How Greenlane Agency Boosted Their Rankings in Just a Couple of Days

This is a TRUE & SUCCESSFUL story from Bill Sebald – founder at Greenlane, with 15 years of eCommerce & SEO experience in the background, written and documented by himself.

Within 24 hours, we saw our rank improve from #5,  for one of the term we were optimizing for, to #2 in the search engines.

Background

As an agency, we are always dealing with clients that face all kinds of issues, insignificant search rankings, low quality content, few social shares on social media, poor internal link optimization, low conversion rates, slow loading time for a website, defective link building techniques used and so on. Yet, regardless of the problem they are facing, rankings have always been a focus point.

The biggest advantage I’ve experienced using the tool is the permission to build better blog posts and content pieces with insights from the SERPs we’re aiming to target. And content has a high importance among other Google ranking factors.

For as long as I remember, quality content has always had higher value and can assure a great number of organic traffic.

It’s a good resource for onpage SEO to have on hand for a sanity check to ensure you’re covering all relevant topics in our content marketing plan.

The tool was very simple and easy to use. It did not take long to understand how it worked.
	Bill Sebald
	Founder at Greenlane / @billsebald

It takes a different angle by letting you see multiple SERP results and their contents, which is something that not many other tools have. You can easily use it to optimize your site and boost the ranking of your website.

The USP for this tool is the insights you get en masse about the SERPs you’re optimizing for (topics being covered, intent, etc.).

 Content Optimization Process

We started using cognitiveSEO’s Keyword Tool & Content Assistant for old blog posts optimizing purposes. We chose the article posts that performed well for us and tried to optimize them using the tool.

So basically our new approach on the content creation for the improved version was a quick process. We got a baseline score of the content and then worked on improving it by including some of the topics found in the SERPs that we hadn’t previously included in the write-up.

We went through about 4-6 iterations of our copy until we hit a good content performance.

The step-by-step guide for improving your search ranking and content performance at once is simple:

• find the underperforming pieces of content;
• perform a short keyword research to choose the keywords you want to rank for;
• optimize the new blog post using those keywords;
• use the “Fetch as Google” to re-index the search engine optimized web page;
• continue with link building to gather more value and have a strong content strategy to improve your SEO rankings.

Results after Using the Content Assistant Tool

After we used the keyword phrases recommendations, we saw a beautiful growth and noticeable improvement for the targeted keywords.  

We hit a content performance score improvement from 51 of 74 and a readability score improvement of almost 67.

We had been ranking no. 5 in the search results previously and within 24 hours, we saw our rank improve from #5 for the term we were optimizing to #2. So the improvement is good to see.

This fluctuated over the next few days but then we settled into the #2 spot and have remained there since. This optimization seems to have worked great!

For the time period 6/8-6/25 vs. 5/21 – 6/7 (we launched the changes on 6/8) and for the term we were targeting, we went from 4 clicks in 5/21 to 6/7 to 9 clicks in 6/8 to 6/25. We also improved in clicks for a few other relevant terms.

Total clicks for the 5/21 – 6/7 time period reached 123 and for the 6/8-6/25 time period, 165. Impressions went from 3,709 to 4,755. Average position decreased though which was interesting: 19.7 vs. 21.7. No real traffic lift overall was seen.

We also went from ranking for 29 keywords for the post to 74 overall. Checking in Google Search Console, we saw a lift from 129 queries (13 with clicks) to 222 queries (20 with clicks).

On top of that, we had an overall improvement of the CTR (clickthrough rate) after we optimized the existing content as you can see from the next screenshot.

Huge gains? Maybe not, but we weren’t testing with a webpage that had a big potential audience. This is still very promising, and we’re going to start using it with clients who have keywords that need to move.

Disclaimer

This is not a paid post and cognitiveSEO didn’t make any kind of agreement with the author. This is Bill Sebald’s success story, written and documented by himself. Please feel free to share your thoughts on this story with us.