Google processes an average of 99,000 search queries per second, which equates to 8.5 billion searches a day. There are many rumors that SEO is dead, but in reality, SEO has changed significantly and will continue to evolve in the coming years.
That is why, as a business owner, you need a solid SEO strategy to optimize your website and content to tap into this traffic.
You should understand the core Google algorithm principles, track updates, and promptly adapt to the changes to ensure top-level search optimization. This will help increase your brand’s reach, website traffic, and, in turn, your sales and revenue.
In this article, we have curated some of the best SEO case studies to help you analyze and replicate successful SEO strategies. The aim is to boost your online visibility and attract potential customers to your business.
Read on to understand how these successful SEO campaigns beat all Google algorithms to rank at the top of relevant SERPs and what you can learn from them.
What Makes a Great SEO Case Study?
A great SEO case study should show you numbers and help you analyze the strategies that drive meaningful results. Some of the key elements of successful SEO case studies include:
- Worthy SEO campaign results like greater traffic, higher keyword rankings, and increased conversion rates
- High-quality backlinks acquisition
- Healthy link profile metrics in terms of domain rating (DR), referral traffic, and low link toxicity scores
- Helpful content examples
- Seamless user experience strategies that worked
- Solid technical SEO and website performance metrics
Best SEO Case Studies Driving the Results You Want to Replicate
Let’s look at some of the best SEO case studies and understand what helped them drive good results.
1. Lone Fir Creative grew their monthly organic traffic from 100 to 7K
Lone Fir Creative, a strategic marketing services company, leveraged targeted content creation and technical SEO improvement tactics to increase their organic website traffic by 324%.
They researched high-value keywords using competitor analysis and focused on three aspects: search intent, relevance, and domain authority of competing brands.
Every week, they posted new content and updated their existing ones. They also optimized existing images to boost page speed. This led to a gradual increase in organic search traffic.
Lone Fir Creative created topic clusters for their blog, built pillar pages, and added internal and external linking frameworks to boost their search rankings. Within two years of a research-driven approach to content creation and periodic content audits, they garnered 7,000 monthly visitors through organic searches.
Currently, 65-75% of their website traffic is purely organic. This has helped them drive prospects genuinely interested in their marketing services, boosting their conversions and revenue. In fact, they attributed $100K of their last year’s revenue to organic search.
2. Airbnb grew their business to $84.6 billion using a programmatic SEO strategy
Airbnb dramatically scaled their SEO strategy, which sparked its growth and made it a digital powerhouse in the hospitality industry. I’m talking about a programmatic SEO strategy that propelled Airbnb’s worth to $84.6 billion.
Programmatic SEO refers to creating and publishing landing pages in large numbers using databases that provide information in a page template. This helps you automate and scale your content creation process.
To do this, your landing pages begin from a similar template with the same elements, such as pricing, reviews, etc. Then, you make variations of your page using automated tools.
Let’s now see how this approach worked for Airbnb.
Template pages
Airbnb used a template to create different destination pages that targeted specific keywords. Say, for example, a page like “airbnb.com/united-states/stays.” Airbnb uses the template to create another page, say “airbnb.com/united-states/cabins.”
Looking closely, you realize the difference in these pages is the URL structure, an aspect of programmatic SEO logic.
User experience
Airbnb modeled their website, making it easy and seamless for users to navigate. The website is visually appealing, personalized, and has a great layout.
Airbnb optimized their booking form so users can quickly get information, with a call-to-action (CTA) explaining what happens when you click on it. They also optimized their images to ensure keeping their website’s functionality up.
Keyword optimization
Airbnb did extensive research, finding popular keyword searches for accommodation in different destinations. This gave them a picture of what prospective clients were searching for and helped Airbnb align and optimize their content along these keywords.
Implementing this strategy helped users find Airbnb’s listings in their searches, which attracted more traffic and potentially converted their visitors into bookings.
You can see that currently, more of its keywords are in top positions #1-3.
Internal linking
Airbnb focused on internal linking to boost link juice by linking to nearby destinations and other stays in a specific city. Linking to other unique locations allows them to leverage their pages.
Let’s say they have nine city destinations and three unique locations. If they fill content to all of them with focussed keywords, it automatically results in 27 pages.
With a programmatic SEO strategy, Airbnb attracted over 18M monthly organic visitors. This boosted their revenues to $84.77B and propelled the Airbnb brand to become a leader in the industry.
3. Stanley Steemer boosted its Google visibility by 44.5% in one year
Here, we are talking about getting 716 of Stanley Steemer’s keywords to page one of the search. This was a product of a scalable, local SEO strategy.
Let’s dive into the key aspects of this strategy.
Stanley Steemer targeted users’ channels through mobile, display, and social media advertisements. They used ads that featured a CTA driving consumers to their website.
Megan Lewis, the social media specialist at Stanley Steemer, notes that boosting posts locally allowed them to reach more of their target audience.
They capitalized on local SEO by leveraging Facebook and Instagram to boost their customer engagement with a wider audience. They also optimized their website for mobile devices to ensure their users had a smooth experience, considering that 60% of total web traffic comes from mobile devices.
The company used local SEO tools to monitor their progress, spot any weak areas, and amplify their SEO success. They also capitalized on high-quality content with optimized keywords, raising their Google visibility.
The results were astounding. Stanley Steemer’s Google visibility grew by 44.5%, while organic traffic increased by 36%.
You can see a consistent, gradual growth in their organic traffic, even after Q1 2021. Their overall traffic saw a 143% growth from June 2019 to June 2024.
4. Ahrefs ranked their “SEO stats” article #1 with their link building campaign
Getting your page to rank #1 on Google SERPs is no mean feat, and this impressive Ahrefs achievement must be tactical. Let’s look at how they did it.
They conducted extensive keyword research related to their niche. It helps you understand the user’s intent and find the right keyword to target for your article.
Ahrefs checked for a stats page curating the most backlinks and analyzed it to see how many pages linked back to it.
After, they used the skyscraper technique to build a comprehensive list of SEO statistics. You can find competitive content other websites link to, create better content than them, and replicate the backlinks.
Ahrefs’ link building campaign helped them boost the ranking of their SEO stats page. They reached out to websites ranking to old/outdated stats and offered them their newly-created superior comprehensive content to build high-value links.
Ahrefs email campaign got a 5.71% response rate. 27 of the websites they contacted linked back to them. As a plus, some websites linked to them more than once.
The results were impressive; their “SEO stats” keyword now ranks #1 on Google.
Their referring domains also grew to 2,300+ websites.
Check out our updated list of SEO statistics for 2024.
5. CMA Exam Academy grew their sales by 124.7% in one year
Nathan, the founder of CMA Academy, relied on paid ads, which produced below-par results. Let’s look at the turnaround strategy that did magic for his company.
CMA Academy switched to using a comprehensive SEO and content strategy.
They first analyzed and audited their website to resolve technical issues that were preventing their traffic growth. Some of their existing blog posts were not optimized, so they embraced the opportunity to rewrite and republish content.
Next, they created new scalable content with focused keywords, raising their rankings. For example, one of their pages ranks #1 on Google SERPs for the keyword, “preparing for CMA exam.”
Another page ranks #2.
Their increased rankings attracted more traffic to their website, growing CMA Academy’s average monthly revenue by 124.57%.
Within a year of implementing this SEO strategy, their total transactions credited to organic traffic grew by 395.12%. Traffic still continues to grow at 116%, making it one of the best SEO case studies to learn from.
Nathan, the founder, was amazed by the results and had this to say:
6. KrispCall cloud telephony company’s traffic skyrocketed by 1,969% YoY
You notice this is a four-figure percentage growth, right? Incredibly insane!
In the first year of launch, KrispCall’s cloud telephony website had only 154 visits. Within a year of four SEO techniques, their traffic grew to 185K. Today, they receive over 229K monthly website visitors.
Let’s examine what they did through this SEO case study.
KrispCall used four main SEO strategies to generate big results:
- Programmatic SEO
- Backlinking
- Area code landing pages
- Schema markup
With programmatic SEO, they leveraged data-driven automation to write and publish bulky content using a comprehensive template. Tapping into the full benefit of programmatic SEO ensures your content is informationally rich and fulfills your users’ search intent.
KrispCall used FAQ schema markup on most of their landing pages and blogs, which boosted their visibility in SERP features. Schema markup is a code that helps Google understand your content and show rich snippets, earning your website more clicks.
See below the FAQ schema markup exemplified.
KrispCall also acquired high-quality, contextual backlinks, which act as a vote of confidence for their website.
KrispCall added 426 area code pages, capturing all United States area codes and where their highest traffic comes from.
By combining these SEO strategies, the cloud telephony company grew their traffic by 1,969% within a year.
Ready to Drive Similar SEO Results for Your Website?
One consistent approach in all of these best SEO case studies is creating high-value content. Create content that satisfies your user’s intent. Ensure you optimize your website speed and crawlability and use high-quality backlinks to elevate your rankings.
Businesses face unique challenges ranking their websites in search results and there is no one-size-fits-all SEO approach. So, tailor your SEO strategy to your business needs.
If you don’t know where to begin or what strategy fits your business, we are here to help you. We help audit your website, create a customized SEO strategy, and build quality links for targeted traffic and leads, ultimately, skyrocketing your sales. Book a call with us today!
