The Client: Watson Adventures
www.watsonadventures.com
Watson Adventures is the leading scavenger hunt company is the US – offering fun, smart and culturally stimulating scavenger hunts for corporate teams, private groups, and the public – in 22 states nationwide. Their hunts have been reviewed by the New York Times, ABC News and countless other sources, and the company emerged as the best in this niche industry.
We began providing SEO services for Watson Adventures shortly following the launch of their new website. Although the site looked great and functioned well on the front-end, the web design company they used had not optimized the site for search engines and it was not performing well online.
After three months of SEO work, we achieved amazing success:
• Unique Visits / Sessions increased by 150%;
• 37% of leads were referred from organic search (no PPC, digital ads, etc.);
• 22% increase across all three lead types
• 50% increase in ‘corporate’ scavenger hunt leads alone
The Unexpected
The situation changed in June 2014 when Google simultaneously released two separate algorithm updates that drastically changed how Google determines its search engine results page (SERP) rankings.
The first, Panda 4.0, wreaked havoc on organic traffic – when visitors come to your website from unpaid or natural search engine results because the site has relevance to their search term. Websites reported losing more than 60% of their organic traffic overnight from Panda 4.0.
A second update, called “Pay Day”, penalized websites that Google perceived as referencing specific ‘shady’ words – words that largely fell into the “pay-day loans” and porn industries.
Our client appeared to be hit by both: a 12% decrease in unique visits, a 15% decrease in Page Views, and a 2% decrease in Landing Page entrances concurring with the updates.
The Diagnosis
After running a number of custom reports and analyzing the data (without a whole lot of specifics to go on from Google’s press camp) we narrowed the issues to the following:
1. A large percentage of the client’s link profile (inbound links) came from spammy sites. These sites had syndicated their content without permission, and without using the proper attributes. A lot of low-quality links to the site was a big red flag.
2. Site keywords may have been taken out of context when ‘read’ by Google and registered as spam under the new ‘Pay Day’ update. Google may have found scavenger hunts called the “Naked at the Met” and “Dancing Nudes Murder Mystery Scavenger Hunt” fishy. Being cheeky may have cost our client.
3. The design, and homepage design in particular, may have been penalized. This site features a lot of custom animation and development work – and it’s great! – But Google may have had trouble identifying it as quality content in its crawl.
4. And lastly, something we could never have planned: The site suddenly saw a huge increase in competition for the keyword “hunt” – at the exact time the #cashhunt phenomenon hit US cities. This caused a tremendous number of visitors to land on the site, only to find the content was not relevant to the “hunt” they were searching for, and left the site quickly. While a spike in website traffic is usually a positive metric, coupled with an increased Bounce Rate (when people leave the page without taking further action) indicated that the site was not reaching its target audience.
What was particularly confounding is that this SEO activity – rapid ups and downs – is something you might expect to see if the client had been using a cheap, “black hat” SEO provider. These SEO companies (often times they are just bots) are known to use manipulative link building tactics such as purchasing links in bulk to achieve a high volume of inbound links in little time — quantity over quality links.
With one swift algorithm change from Google, our months of hard, organic work unraveled.
It was up to us to put a plan of action into place to reclaim their SEO success and prevent more violations from coming.
The Plan
Liqui-Site worked to disavow over 1,000 low-quality backlinks that were doing the greatest harm to the Watson Adventures domain. A backlink (also known as an incoming link, inbound link, inlink, and inward link,) is a hyperlink from another website to yours.
It used to be that the more backlinks you had pointing back to your site, the more popular the search engines would believe it to be – but when those links are not relevant, or are low-quality or spammy, the reverse happens. Connection to too many low-quality links will cause your site to lose its position on search engine result pages (SERPs).
To identify the spammiest sites, Liqui-Site culled through over 5,000 total backlinks and manually extracted 400 deemed priority disavow links. These links were chosen based on their page rank, page authority, and scores for trust, quality, and relevance ¬ although in many cases, it was obvious just by sight that it was spam.
Next, we submitted the offending URLs to Google Webmaster Tools and requested that they be ‘disavowed’. The disavow action is taken if you’ve done as much work as you can to remove spammy or low-quality links from the web, and are unable to make further progress on getting the links taken down. In other words, you can ask Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site.
Note: the disavow option should be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. It should be undertaken by an SEO professional.
We anticipated it would take a number of weeks for Google to crawl and process the information uploaded, and incorporate it into their index.
Meanwhile, we started in on other solutions:
• More fresh, relevant content. We designated a blog that would allow the client to produce new, original content on-site, which is one of the best things you can do to keep and improve SERP results.
• Corrected technical issues. After running a UX analysis we discovered the site had a lot of large image files that were dragging down the page load speed. (Visitors have a low tolerance for slow sites; and search engines also penalize for page speed.) We compressed PNG files throughout the most popular pages on-site.
• Private pages. The client had a number of landing pages that were used as an interactive element to its physical scavenger hunts – thus the content made no sense to the average viewer. Liqui-Site made sure that these URLs were no longer visible in search engines.
• Link quality. We established a minimum page rank of 4 for all new links being built in the future as a form of quality control.
• User experience. We made modifications to the homepage for better optimization, including changing a busy 3-column layout to a cleaner 2-column layout, and integrated multimedia for on-site engagement.
In a number of weeks, we began to see progress and – from July 1 through Oct 15, 2014 – can report:
• Unique Visits / Sessions increased by 28.18%
• New Sessions increased by 28.89%
• Page Views increased by 23.96%
The Takeaway
As SEO professionals, we have to expect the unexpected. Sudden algorithmic changes from Google are par for the course in this industry. It speaks to our strength that we were able to spot the damage so quickly (by providing 24/7 SEO monitoring) and diagnosed the problems based on solid reporting and data analysis. Getting our client on board was the easy part! – Unlike other agencies we don’t overpromise SEO results, and we take the time to educate clients about the ebb and flow of SEO. We continue to monitor the situation and plan and implement SEO improvements weekly.
– Kelly Campbell, President & CRO, Liqui-Site Designs, Inc.
