How Accrue SERP helped 10Pie recover from Google’s Helpful Content Update.

What we did

Here is the complete process that we followed:

1/ Site level audit

• The website only receives traffic from organic searches. No followings on social media.
• The backlink profile is poor considering the authority sites in the niche

There are only a total of 29 referring domains that give backlinks to this website from content (excluding links from directory listings, Quora, Reddit, etc.).

2/ Page-level audit insights

• Articles published in the last 6 months are well-optimized
• There are some old articles (~20) that are poorly written in terms of unique information
• Almost ~10 articles that were driving maximum site traffic require fresh and updated content (important note).

• Internal linking can be improved

For example, when I checked the number of inlinks to article pages, I found some articles only have 3-4 internal links coming to the page.

This is a missed opportunity to pass maximum PageRank from high authority sites to new pages or low authority pages.

• Almost 10+ pages have declined traffic in the last 3 months compared to the previous 3 months (via GSC)

Getting the ranking position back for these pages will quickly boost the site traffic.

• Almost 60% of backlinks point to the homepage, but only a handful of backlinks point to individual articles.

Stage 2: Quick SEO win strategies

One strategy that I am currently working on is updating page content for two types of pages:

1. Pages that need to stay relevant and fresh information (e.g. Best AI documentaries in 2023)
2. Pages with traffic decline (only if it is older than 3 months)

This will allow me to get the initial boost and stop further traffic decline in the coming months.

Stage 3: Long-term SEO strategy

1/ EEAT

Improving the EEAT deserves a dedicated newsletter issue. However, the following are the quick changes that I will be doing:

• Making the LinkedIn page active and publishing content (repurposing articles)
• Creating a YouTube channel with 2-3 introductory videos (and try to publish informational videos at least 1 per month)
• Creating dedicated author and expert pages (since there are 10+ tech experts and contributors)
• Using schema to markup tech experts as contributors and person schema for dedicated author pages
• Creating/updating important pages— about us, homepage, contact, editorial policy, careers page, website accessibility, etc.
• Inviting more experts and showcasing them as content contributors
• Making transparent about the content creation process, founder, and other members.
• Publishing review articles (since we don’t have any product, we will ask readers and individual bloggers to share their experience about our free eBook and templates on LinkedIn, personal website, or Medium)

If you want to turn your niche site into a brand, then you also need to work outside of your website. Adding schema, author bio, and other similar tactics is not enough.

NOTE:

One advantage this website has is that 10+ tech experts from top universities have contributed to some of our articles.

So, I will use the contributor schema on the blog pages to indicate to Google that these experts are connected with the content we are publishing— not a direct ranking booster, but will help to establish a connection between the website and niche experts.

2/ Backlinks

• Continue with homepage link building via Featured and HARO
• Guest posting to pages that are ranking on the second or third page with first-priority
• Paid backlinks from highly relevant sites (high traffic and med-high authority)
• Report pages (link-bait) or original research pages by turning publicly available data.

3/ Content strategy

One major issue that made the site traffic decline is that the website has content over several topics, not on a focused niche.

The primary goal is to cover several a topic from the TOFU to the BOFU stage.

Here’s a sample example:

Consider, that a data science training center wants to improve topical coverage in the data science career niche. Here are the topics that must be covered:

The idea now is to build a similar topical map for multiple subtopics in my niche. This will help Google to understand brand positioning and what this website is good at.

Stage 4: Execution

When you work with multiple writers who have good knowledge in their domain, it is important to have clear guidelines and SOPs to train them.

It includes guidelines for doing content research, formatting the content, and sentence structuring.

Here are the ways I have built the documentation:

• Divided content writing part into several buckets— researching, understanding the brief, writing guidelines, and formatting
• Then creating documentation for each step