Business Case SEO – MadCityZen

If you are a marketer or a business owner, one of your wishes is probably to get more customers to expand your business

And one of the most effective ways to do this is undoubtedly to attract traffic to your business website. Unfortunately, many companies still struggle to find the best strategy to generate visitors to their website

However, there is no lack of solutions. Moreover, on the Internet, there are many contents, sometimes wrong, which promise to attract more visitors. But what is it really? How can you really improve your website’s traffic with SEO techniques?

If you have already tried to apply some strategies to try to gain more visitors, but without much success, I propose you today to discover those presented in this business case

These are optimization techniques that I personally implemented on the website of one of my clients, the team building agency MadCityZen, as part of an SEO campaign to improve its visibility on the Net and actually generate more visitors

To make this business case as factual as possible and not to complete this long list of purely theoretical contents that already abound on the Web, I thought it would be useful to illustrate each section with “before and after” shots

The idea is to clearly highlight the changes observed between the old performance and the newly acquired performance on my client’s site thanks to my branding

Come on, let’s stop chatting! Let’s discover together these strategies and these captures that could be made public of course with the client’s consent.

Chapter 1: Preamble

Before starting the case study itself, this first chapter will serve as a sort of preamble where I take you to discover my SEO agency Twaino and the client’s universe, the Team Building MadCityZen agency

1.1 Twaino : SEO Agency

Twaino is an SEO agency with its head office located in the 10th district of Paris. The agency is also present in several other French cities such as Nice, Marseille, Lyon, Strasbourg..

Twaino’s objective is to assist business owners to improve the visibility of their activities on the web. And for that, our strength is to succeed in generating traffic from the results pages of search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!

Search engines remain the primary source of traffic for many industries on the web and our specialty is to help you get on the first pages of these engines for better traction on your site

Whether you are in the restaurant, hotel, healthcare, retail, travel or service industry, Twaino has a staff of qualified SEO experts who can help your site rank on search engines for even more customers

To meet the needs of our clients from all walks of life, we offer a diverse list of services such as

• Online SEO training;
• SEO campaign;
• SEO audit;
• A competitive SEO benchmark;
• Writing blog posts, product sheets, service page content or any other type of web content;
• The creation of personalized illustrations;
• And more.

In addition, Twaino SEO agency stands out in the market by some values that we have remained faithful to namely

• An SEO service based solely on SEO
• The use of ethical optimization techniques approved and recommended by search engines
• A turnkey approach to SEO in order to guarantee short and long term results for our clients
• A “cards on the table” collaboration with easily measurable results
• An inclusive approach to take our clients’ opinions into account

1.2. Alexandre Marotel: Founder of Twaino Agency and SEO Campaign Manager for MadCityZen

I am the person in charge of the campaign conducted on behalf of the MadCityZen agency and which is the subject of this business case. For those who do not know me, I am Alexandre Marotel, SEO expert and consultant. I am also the founder of the SEO agency Twaino

To give you an overview of my career, I first accumulated 3 years of international work experience after graduating from business school

Before I decided to start my own career as a web entrepreneur, especially in the field of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is a highly competitive sector here in Paris

But by respecting White Hat SEO techniques in accordance with search engine guidelines, my agency manages to stand out from the crowd with more than 20,000 activevisitors per month on the https://www.twaino.com/ website

My specialty is SEO, but I am also passionate about digital marketing in general. Outside of my working hours, I also spend my time sharing my knowledge of digital marketing through content that I post on

• My blog
• My LinkedIn profile
• My YouTube page
• And my online SEO store

I also share my graphic designs available for free on my SEO gallery as well as some SEO tools that you can still use for free to optimize certain tasks in your marketing strategy

These are

• People Also Ask Twaino
• The Twaino SERP Simulator;
• Twaino SEO Audit Tool
• Twaino Word and Character Counter
• The SEO Tools Platform

I also have an SEO Qualification (QASEO) and a Certificate of Achievement from Google Analytic Academy

But it is one thing to have degrees and another to mature in professional experience

That’s why I’m always learning to understand more about search engine algorithms and new trends in the SEO industry

I’ve been helping companies of all sizes and in all sectors to gain visibility and notoriety on the web for several years now, like this agency we’re about to discover

Chapter 2: The client and its context

MadCityZen is a production agency of animations during events and company seminars to reinforce the team cohesion

The agency has more than 5,000 events to its credit, with animations that are at the cutting edge of innovation and the latest event trends

Before our collaboration, MadCityZen had two websites on which Internet users could discover the services offered by the agency

• A first, main website, dedicated to team building events and which gathered most of the traffic and leads of the company

On this first version of the MadCityZen website, a summary analysis revealed the following information

• Website : https://www.madcityzen.com
• Sector : Team Building Agency
• Type of business : BtoB
• Domain Authority : 29
• Page Authority : 29
• Content Management System : WordPress
• Age of the website : 10 years

• A second website dedicated to digital team building activities and which generated few leads and almost no traffic:

So I took a much more in-depth look at the main version of the agency’s site with a more in-depth analysis that revealed the following this time

• Traffic: 5 000 visits per month including
  • 88% came from organic search (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.)
  • 6% from referral sites
  • 2% from social networks
  • And 0% of traffic obtained through advertising and emailing
• Average visit duration: 1 minute – 30 seconds
• Bounce rate: 67%
• Computer: 68% and Phone: 32% (Type of devices used by Internet users to connect to the site)
• Duplicate content found on the site: 21%

I also noticed the presence of some practices not recommended by search engines such as

• The creation of more than 300 articles with less volume and poor quality
• And several punishable optimization techniques that can affect the ranking of the site on search engines

Considering everything that was observed on the client’s site, it was decided to start an SEO campaign in accordance with Google’s requirements and recommendations

• Start date of the SEO campaign: January 2020
• The services offered during the said campaign
  • White Hat SEO techniques in accordance with Google regulations
  • A rigorous methodology focused on data analysis and the client’s business knowledge

Chapter 3: SEO campaign start-up and methodology

As an SEO, it is my duty to offer my clients a quality SEO service that can really improve their ranking on search engines

And one of the effective ways to achieve this is to succeed in reconciling rigor and methodology in the SEO strategy used.

The fact is that SEO is a rather vast discipline that requires a well-developed roadmap in order to remain effective in the application of the different optimization techniques

Of course, a good SEO consultant is also the one who can improvise in case of unforeseen events and who is able to propose a solution to quickly correct a bad situation

But still, in the absence of a methodology, such situations could quickly get worse with important repercussions on the SEO performance of the site.

I have therefore found it useful to split my SEO campaigns into 3 main steps for all my clients

Obviously, for a customized campaign that is truly adapted to the difficulties of each client, the optimization techniques used in each of the 3 steps may be slightly readjusted from one project to another, but the methodology remains the same:

Without further ado, let’s discover together the first step of this process

3.1. Phase 1: SEO Audit

It should be noted that I systematically begin my campaigns with an SEO audit because it is an essential step in SEO

Just like a medical diagnosis, the SEO audit allows me to identify the “evils” that undermine your site and that prevent its referencing on the pages of search engines

The goal of this first step of my SEO campaigns is to really understand the cause of the problems encountered on your site in order to propose optimization techniques really adapted to your site

But that’s not all, the SEO audit is also an opportunity for me to identify your pages that already occupy good positions on search engines. The idea is to help them to keep this ranking or even better to optimize them for even better rankings

But in practice, what do I actually do during my SEO audits? In order to analyze all aspects of the MadCityZen client’s site, the SEO audit essentially consisted of a

3.1.1. Crawl of the sites

The crawl is a particularly important concept in natural referencing because of its double utility

On the one hand, it is the step that allows indexing robots to explore your site and decide which of your pages deserve to be added to the search engine index

A page that is not indexed has no chance of appearing in the search results no matter how much optimization strategies have been applied to it

On the other hand, the crawl allows the SEO to explore the site he is in charge of in order to understand, among other things, the internal mesh of the site, the indexability of the pages, the origin of the problems encountered, etc

With my client, I performed the crawl on his two websites, which allowed me to identify

• All the URLs
• Their volumes
• Their HTTP status codes
• Their indexability states
• The size of titles and meta descriptions
• Conversion rates

Collecting this information allowed me to have an idea of the overall health of the site. I then continued my audit, this time focusing on the competition

3.1.2. Study of the competition

During the study of the competition, I manage to identify the main competitors of my clients. The idea is to keep an eye on the competition by spying on their different SEO strategies

Successful strategies will be copied and improved into something more competitive. As for the competition’s unsuccessful strategies, they will be avoided in order not to make the same mistakes

In order to remain efficient during this competitive analysis stage, I apply a few filters to my client’s list of potential competitors in order to extract only the most important ones

With MadCityZen, for each potential competitor on the search engine pages, I looked for

• Domain authority
• The different sources of traffic
• And site construction

Only the sites that were able to get good results for the different filters will be considered as main competitors

This allows me to avoid wasting resources and to focus the competitive analysis on sites that represent references in my client’s industry.

3.1.3. Analysis of the competition on important keywords

A complete competitive analysis also includes keywords, especially the most profitable keywords for the client’s site

I therefore carried out an in-depth keyword research in order to determine precisely the most important terms and expressions in the team building activities organization sector

The next step was to identify the competitors’ web pages that are well positioned for each of these keywords. From the URL of these pages, I was able to know

• The exact position occupied on the SERPs
• The type of content used
• The title and the meta descriptions proposed
• The authority of the page
• The authority of the domain
• The number of referring domains
• The number of backlinks obtained
• The number of words and images inserted
• Etc

All this information collected on the strategy of the competition will allow to adapt accordingly the contents of my client to occupy a better position on the SERPs

However, it is one thing to produce content that appeals to search engines enough to win the top positions in search results, but it is another to attract the interest of Internet users and succeed in converting them into customers

To really take advantage of the ranking on SERPs, it will be necessary to produce content that also appeals to Internet users to achieve a better conversion rate.

But to do this, we must first succeed in identifying the user profile most likely to be interested in my client’s services

3.1.4. Definition of targeted personas

The persona is a marketing term used to designate a character imagined from a set of individuals who share the same consumption habits when faced with an offer

In the current context, the study of the different user profiles allowed us to define 3 personas for the MadCityZen agency, of which here is a model

Name : Sandrine

Age: 45 years old

Level of study: ESC / FAC / Master

Social Networks: LinkedIn / Facebook

Business sector: Event agency

Company size : 30 – 200 people

Preferred means of communication: Phone / Email

Responsibility: Senior Junior Project Manager / Account Director

Line manager : CEO

Source of information : Website / Phone / Internal database of providers

Objectives: To build client loyalty to the agency

Main Challenges: To be able to trust your provider / To make your teams autonomous

Decision level: Medium / Strong

Career aspiration: Aspires to manager / Political / No waves

Reco: Very strong reco power / Internal influence

Pain point : Intervene as little as possible

Enable clients to achieve their strategic objectives

Type of content : Business case (Big projects)

Customer opinions / References

Strategy

Budget sensitivity: Medium

As you can see, this is valuable information that will be used in the creation of future content to target only potentially interested people

3.1.5. Determination of the current architecture and redesign proposal

Search engine optimization also requires a good site architecture. A complex site with deep pages could ruin the user experience and significantly affect the conversion rate

Let’s say that in order to buy a product or pay for a team building activity, the user has to first browse through several pages with an “Add to cart” or “Request a quote ” button that is hard to notice

In such a structural mess, it is unlikely that all interested users will actually find their way to your important pages and make a purchase.

What is recommended is rather a well-organized architecture capable of

• Helping the user to easily and explicitly discover the scope of your services
• Facilitate the process of purchasing or ordering your products and services
• Putting the company’s addresses in plain sight to allow Internet users to contact you easily or join your pages on social networks
• Simplify the process of subscribing to the newsletter
• Avoid deep pages more than 3 clicks away from the home page

But before bringing all these points on the architecture of my client, it would be necessary to first succeed in determining the type of architecture currently used on his website. The work at this level therefore consisted in going through the site to determine the current architecture

3.1.6. Proposal to redesign the architecture of MadCityZen

It must be said that the model I identified on the client’s site does not offer a better user experience and is not very recommended in terms of SEO optimization either

So I made a proposal to the client for a redesign based on a preliminary analysis of

• The most visited pages of the site
• The browsing behavior of the visitors
• The conversion rate
• And the architectures of competing sites

My proposal is an architecture built according to the silo model which consists in grouping the pages by theme or category

This grouping is possible thanks to a network of internal links that connects the pages of the same theme (or category) to each other

The advantage with the silo architecture is that it allows visitors to quickly find the information they are looking for

By consulting the first content on a given topic, they will also discover links that address related topics for a more complete understanding of the original topic

In other words, the silo model leads the visitor to “travel” through your site by discovering other pages that address a specific aspect of their initial search topic

In addition, the organization of pages according to the silo model makes it easier for crawlers. The crawl is much faster, which optimizes the crawl budget and constitutes more chances to see your important pages indexed by search engines

With the client’s consent, I implemented the new architecture on the agency’s website as follows:

The architecture redesign proposal has been done on the main MadCityZen website, but what about the second website of the agency?

3.1.7 Merger of Digital Day into MadCityZen

Instead of proposing a new architecture also for the second site (Digital Day) of the agency, I found that it would be better to merge it with the main site. So I consolidated all the activities proposed on the Digital Day site as well as the contents written on the domain name https://www.madcityzen.fr/

This was done for several reasons, but mainly to concentrate all the SEO efforts in one direction and to obtain better results

Thus, the performance obtained will not be diluted and will be converged to a single version of the site for a higher Domain Authority

But between the old animations already available on MadCityZen and the new ones added since Digital Day, it will be necessary to clean up to propose something well organized for the visitors

3.1.8. Recategorization of the animations

After the architecture redesign, there were more than a hundred animations to be classified by categories. For a coherent recategorization of the animations, I grouped them according to business and SEO interests

This resulted in a total of 9 categories of animations which are

• Remote Team Building
• Unusual & Original
• Innovation & Digital
• Art & Creativity
• Music & Expression
• Sustainable development
• Challenges
• Audiovisual & Cinema
• Zen & Wellness

But it should be noted that for the visitors, especially the new ones, it would be a bit difficult to find the animation that would suit them best in this flurry of activities and workshops that the agency offers. So I found it useful to add some filters to refine the search

3.1.9. Creating new filters to pull animations

To help users who connect to the MadCityZen website to find the ideal team building animation more easily, I set up a search system with more than twenty filters that visitors can check such as

• Collaborative animation
• Product launch
• Covid Compatible
• Strengthen cohesion and team spirit
• And many more.

The operation remains the same as the filters you usually use when searching: The user checks the filters of his choice to decide the format, the context and the objectives of the animations he wants to consult

The user automatically receives a list of activities that correspond to the criteria he or she entered during the search. He can further refine the results by adding more filters to be as precise as possible

But the MadCityZen website is not only animations, it is also a Blog section with several articles that have also to be well organized

3.1.10. Categorization of the blog articles

Just like the animations, I also categorized the blog articles of the site according to business and SEO interests. There are more than 300 contents that I tried to group into ten categories, namely

• Team Building Music
• Team Building Activities
• Team Building Company
• Innovative activity animation
• Team Building Sustainable Development
• Team building activity
• Team Building Artistic
• Company evening
• Ideas for Event Animations
• Zen and Well Being Activity
• Team Building

But since it is still an SEO audit, I analyzed all the articles published on the site to evaluate their quality from an SEO point of view.

After analysis, it must be recognized that from an editorial point of view, there was a commendable effort that was made. However, some errors were observed, including

• Low quality content
• Content that was sometimes less relevant
• Non-categorized contents
• Non evergreen contents.

To correct all this, some contents were simply deleted and others were consolidated into more complete and qualitative contents

3.1.11. Implementation of a redirection plan

To really take advantage of the architectural redesign that was done, it was important to proceed with a restructuring of the URLs of the site

The work at this level was to review the structure of over 700 URLs and propose a new, more explicit structure for each of them, especially the slug parts

This is a rather important task in SEO because search engines also use slugs to understand the theme of a page

This way, the page in question will rank higher in search results when a user makes a query that includes the same keywords used in the URL structure

In addition to the optimization techniques, proposing for example the URL www.madcityzen.fr/activites-team-building/team-building-a-distance/home-party as the address of a page is a way to give it a better chance of getting a good ranking when a user searches for “team building activities”, “remote team building” or “home party” on the Net

Secondly, redirects were put in place to ensure that users who still have access to the old URLs do not end up on a 404 error page

All the URLs that were modified or restructured were automatically redirected to the new URLs so as not to lose the traffic that these old addresses generate to the site

3.1.12. Creation of the page: Team Building Activities

Finally, I created a reference page, the ” Team Building Activities ” page, which lists all the activities offered by the agency, that is to say more than a hundred activities

The idea is to offer to the users of the site, a complete list like an index listing all the available activities that can be discovered on a single space

On the left side of this page, the visitor has a filtering system to help him sort the activities and easily find those that best fit his needs.

In summary, the main result of this first stage of the SEO campaign is a new site architecture that offers

• A structure that meets the needs of the client
• An SEO friendly architecture according to the recommendations of search engines
• And a categorization of the contents to facilitate the search and the visit of the Internet users as well as the robots of exploration on the site.

Now, let’s move on to the second step of the SEO campaign process, the actual optimization

3.2. optimization

The optimization stage is not fixed and can change from one company to another depending on the analysis results obtained during the SEO audit phase

Indeed, it is on the basis of the data collected and the observations made during the audit that I can decide on the SEO optimization strategies to be applied in the long and short term on the site in order to correct the problems encountered

It is also during the optimization phase that I manage to better exploit the best pages of the site to attract more traffic to the site. This can include, for example

• Expanding the volume and semantic scope of a page
• Repurposing successful content into other types of content for greater success
• Targeting other marketing channels to generate new visitors
• Etc.

With MadCityZen, the optimization phase consisted mainly of

• Optimization of 100+ animation pages;
• The optimization of 300+ blog posts consolidated into 30 contents
• The optimization of the geographical pages of the site
• The optimization of titles and Meta description

But in practice, what are the tasks I perform during these different stages of optimization?

3.2.1. Rewriting and SEO optimization of animations

The optimization stage started with the content written on the team animations and consisted in

3.2.1.1. Restructure more than 100 contents written on the animations

The idea here is to propose a detailed and coherent plan that leads the reader to progressively discover the concept of the animation that has been presented. Typically, this means proposing a plan in this format

• What is the XXXX activity?
• How does it work?
• Why choose this animation?
• Frequently asked questions
• Conditions of realization
• Customer reviews

As you can see, the plan is rather detailed with at the beginning a definition to bring the reader to really know what it is about. Then comes a description of how the animation works to reveal the course of the animation in great detail

In the third chapter, we try to list all the advantages that the prospect could benefit from by participating in the animation. And finally, the questions that often come up, the conditions of realization and the opinion of customers who have already tried the animation

To give you a concrete example of all this, we have the Team Building African Beat article that I copied/pasted into a Google Docs document in order to rewrite the content

During the rewrite, I perform

• Expanding the semantic fields by targeting in the content variants of the main keyword that users could enter to search the animation on the web;
• The addition of several paragraphs to increase the volume of the content, but also to provide all the useful information that the visitor needs to discover the animation and potentially offer it to his work team
• Inserting images and videos to enhance the content and avoid the user reading a block of text. This can be very annoying;
• SEO optimization by working on the content tags :
  • Headings
  • Titles
  • Meta description
  • Etc…

Once the new plan was used, the content rewriting was completed and the optimization techniques were done, I

• Determined with the internal sales teams the most frequently received questions regarding the animation;
• Before proceeding with the writing of the answers to these questions

You can go to the website to see the Team Building African Beat article in question, but here are a few captures to help you get an idea of the final result

• The page header and the first chapter

• The next 3 chapters

• Then the last 3: the FAQ, the conditions of realization and the customers’ opinion

This scenario was applied to the 100+ animations published on the client’s site

3.2.2. Consolidation, Rewriting and SEO Optimization of the Blog articles

After the content on the animations, the work was then to optimize the articles published in the Blog section of the site, that is to say more than 300 contents I also optimized

The work at this level was essentially to :

• Consolidate the articles that address the same theme into more detailed and larger articles
• Propose a new structure to the contents by respecting these 3 different parts:
  • Introduction
  • Chapters
  • And conclusion
• Expanding the semantic fields
• Adding new paragraphs
• Add and optimize images by
• Renaming raw images
• Defining an alternative text (Alt text tag) optimized
• Inserting images in the content, taking into account the context of the surrounding texts

To give you a concrete idea of the work that was done at this level, let’s take the example of the article 70+ crazy ideas for Team Building and federating animations

• To start, I created a Google Docs document in which I scrapped several rather unusual animations that have the power to really unite the employees of the same company. I counted 70 in total, hence the title of the article
• Then, I had to rewrite all the content to correct the little typos and above all to create a well-structured and coherent article

• For SEO reasons, the semantic field of the article was expanded to cover as many queries as possible. For SEO reasons, the semantic field of the article has been widened to cover as many queries as possible. This includes terms and expressions related to the main keyword that Internet users are used to enter on search engines to look for ideas for Team Building animations for their corporate events

You can consult thearticle in question on the agency’s website, but here are a few captures to show you the final result

At the beginning of the page, the reader has a summary to consult the plan of the article and access or return directly to a chapter that interests him/her

Then, in the body of the article, they can discover each of the animations listed with supporting photos to experience the highlights of other participants

And it’s safe to say that this article format has been well received by Internet users, as it now totals 35,800 clicks, which is a fourfold increase in organic traffic in the space of a few months.

Now, let’s move on to the third part of the optimization phase, the geographic articles

3.2.3. Rewriting and SEO optimization of geographic pages

Geographic pages are those pages that are designed to promote a service in a specific area such as “business animation in Paris” for example. These pages are very important because of the conversion rate they generate

With MadCityZen, I gathered all the geographical pages on a single address that you can consult and discover the cities in which the agency organizes its corporate events

The optimization of these pages also consisted in

• To propose a restructuring of the contents by respecting the plan
  • Introduction
  • Chapters
  • And conclusion
• Expanding the semantic fields
• Adding new paragraphs
• And integrate images

To finish the optimization phase of this SEO campaign, I also thought of reviewing all the titles and meta description

3.2.4. Optimization of titles and meta descriptions

The optimization of titles and meta descriptions is almost important in the SEO process because they are two essential elements that considerably influence the traffic rate that a website or a web page can receive

Notice that despite a good positioning on the SERPs, a page has less chances to receive clicks when it displays a non-explicit title or a truncated description for example

It is in a way the first impression that the company presents to Internet users. It must therefore be attractive enough to encourage users to learn more by clicking on the page

With MadCityZen, I first identified the titles, descriptions and subtitles that really need to be optimized

Then these titles and meta descriptions were rewritten not only to catch the users’ attention, but also to reiterate to the search engines the theme covered on each page

But how is all this organized? Let’s say for example that a web page

• Succeeds in occupying the 7th place on the first page of Google search results
• It then registers 23,000 impressions (number of times a user has seen the link of the page in Google results)
• Then finally gets 14 clicks

It is clear that there is a disproportionality between the visibility of this page and the traffic it gets. In such circumstances, we can only suspect the quality of the meta description titles as the source of the problem that probably doesn’t encourage users to click on the link of the page.

With MadCityZen, I have therefore prioritized the optimization of titles and meta descriptions of all pages that despite their good ranking and high number of impressions do not manage to attract corresponding traffic.

3.3. creation and promotion

The creation and promotion stage is the last phase of my SEO campaigns. By the way, I would like to remind you that after identifying and solving the problems with the SEO audit and optimizing the existing content, the site is doing quite well with content that is now perfectly optimized for search engines

The SEO campaign could well end with these two steps, but if I decided to add a third one it’s mainly because the Web is a medium of the moment and standing still could regress the performance and the SEO ranking of the site.

The creation and promotion phase therefore comes to maintain the current state of the site while also trying to gradually gain better results

With MadCityZen, the creation and promotion phase essentially consisted of

• Creating content for the category pages
• Creating new Blog articles
• And of course optimizing the titles and meta descriptions of the new articles written

Concretely, here are the tasks I perform during these different stages

3.3.1. Creation of category pages

The objective here is to create category pages capable of ranking on the pages of search engines. The work to achieve this was to

• Create new content
• Create category pages according to the plan
  • Introduction (presentation of the category)
  • Chapters
  • Conclusions
• Inserting images and videos;
• And expand the semantic field

For example, we have the “Remote Team Building” category page that I created from a Google Docs document

Here is the final rendering

It must be said that the creation of this category page on “remote team building” was a success with a total of 12,700 clicks due mainly to the fact that it is a cardinal request during the COVID period

As with the animations, I also found it useful to create new blog posts for the MadCityZen site

3.3.2. Creating New Blog Posts

Before proceeding to the writing of the articles themselves, it is important to proceed to a thorough keyword research in order to identify the themes with a strong potential for the site

To do this, the keyword research will be based on 3 selection criteria, namely

• An interesting search volume
• A low competition
• And a quality traffic for the company.

The list of keywords obtained after this sorting will allow the creation of contents

• Relevant from a business point of view
• And effective for SEO.

Then, in the order of content creation, priority will be given to topics according to

• Volume of content
• SEO difficulty
• Search intent
• And the data collected during the study of the competition

Now, the creation of articles can begin for content

• Useful
• Unique
• Accurate
• That respect Google’s rules
• Structured
• With optimized titles and meta descriptions
• Optimized images and videos

As an example of a new blog post written, we have the “30 Team Building Activities Ideas to do indoors”

The final result is this

After being published, the article was able to accumulate 238 clicks from 07/19/2021 to 10/18/2021 with “indoor team building” as the main keyword

This is where the SEO campaign for MadCityZen agency ends. But what about its effectiveness? Was the campaign able to deliver the expected results? That’s what we’ll find out in the next chapter

Chapter 4: SEO results

This last chapter will be dedicated to the results we were able to obtain on the MadCityZen site in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the SEO campaign that was conducted

And the reference tools to appreciate the quality of an SEO campaign remain unquestionably

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• And Ahrefs

Without further ado, let’s discover together what Google Analytics has revealed about the SEO performance of the site

3.1. Google Analytics

The first metric we will check with Google Analytics is the traffic source to understand which source brings the most visitors to the website

On the screenshot below, we can see that the organic traffic coming from SEO is increasing

An evolution from 5 000 active visitors per month in January 2020 to 17 000 active visitors per month in October 2021

On the two following captures, we can also see a nice progression of acquired traffic from SEO that continues to rise over time

Not surprisingly, the acquisition report revealed that

• Organic traffic, i.e. traffic obtained from the organic results of search engines represents 85% of the overall traffic of the company
• Next comes direct traffic, which represents 13% (visitors who enter the site’s domain name directly into their browser)
• The referral or referral traffic 2%
• And the traffic acquired from social networks 1%

The report “sessions by country” has also allowed to classify the website traffic by country of origin

• France is at the top of the ranking with 75.8
• Belgium with 4.3%
• Canada 2.8%; and
• Switzerland 2.2%
• Morocco 1,3%

These were the important reports offered by Google Analytic, now let’s discover those offered by Google SEarch Console

3.2 Google Search Console

The first important report with the search console is the total number of clicks. For the MadCItyZen account, we can see that the site gets 129,000 as total number of clicks.

With 3.49 M as the number of impressions

3.3. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is also a very powerful SEO tool and its results confirmed the trends observed with Google Analytics and Google Search Console

Organic traffic in full progress

3.4. Duplicate Content

Duplicate content refers to pages whose contents are completely or partially similar. In some sectors such as e-commerce or events, it is not uncommon to encounter a high rate of duplicate content on websites

However, this is a punishable practice that can regress the ranking of the sites concerned on the pages of search engines

With MadCityZen, the work was also to review the rate of duplicate content. As you can see on the picture below, the site had a 21% duplicate content rate

After the SEO campaign, we were able to obtain

• 11% duplicate content
• 16% of common content;
• And 73% of unique content

This reduction in the rate of duplicate content on the MadCityZen site helped to avoid potential Google penalties while improving the user experience.

Conclusion

We are at the end of this case study with the team building animation agency MadCityZen and I really hope you enjoyed it

Throughout this Business Case, we had to discover the optimization strategies I use during my SEO campaigns to improve the visibility and the notoriety of my clients’ websites on search engines pages

It is also these same optimization techniques, with a few adaptations, that allowed me to exceed the 20,000 monthly active visitors mark on the website of my SEO agency, Twaino

If you too have a business that needs more visibility on the web to expand your activities, I remain available to accompany you in this quest.

Together, we will discuss your goals and agree on a win-win collaboration to achieve those goals.

Contact me at

If you have any questions or need advice, feel free to contact me by email, or by phone at the following addresses

PARIS

• 20 passage cardinet, 75017 Paris
• Phone number: 07 86 06 39 48
• contact@twaino.com
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