SEO for a visa application center

The niche in which the client works is narrow. At the same time it is highly competitive - due to the abolition of the visa regime between Ukraine and the EU countries, the main players in the visa processing service have retrained to work with other markets. A niche requires careful study and a well-defined promotion strategy due to the topic.

What did we have at the start

Already during the preparation of the commercial proposal and the initial technical audit of the website, we identified the main problems that prevent the Client's website from promoting correctly:

• many problems in the technical part of the project;
• weaknesses in the content part;
• near absence of link profile.

These errors significantly affected the traffic - compared to competitors, it was extremely low.

Start of work (June 2019) - 40-50 users per day.

Fig. 1 — Data for the start of work (Google Analytics)

Automated services Ahrefs, Serpstat and SreamingFrogSeoSpider helped us with niche analysis and web project audit. The SEO specialist manually reviewed the main pages of the website for common errors including the code. Then we made a list of recommendations for the programmer to fix the problems found.

Workflow

What errors showed a detailed technical audit:

• problems with metadata.

Many pages lacked Title and Description tags, and the existing ones were not optimized for keywords.

• absence or not optimized content on the existing pages.

Content on service categories was significantly spammed by the KW. The texts in the subcategories were present only for the sake of appearance without optimization for targeted queries.

• raw structure.

The website lacked additional pages (splitting by types of visas, by countries, sections "News", "Information on cooperation", etc.), which could additionally lead the target audience for target and near-target queries.

• problems with OnPage optimization:

1. problems with displaying the Ukrainian version of the site;
2. poorly designed conversion path;
3. objects on the pages either ran over each other, or were displayed incorrectly.

• weak link profile.

In fact, it didn't exist at all - we built the link mass literally from scratch.

• lack of crosslinking on multiple pages where it is needed.

1. lack of contextual linking on category pages;
2. wrong implementation - linking led to unimportant pages, the necessary keywords were not used, there were also links to external resources.

• problems with URLs.

Problems with URLs. Many duplicates due to the addition of slashes, incorrect display of language versions with the presence of parameters in the URL.

• low site loading speed (especially for mobile);
• unclosed external links on the website;
• presence of broken links.

Especially on pages with 404 response. All broken links on the website were replaced with working ones.

Now the snippet with micro-marking looks like this:

Fig. 2 — Snippet using micro-marking

The first traffic growth began after correcting the identified errors:

Fig. 3 — Growth after first implementations (Google Analytics)

The website belongs to a narrow topic, so the analysis of the main competitors of the visa processing niche helped us with the content part of search engine optimization. 

Information from Ahrefs and Serpstat made it clear that the website we are promoting has:

• minor semantic core;
• insufficiently optimized texts;
• very weak link profile. 

For example, in this niche, the texts in the main categories usually consist of 5,000 - 10,000 characters. Our site contained texts up to 3000 characters. It was necessary to expand the semantics of the project and write new optimized texts for categories.

The original semantics were small. It only affected the super-frequency keys that matched the page. Medium and low frequency keywords were not used at all. We used Keycollector to collect the complete semantics. The SEO-specialist also collected search tips to maximize the work of the SC. 

That way, the new extended semantic core began to include a wide range of high-, medium- and low-frequency queries. It turned out about 1000 queries.

Fig. 4 — Key query visibility growth trend, Serpstat

Based on the new SC, we compiled a detailed ToR for a copywriter. After agreeing on the ToR and ready-made texts with the Client, we've come to linking.

Fig. 5 — Visibility trend, Serpstat

Analysis of the link mass of the main competitors in the niche showed how many guest posts, crowd links and other types of links are needed for confident promotion.

Sites from the TOP had a minimum number of donors from 100 (according to Ahrefs), while our site had up to 10 donors.

We selected donors based on indicators from different web page ranking, namely: we used data from Ahrefs, Serpstat, Similarweb, Checktrust. Focused on the thematicity of the donor and its GEO. 

That is, they followed an understandable and logical SEO-promotion algorithm with adjustments to the website's topic and the allocated budget. The main thing is to maintain dynamics, both in text factors and in link factors.

Fig. 6 — Link dynamics (Ahrefs data)

The growth was wavy, because search algorithms reacted very quickly to each change, but then a correction followed.

Fig. 7 – Increase in site impressions and clicks (Google Search Console)

Final work on external promotion:

• crowd marketing - posted links on forums, thematic blogs, and other portals from our target audience;
• outreach in thematic sites about travel, tourism, visas, etc.;
• posted links in articles on relevant donor sites;
• web 2.0 for building 2 and 3 levels of link profile.

There are difficulties and certain obstacles on the way to optimizing any project. And our visa application project is no exception.

Problems that affected the outcome:

• problems with finding a good copywriter who understands the subject matter of the website (texts must comply with government laws and at the same time be optimized for sale and promotion);
• difficulties in coordinating texts with the Client (each ToR and written text was personally checked by the Client for the relevance of the information in the text, since the topic of the sphere is quite specific);
• low budget for external promotion;
• lack of understanding of many processes in SEO on the part of the customer (according to the Client, we wrote technical specifications for the collected keys and purchased links. While analyzing a niche, creating a strategy, collecting semantics are time-consuming processes).

All these difficulties have affected the result that we got.

So, what have we done according to the promotion strategy approved by the Client?

• filled the website with well-optimized content;
• implemented cross-linking;
• competently built up the link mass.

Deliverables

Some results became visible in the very first months, because internal optimization was enough for the first push.

Ultimately, traffic grew by 152%:

Fig. 8 – Comparison of data for the first and last months (June - October, Google Analytics data)

We also managed to increase user engagement:

Fig. 9 – User Engagement Metrics

SEO is one of the most effective, but labor-intensive and expensive services.

As part of our SEO work, we have implemented the Client's main task - increased search traffic by 2.5 times. This amounted to 100-110 users per day, despite all the difficulties and obstacles.

We made a plan of activities for further promotion, according to which we are developing the website today.

Do you want to have the same results? Contact our specialists and order SEO-promotion for your website!