Case Study

If you already have a website up and running with regular organic traffic with paid traffic, or if your website has ever been negatively affected by a Google algorithm update and you want to improve it, this case study will interest you.

I’m going to share with you the exact steps my team at AccuWP took to grow a 5 years old client website’s monthly traffic (organic + paid) by 71.6% and reduce the cost per conversion by approximately 450%.

From this case study, you will learn how to achieve these results by:

• Reducing the average CPC through day-parting
• Pay only for the right targeted keywords in Google Ads
• Reduce ad budget wastage from irrelevant keyword clicks
• Remove keyword and content cannibalisation to prevent low quality pages being indexed in a lower position
• Increase site speed for higher conversions
• Improve internal linking to index targeted landing pages with the right keywords
• Build quality backlinks to improve the overall organic search visibility

The Favourables

This client operates a medical aesthetics clinic in the heart of Orchard Road, Singapore. The clinic is run by 2 licensed medical doctors with long experience and achievements in the aesthetics industry. This makes it easy to achieve E-A-T (Expertise, Authority & Trust) as they are already the expert and authority figure in the field.

The client is also highly positive and a believer in digital marketing, and is already spending a large amount on paid ads.

While the client does not understand topical authority, they are highly into writing content with the medical doctors actively reviewing & fact checking after the content team.

The Problem

The client does not have any experience in Google Ads and was mostly trying to figure things out on their own. While still profitable, they were still paying through their nose with high average CPC with at least 40% of the ad budget being wasted on a monthly basis.

Client is technically challenged and also desires a highly featured website with autoplay videos. While they have an outsourced development agency maintaining their sites on retainer, the web developer does not have the right approach and does not act in the client’s best interest in helping them succeed. This results in a slow website, especially on the mobile version.

Due to the aggressive rate of content creation with no SEO knowledge, they have many similar content pages that are cannibalising to be indexed on some profitable keywords.

They also suffered a Google algorithm update which acted negatively on their organic search rankings and needed to bounce back.

The following is a step-by-step guide on how me and my digital marketing team at AccuWP achieve incredible results with simple tweaks in search engine marketing and optimization.

SEM Optimization

The costliest marketing activity for my client is Google Ads and hence it should be the first thing to fix before moving on to SEO. By reducing the average CPC and reducing ad spend waste, I can quickly bring faster and much more visible results to their PnL report.

Identify Your Target Customers

The first step in identifying your audience, is to identify who is not your customer.

As the business is a physical location situated in Orchard Road, the first step is eliminating location keywords that are outside the central area of Singapore.

This includes places in Singapore such as:

Directional keywords such as “west”, “east” and “north”.

Lastly, country and also location keywords outside of Singapore such as “Malaysia”, “Philippines”, “Johor”, “KL” etc.

Competitor Keywords

Competitor keywords can be a source of potential leads. However, there is a significant disadvantage in running ads on them as your ad relevance quality score will be very low. The click-through rate and conversion rate are also much lower as most of the searchers’ intention was to look for your competitor with less open-mindedness to consider your brand. CTR, landing page experience and ad relevance will impact significantly on your overall quality score, resulting in likely, 200% the cost of the average CPC. As the client was looking at reducing their cost per acquisition, it made sense to remove the competitor keywords.

Competitor keywords include competitor brands such as Sozo Clinic, Mizu Clinic, Illumia and so on, competitors’ doctors’ name such as Dr. Justin Boey, Dr Wong Soon Tee etc, as well as competitor’s devices such as PicoWay and PicoPlus.

Top of Funnel Keywords

Having too broad of a targeting for your Google ads will cause your ads to be targeting a lot of top of funnel keywords. These types of traffic are much less likely to convert any time soon as they come with weaker buying intent.

With the objective of lowering the cost per acquisition in mind, we negative the keywords like:

• salicylic
• retinol
• glycolic
• tea tree oil
• benzoyl peroxide
• adapalene
• clean and clear
• neutrogena
• ordinary
• dermalogica

This is mainly because these are home remedies or over-the-counter solutions, and visitors looking for such solutions are not ready to pay much more for professional medical solution to treat their skin issues.

Dayparting

Dayparting is a term derived from broadcast programming where the radio or tv channels are divided into several parts of the day to deliver different programs for different audience.

In paid advertising, we run ads only at specific parts of the day where the audience is the most engaged, usually divided into after midnight until the next day. This can vary between businesses and locations and the most important thing to note is the average CPC and cost per conversion in different hours of the day.

For this particular client, I’ve found that the average CPC was 5x higher during the hours of 1am to 7am while the conversion rate with 2x lower. Also note that as the daily budget refreshed at midnight, most of the budget is spent on expensive low-converting clicks before it starts spending on the cheap and high-converting clicks of the day. It made complete sense to add dayparting.

By setting up ad scheduling in Google ads, I’ve channeled budget to be fully spent on the best times of the day for generating leads.

SEM Optimization Results

From the activities done above, the average cost per click was reduced by 300-350% with the same budget, resulting in 145% increase in SEM traffic and a 450~% reduction in cost per conversion across 3 different campaigns. There was a dip in traffic in September 2022 due to higher average CPC as COVID-19 measures are relaxed in most tourist-friendly countries, resulting in less customers than usual. However, the ads bounced back and performed even better in October. 2022 is a turbulent year for many businesses.

Seach Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is almost always a positive return on investment for all businesses, especially local businesses. Unlike paid advertising, you do not need to pay for every click. While there is still cost in terms of time and effort, the investment into SEO is often positive as your organic search rankings are an income-generating asset.

Core Web Vitals Optimization

Website speed optimization and core web vitals is critical to your organic search rankings today. In my case study with Joinfit, I rebuilt their site with a much lighter and powerful theme, switched from Elementor to Gutenberg as well as making other speed optimizations, it helped them to more than double their organic search traffic.

In this case study, I am unable to map out the result of the site speed optimization due to multiple enhancements being done on the website simultaneously, but I will be detailing the steps I took to improve the site speed.

When the client first brought me in, they were facing a huge slow loading speed on their mobile site. While they do have an outsourced developer on retainer, the developer does not know what caused the slow load speed on mobile. The website was using WPRocket for caching, but they did not enable mobile caching. This was incredibly silly as it effectively made WPRocket similar to free plugins you could install from the WordPress Plugin Repository while it cost 49USD/year. Of course, this was immediately rectified.

As design and website features were important to the client, and making too many changes can break the site, I had to compromise in removing certain unused or unimportant elements and reducing DOM sizes such as the email opt-in footer.

I also trained the team in making use of facades and video thumbnails to reduce page requests and page size.

A CDN from Bunny.net was also implemented and ShortPixel was used to optimize the site images and convert them to WebP and AVIF.

I would still highly recommend using EWWW Image Optimizer as it provides image optimization with AVIF support, CDN from Bunny.net included, as well as caching and script loading management rather than paying for multiple tools and complicate your site speed optimization setup.

While not much can be done overall, the average local Singaporean traffic webpage load speed still fulfills the Core Web Vitals requirements of loading in less than 2.5s.

On-Page & Technical Audit

If SEO is a car, off-page SEO is the engine while on-page SEO is the body of the car. Good on-page SEO practices helps your site gain more search visibility with off-page SEO efforts similar to how a lightweight streamlined car body helps a car travel faster.

I always trust Labrika site audit tool for any on-page SEO or technical checks. It provides one of the most comprehensive checks for on-page SEO. Being a cloud-based tool, you can also schedule it for regular site audits. Check out my video below on how I use it to audit my sites.

Keyword and Content Cannibalisation

Content is great! But having too much content can be a bad thing too! And that’s what happened with this client’s website. They have very similar service pages that were competing for the same keywords. The issue comes when one page is significantly much stronger in SEO than the other. For example, they have multiple service pages talking about acne scars. One was significantly stronger and ranking most keywords on page one, while another was very weak and ranking in page 3-4.

This becomes increasingly complex to fix the more content you have. Hence, having a proper topical map before writing content can help. However, this should not stop you from writing content.

The weaker page was the one indexed for keywords such as icepick scars, rolling scars, boxcar scars as well as types of acne scars.

Whenever you have 2 similar pages, you should always check where these keywords rank in the search results and see if you can consolidate these pages or content together to the stronger page. You can do this by using SERanking and setting it to URL, and entering the URL of the 2 pages and check their indexed keywords.

If one page is indexed for minimal keywords, see if you can move more of the keywords over to the stronger page by:

• Changing the content and reducing the keyword density of the weaker page and increasing the keyword density of the stronger page
• Add internal links with the keyword as anchor to the stronger page
• Add external links with the keyword as anchor to the stronger page

Backlinks

As much as everyone would tell you that backlinks do not matter, the real SEO professionals know that backlinks are the most important factor to SEO. Check out this case study where I literally did not do anything at all for SEO, except for building free backlinks and got the site up to number 1 on Google for all the highest volume keywords.

With this client website, I opt to build paid backlinks which had more power. Backlinks were built in 2 different phases. Once in August and once in October. This was highly profitable investment as my client sells packages that cost $2,000 and upwards while the total cost spent was only $2,500 or so.

When it comes to backlinks, you want to select websites that have at least 1,000 traffic per month. You can assess how powerful a backlink would likely be using the formula of (total traffic/total indexed keywords) by using tools like SERanking or Brandoverflow.

SEO Results

Organic traffic was increased by 71.6% and was highly positive in the cost per acquisition results as well. The client achieved one of the lowest CPA months in August and November 2022.

Overall Thoughts

SEO is always one of the best ROI marketing channels out there. Depending on competition, results can be felt within 1 month of implementation of proper SEO strategies.

However, in competitive niches, simply depending on SEO will not work because some of the high volume keywords can take too much time and money to rank. These includes ultra-broad and general keywords such as acne and pigmentation because you would be competing against MayoClinic, Healthline, WebMD, ClevelandClinic, MedicalNewsToday and more. Instead, using an SEM approach can help you gain visibility in those keywords. As you start making money through SEM, you can reinvest those profits into SEO.

Once you start ranking number 1 on Google for those keywords, you can then decide whether to turn off those keywords on SEM. There are 2 considerations before you do this. Firstly, most clicks are always going to organic results. By removing SEM, you reduce your ad budget. However, based on two different studies, the CTR of the #1 organic position in Google results is 34.2% while CTR on SEM is just 3.17%, you might lose out about 10% of clicks or 3-5%(estimated) of unique visitors that you could easily win. You will need to decide if your objective is ROI or market share.

In summary, SEO should be a core marketing strategy of any business that can generate leads online, and SEM is a great supplementation to SEO. I’m glad to have worked with this client and achieving the visible results in their business. In fact, just a week before penning this case study, I was told that the client has even expanded to yet another unit for more floor space for their business.

If you are interested to have me and my team consult for you in your digital marketing strategies, feel free to contact us.