When this client first approached us for help to expand globally, we were able to identify three main problem areas:
- An old website (more than a decade old), with a local Malaysian domain name (domain.com.my)
- A non-existent content strategy
- No backlinking
Each customer that signs a contract with this client is worth hundreds of thousands to millions of US dollars! The manufacturer couldn’t afford to lose out on potential prospects, so we had to do something – and fast.
Our SEO Strategy
1. Secured New Domain Name And Rebuilt Website
First off, we advised our client to buy an international dotcom domain name for best SEO results.
We found that the name was already owned by someone else, but we managed to secure it from them after negotiation.
Our team then proceeded to build a new site for them, which was ready in late May 2019. As soon as the website was completed, we optimized the server and website for speed and user experience.
A brand new domain name, with no historical data is usually ‘sandboxed’ by Google, which means that it could take a while for it to start ranking on Google, no matter how strong the content is. In other words, the domain had negligible crawl and indexation budget.
Generally, a new website will take about 3-6 months to get decent attention from Google. This also depends on how active and how strong the content of the website is.
The first thing that we did once we secured the new domain was to do a 301-redirect of each of the page in the old site to corresponding pages in the new domain name. We built temporary placeholder pages with properly planned-out URL names and structures for each of them.
This way we were able to transfer SEO equity from the old pages to their corresponding new ones, and give them topical relevance. This helps the GoogleBots to crawl the updated pages and start pushing them up through the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
2. Devised And Executed A Strong Content Development Strategy
Our team conducted detailed keyword research and competitor analysis.
- Keyword research process: We identified dozens of ‘money keywords’ to build a targeted content strategy for our client.
- Competitor analysis: We analysed competitor websites whose articles were ranking on the first page of Google SERPs. We then reverse-engineered their keywords, titles, and content so that we could outline something that would easily outrank them. And, of course, we made our client’s onpage optimization to be much better than their competitors!
We then charted out a 6-month content calendar.
Our goal was to help our client win the top spots on Google international search pages through a content clustering strategy.
Our writers team began to create strong pillar articles that were linked to clusters of supporting secondary ones. Then, we started on-page and on-site optimization in late September 2019. This wasn’t done earlier since we knew that the site was new and GoogleBot wouldn’t pay much attention to it yet.
Once we started noticing keywords being indexed in Google’s database, we got even more aggressive with our onpage efforts. However, even after a month the results were not as great as expected.
More research was done and existing articles were improved by layering additional content on them.
We finally started seeing some positive results!
To our delight (and our client’s!) thousands of keywords were now being indexed by Google on all the articles that were created in the past 6 months. It goes to show what great keyword research and a comprehensive content strategy can do for SEO!
Although most of the articles were ranking on the 5th page of Google or lower, we were now seeing some important keywords in the first page of Google SERPs already.
3. Created Backlinks
Now that our client’s content was ranking and seeing some results, our outreach team started building local and international citations in the form of backlinks to relevant sites within the niche.
We contacted bloggers and websites in the same industry to create backlinks for each of the articles.
4. Next Steps
We now plan to move hundreds of important keywords to the first page of Google SERPs and help our client dominate the niche they are in.
