SEO Case Study Singapore: Growing Daily Traffic by 250% within 3 months
If you're starting a new website from scratch, let me share with you some steps and strategies that my team at Khepri Digital took to grow a relatively new Elderly Care service website by 250% in just 3 months. Our content-driven strategy is used for many of our current clients and can be used to deliver some quick, quick wins.
From this case study, you will learn about these SEO quick wins:
The Content Strategy roadmap is broken down into three parts: Building topical authority, covering all possible user intents, and also E-A-T (important for a health website)
Internal linking for the correct website structure
Building Local Relevance with Citations & Local Blogging partnerships
Website Background and Website Traffic
This client operates as an eldercare service in Singapore in almost all areas. They provide all types of elder care but are generally considered a type of nursing home.
This client came to Khepri Digital with the expectation that:
We should get them to Page 1 for at least 30% of their keywords in a year
They should be regarded as the experts in the elder care niche
Their Search engine optimization strategy has to be algorithm-proof
Because they came to us completely unoptimized and without any long-form content or blog posts, we were essentially taking a website to rank almost from scratch. Thanks to the PHMC guidelines, SEO is not considered as a push technology so it it is allowed to be used to boost the website's visibility. In this SEO case study, we tell you the step-by-step process of how we generated the organic traffic volumes for this website.
When websites come to us with ranking difficulties, the most usual reason is that Google does not recognize your website as an "authority" in your subject. Remember that the goal of Google is always to answer the searcher's question or intent, so it always wants to match searchers with websites that have answers to these questions.
An "authority" is someone whom you ask a question, and will likely have the correct answer to it. The more developed content you have, the more likely it is that you have an answer to the searcher's question.
For Google to recognize a website as an authority, there are a few prerequisites. This may be an oversimplification, but summarized in three factors, these are
How much of the topic do you cover?
How deeply do you cover a topic?
Are these contents easy to navigate?
We'll have an On-page SEO Step-by-Step for Topical Authority soon, so look out for that!
Step 1: Identify Topics in the Niche
Our clients in the Elderly Care Niche already have a clear niche in the Nursing Homes industry. However, as said above, it is not sufficient to only have pages on Nursing Homes in Singapore, for example. A true expert in the Nursing Home industry must also have good knowledge on
Nursing Home Costs
Old Folks Homes
Nursing Home financial aid
Hence, for any website that you may have, you can condense the content strategy into the general manner
Main Landing Page - Nursing Homes in Singapore
Blog Article 1 - Guide to Nursing Home Costs in Singapore
Blog Article 2 - Financial Aid for Nursing Homes in SG: What they are and How to Apply
Blog Article 3 - Old Folks Home vs Nursing Home: Is there any difference?
Each blog article may also have supplementary blog articles.
If you're thinking - huh? How do I find such topics?
You can easily find new topics and keywords just by doing a Google Search. The "also searched for section" is a good section for you to look at what others are looking for. Then, you should be able to generalize topics that you should be looking at.
You can help your SEO strategy by recording these "also searched for" queries into a Google sheet. You may create a column in the Google sheet named "topics" so that you can assign topics to each of these queries. This helps you visualize any recurring topics you might see in your keyword research.
These research processes are made easier via the use of keyword research tools like Ahrefs.
Step 2: Create Supporting Blog Articles For the Chosen Topics
You should already have had a collation of "Also Searched For" queries on Google, and you should have already assigned topics. You should then search Google again using these keywords to generate more examples of searches that you can use.
You should group keywords with similar themes so that 1 article can optimize for multiple keywords.
Step 3: Internal Links from Blogs into the Main Landing Pages
This is the issue that 90% of our clients have. Google finds your website and your subpage by following the links other pages have. Therefore, to increase the visibility of your website and subpages, you should be actively linking your articles to the main page that you want to rank.
This is an example of an internal link we optimize.
Your internal links, as we call them (because you link from your site to another page of your site), must be contextual. Contextual internal links are
Natural and not forced
Usually in the middle of the article text body
Use anchor texts that explain the subject of the main landing pages
Doing so helps make it clear to Google that your article is reinforcing your landing page for that topic. I.e., your blog post shows google and customers that you know the topic very well.
One of the most important SERP ranking factors is the anchor text used in your internal links.
This has been shown not to be as strict as external backlinks, so we can use keyword-rich anchor texts in a more loose manner.
So, an example we have for our anchor texts that leads to a Nursing Home landing page could be
✅ Keyword rich: Nursing homes in Singapore
✅ Keyword rich: nursing home in Singapore
✅ URL: site.com/nursing-home
✅ Miscellaneous: explained more thoroughly here
This helps you create solid topic clusters for users to read through when they come to your website. For Google, this looks like a set of high-quality content for the niche in Singapore that you choose. Search engines, not just google, love internal linking in general.
Bonus: User intentions & Covering more traffic
One thing to help boost your SEO tactics is the use of different articles for different intents.
The intent of a keyword stands for the desire of the user when he/she goes to the Google SERP. For example, if I search for "list of nursing homes", do I expect information on 1 nursing home, or do I expect an article summarizing the best nursing homes available in Singapore?
There are 3 kinds of Search Intents to cover
Informational - The user wants to get more information. For example, he would search for "How much does a nursing home cost". Informational keywords will have the 5W 1H particle - Who, What, Where, When, Why and How
Commercial - The user is researching for more information about a service or product. They want to know what the "best", and "cheapest" services are.
Transactional - The user is ready to buy the product or service right now.
You should go back to the Google Sheet that you've prepared for your earlier queries, create a new column called "intent", and assign an intent for each keyword you identified. This should help you shave down the specificity of your blog post.
Search Engine Optimization Mantra 2: Search Engines Care about Your On-Page SEO
On-Page Monitoring
When you publish your blog articles, you should always keep a record of the on-page content of your website. The on-page is usually summarized into four sections, much discussed on our on page SEO checklist:
Meta Titles (Yellow Box)
Meta Descriptions (Blue Box)
Headings
URL
Meta Titles
The Title tags (appearing as is in the Yellow box) should
Be about 65 Characters
Have primary keywords near the start of the Title
Not repetitive
In our case studies, for the nursing home client, we do not want titles like "Best Nursing Home in SG Nursing Homes for Singapore | nursinghome.com".
It's long, repetitive and loses clients easily.
You want something short and succinct that highlights the benefit of your business, like:
The Best Nursing Home in Singapore | Express Admissions Now
Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions (which appear as is in the blue box) have not been shown to help websites rank, but the copy which you use in the meta descriptions can help attract readers to the website. The Meta descriptions should
Summarize your page content
Include the keyword at least once in your description because Google highlights those keywords in the descriptions
Squeeze an offer business selling point into the description.
Headings
The Headings are the titles of the page itself (not on the Google Search Engine Results). Headers also summarize the page for users, allowing them to go to where they want quickly. These are some guidelines that we used for our Headers.
Each page should only have ONE H1 Heading that is keyword rich
H2 tags can be dispersed on the page but should be matching with long-tail keywords.
URLs
One of Google's most important success factors is the URL slug that is used for the page. These are the guidelines that we used
User-friendly URLs - for example, nursinghome.com/ang-mo-kio and not nursinghome.com/ang-mo-kio-block-4967-10-536
Have a consistent convention - for example, nursinghome.com/location
The SEO Nirvana for Organic Traffic 3: Technical SEO strategy
For this client, we helped to
Clear out technical errors
Improve Site structure
Technical Audits
A technical SEO audit must be done for all our clients. Google has a limited crawl budget, and hence we take it quite seriously to ensure that our website is accessible to Google. An SEO optimized website should have no major errors, such as
Site Speed
404 Page not found
Robots.txt blockage errors
This article would be too long if we talked about it here, so we are preparing a Technical SEO checklist a little bit down the line.
For this client, the site speed was not an issue, but the broken links were a huge issue when we started work. You can easily check for Technical Errors using the Free Version of Ahrefs' tool, or Siteliner.
If it shows up in the tool - fix it!
Site Structure
How each page of the site is connected will determine whether your page shows up on the first page. Websites with deliberate structure should be able to push users to their desired answers quickly, while also helping Google bots to crawl their website.
When we checked our clients upon onboarding, there were lots of orphan pages. I.e. pages that were not linked to anywhere, or take above 3 clicks to reach.
You can use an automated tool to do so, and Screaming Frog is a good free one.
If the tool turns up orphan pages, what you need to do is quickly link from a blog article to that affected page.
Search Engine Optimization Mantra 4: Backlinking and Citations
What we realized was that this website actually had a lot of Press Releases pointing to it, but most of it was from overseas. Therefore, this wasn't an issue of not having enough powerful links, but there may simply be no local relevance in the backlinks pointing to this website.
Outreach to local bloggers will take some effort, so for the short-term wins, our local SEO Singapore team decided to focus on Local Citations instead.
Local Citations
Business directories in Singapore contain business information of companies that could be helpful to potential searchers. Hence, for a company in Singapore, it stands to gain that its reputation is directly linked to the number of directories it appears in.
Visibility as an authority in the Singaporean market means that it should be mentioned by others - bloggers or directories. While not necessarily bringing high volume sales, citations are usually the first step to solving a locality relevance issue.
We realized that a big problem was that the client was not creating these listings, and neither did it want to generate reviews for its service. We changed that. (Our best local SEO case study also shows how we aced it.)
What we did was to drip in 50-60 citations across 2 months, being careful not to do it all at once. We also ensured that these business directories had high reputations (such as Yelp, and Yellow Pages) and had a low spam score.
You can see how you can improve traffic quickly with some quick wins - what else can you achieve if you have more time and more analysis on your hands?
The content strategy forms the first part of the SEO strategy, and the technical on-page activities that follow will support it. It's a simple mindset to have.
Pierre, a digital marketing expert with over a decade of experience in the industry. Pierre has helped numerous businesses grow their online presence and achieve their marketing goals through strategic digital marketing campaigns. He loves football (a Real Madrid fan) and enjoys Italian food.
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