[Case Study]: Mindstream Improves Organic Traffic by 179 Percent for Online Nutrition Retailer

Background:

Healthy Goods is an online nutritional supplement retailer and healthy lifestyle blog that turned to Mindstream Media Group for strategies to help them drive traffic to their website.

Campaign goal:

Healthy Goods wanted us to help them increase organic traffic and sales throughout Healthy Goods’ website. After a comprehensive search engine optimization (SEO) audit of the Healthy Goods site, we determined they’d been hit by several Google penalties that had adversely affected search traffic to the site. These penalties resulted in a steady decline of organic traffic and revenue.

We immediately triaged the most pressing SEO issues including toxic backlinks to the website and duplicate site content. Given the nature of these issues, it’s most likely the site was impacted by two of Google’s algorithm updates – Panda and Penguin.

Here’s a quick background on the two Google algorithm updates.
Panda:
  • Introduced in February 2011.
  • Impacted roughly 11.8 percent of queries.
  • Designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites — sites that don’t have much value for readers, contain low-quality content (e.g., sites with spelling, stylistic or factual errors) or have duplicate content available on other sites.
Penguin:
  • Introduced in April 2012.
  • Impacted roughly 3.1 percent of queries.
  • Designed to lower the rankings of sites engaged in webspam – a practice that includes keyword stuffing and building unnatural backlinks.

Results:

After disavowing several thousand links and updating the website’s content, Healthy Goods started to see a climb in organic traffic. The advanced SEO techniques that Mindstream Media Group implemented resulted in a complete turnaround of the organic traffic to the site.

Improved monthly SEO traffic

Month-over-month traffic increased by 179 percent after we implemented our advanced SEO tactics. This image shows a year-over-year comparison of traffic to the site for July.

Year over year comparison of site traffic

Highlights:
  • Sessions increased more than 179 percent.
  • New Users increased more than 203 percent.
  • Transactions rose more than 12 percent.
  • Revenue rose more than 14 percent.

Here’s an extended four-month snapshot (April through July) highlighting the impact Mindstream’s SEO efforts had on the SEO of Healthy Goods’ website:

Four month snapshot of website traffic after SEO improvements

Highlights:
  • Sessions increased 120 percent.
  • New Users increased 133 percent.
  • Transactions rose 15 percent.
  • Revenue rose 8 percent.