How much impact can SEO have on the website traffic?

Does SEO really justify the time investement? Yes

This post describes what was done and how much impact SEO had in a corporate website. We went from 9K visits per month to 30K in a 14 months period:

1. Context
2. What was done (SEO steps)

I was hired by Kaizen Institue Consulting Group with the main task of improving their web apps which include their consulting website www.kaizen.com .

There were several tricky parts, first of the company is present in more than 30 countries and each one has their own country page, furthermore the website platform should allow each country to control the content.

When I joined, kaizen was was using typo3, which in most cases is not a good choice, I previously defended that for very static and template fixed pages it would be ok but with what I know today I can't recommend it for any scenario, with the main reason being  typoscript which is just a pain.

So we actually decided to create our own in-house CMS, which should be able to:

• Have a standard content common to all countries which would be localized providing a cohesive experience to users
• Allow online event booking. Kaizen Institute is a consulting group which offers training events worldwide and users should be able to buy and register on those events through the website.
• Everything should be translatable, if we had a registration form then it should be possible to translate the different input fields as well as adding new ones country specific.
• There should be a success stories database where each country could share their most valuable case studies, filterable by industry type or method used.
• Finally a blog system should also be in place to create long articles not suitable for the main website.

On top of all of these features the website should be search engine optimized and I thought:

"Ok, let's keep SEO in mind while developing the platform but considering that typo3 is being used and that it's a rather well known CMS we probably won't see a considerable improvement". 

But we did, in fact a year after we migrated to the new in-house system we are seeing more thean triple the monthly traffic that we had, from 9 000 monthly visits to 30 000 and we actually decreased the adwords budget.

So what changes were done.

To make this as brief as possible I'm going to enumerate them without go into details but if you would like to know more please feel free to leave a comment:

• Cleaner code. This was a simple side effect of dropping typo3 which adds a lot of garbage to the HTML.
• Multi language signals to Google. To prevent each website to "fight" against each other for search engine index we used the x-lang href element to indicate that there was another language version of the given page and obviously we set the target country in Google webmasters tools.
• Schema.org usage: considering event booking is a big part of the website it made sense to use the schema.org Event element. Using this data structure allows google to show events descriptions like the ones below directly in the SERs (search engine results):
  
• Flexible URL management including complex redirects: We actually don't use apache redirect rules instead everything is catched by php and then based on "starts with" and key map behavior the redirect is done. This is great when you are doing 301 or 302 and don't underestimate their relevance. For instance every time we change a page on the sitemap we always do 301 from the old URL to the new one, preventing shared links to be 404. The URL structure is also easy to parse by Search Engines and directly change by users, actually we almost never use query parameters or pages ids, the URLs are always relevant keywords .
• Keep it fresh: content freshness is good for SEO because it's a good signal of up to date pages and relevant material. The content management system role in this point is removing any technical obstacle and make it as easy as possible to add new content. Actually the tricky part on this one is getting quality content on a regular bases and to solve this issue we setup a reward system. Because Kaizen Institute is a consulting group we knew the best content would come directly from the consultant who are in the Gemba (working place) based on how they helped organizations achieving continuous improvement and what were the lessons learned. So, in order to share these amazing experiences through our online presence (website + social media) a points system was set in place in order to reward the best article writers. Consultants would work hard to have quality and on time articles which had a double positive effect, good examples to showcase to existing clients and great material to increase web awareness and attract new ones.
• Social Media: well this one is quite self explanatory, use social media to spread the word and even have direct interaction with existing or possible clients. To speed and improve our social media presence we use "buffer app" which allows  us to submit  to several social media websites (Kaizen Facebook page, g+, twitter, linkedin, etc) with a single click and at scheduled times (increasing visibility).

This was our one year rode to achieve triple the visits, all comes to good and regular content along with SEO. Our next step will be extending our blog responsive layout to the main corporate website.