Ecommerce SEO Case Study: 500,000+ Visitors After Penguin Penalty

In this case study, I will show you how we helped our client not only recover from a Google penalty but also:

This client sells a range of dieting recipe books & guides, so it was important for them to recover from their penalty whilst keeping a high presence in the search results.

Keep reading to learn the exact strategies we used to achieve those results.

A Closer Look At The Case Study Site

This client sells products in the diet & weight loss niche, mostly targetting a US-based client list, came to us after getting badly hit with a Penguin penalty.

Operating within a YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) niche meant that we had to pay extra attention to:

…both for visitors and for Google by cleaning up their link profile and building high-quality links.

Not only that but the site was plagued with on-site SEO issues that needed to be fixed in order to create a good user experience for the visitors.

The Biggest Challenges We Had to Overcome

The client came to us via our Google penalty recovery service after their site got hit badly by a Penguin Penalty.

This penalty was due to 2 reasons:

1. A long history of link spamming
2. Use of over-optimised anchor text

On top of that, the old site had serious on-site SEO issues.

As a result, we decided to set up a brand new site with a partial match domain which also makes up the brand name of this business.

The site was freshly registered when we started to work on it.

Create A Plan Of Attack

After identifying all the challenges our client was up against, we:

Let me explain:

We were able to achieve great results with our bespoke link-building process that was focused on elevating the rankings for the search terms that would have the biggest impact.

Over a year, we created 200+ dieting, health and nutrition-related backlinks from sites that have high levels of authority in Google.

We were fully focused on feeding the algorithm with exactly the type of links it favours – contextual links on high authority-related websites.

If you want results like these too and you need our help – send us an enquiry form to start the process.

The Results Are In

Ranking Results

A year after starting the campaign, the site now ranks on the first page across the board for most high-value diet-related terms.

It also ranks on the first page for over 4,000 separate keywords in the US, according to SEM Rush data.

We targeted the most competitive high-traffic terms in the niche & you can see our results in the image below-

As you can see from the graph, the majority of the rankings gains were made during the first 4-6 months of the campaign.

The site continued to rank on the first page and steadily improved its positions with no negative impact from the recent Penguin updates or any manual reviews.

Looking at the SEM Rush data, you can see how the site has progressed during the past year.

There was a slight drop-off in May due to a few Panda issues related to other websites ripping off and duplicating our clients’ content.

That was swiftly remedied, with overall search visibility continuing to grow each month steadily.

The site is currently ranking for:

Traffic Results

The site now gets over 500,000 visitors each month from organic searches, including Google and Bing. Traffic from search engines makes up over 50% of this site’s overall traffic.

Social Media Results

The increased search positions have also helped the site owner grow out some large and highly engaged social profiles:

The social following is a great boost to traffic.

It acts as a further trust signal with Google, which has certainly helped the campaign progress quickly and maintains its rankings once shown on the 1st page.

Wrapping It Up

So there you have it:

The strategy we used to help our client recover from a Google penalty.

All we did was:

…whilst building trust & authority and increasing our client’s online presence.

If you want to archive similar results but don’t have the skills, the time, or the resources, feel free to contact our team here.

And if you have any questions about the case study, please leave a comment below!