SEO Case Study: How to Triple Organic Traffic for an International Active Ingredient Manufacturer

Being an internationally renowned brand in the manufacture and sale of active ingredients for the chemical industry and enjoying a good market position does not always go hand in hand with dominating search results (SERP).

This is more common than we think.

Especially in industries with business models based on distribution networks, with products controlled by law (such as medicines), and where the impact of digitalization is limited.

Even so, it is possible to be the protagonist of a success story like that of our client:

A large company that manufactures active ingredients in the chemical industry.

And the fact is that many established companies with large brands in the physical space may have great difficulties in taking advantage of the potential of the Internet to boost their visibility and brand.

However, with an appropriate strategy and clear lines of action, it is possible to bring forward, even for the most “Brick and Mortar” companies, a roadmap that promotes:

Online brand visibility.
Greater retail sales without skipping the value chain.
or boosting both at the same time.

Well, over the past 12 months, our agency, iSocialweb, has managed to completely transform the online visibility of an active ingredient manufacturing company.

The metrics speak for themselves:

Increased impressions from 50,000/day to 330,000/day, representing an impressive 560% increase.
Increased clicks from 1,800/day to 5,300/day, experiencing an astonishing 194% growth.

This success is due to an effective SEO strategy, accompanied by a comprehensive approach to address the web development and design challenges this client was facing.

Quite a challenge for the iSocialWeb team led by Jose Joaquin Rodriguez.

Key Lessons to Take Away from the Success Story

If you don’t have time to read our success story, but you’ve come here, it’s because you know you don’t want to miss it. For this reason,we suggest you save this page in your bookmarks. Or, you can also copy and save the following key points in your notes:

Essential Technical SEO: Solving technical and programming problems on a website is essential to avoid errors and non-optimized redirects, thus improving visibility in search engines.
Heuristic-Based User Interface Design: Web design plays a prominent role in user experience. And search engines are increasingly moving toward putting user experience first. Having a website that follows these principles makes ranking easier.
Content Cleanup: Simplifying the structure and reducing unnecessary URLs helps focus on high-quality content, avoiding problems like thin content and duplicate content.
Relevant Content Strategy:Working closely with the client to create content that meets user demand is essential to gain visibility in search engines and social media.
Control crawl budget and link juice distribution:Optimizing the structure and content of a website helps improve the crawl budget and link juice, which is essential for optimal search engine performance. Especially on large websites.

All these points, well combined and worked on, show that an SEO strategy can transform the online presence of any company in a short period of time. Even in a large corporate company. Achieving increases of 560% in impressions and 194% in daily clicks.

Context and starting point: Company manufacturing active ingredients for the chemical industry

Our client was facing a difficult situation.

They were undergoing a rebranding process and the website had recently been revamped, leaving unresolved issues stemming from a failed website migration.

In addition, their website had a large amount of content focused on topics related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The demand for which among users was clearly declining.

This resulted in a significant loss of visibility in search engines.

Therefore, a solid strategy was required to regain visibility and increase the quality of organic traffic to their website to attract their potential target audience.

The Challenge: Legacy, internal bureaucracy and an unfocused content strategy

Our first task, after the technical SEO audit, was to reflect on the challenges faced by the client:

A very large website with thousands of URLs.
Duplicate content that was confusing search engines.
Presence of «thin content» (content that is not very relevant or of low quality).
A non-optimized structure.
Various technical problems resulting from the migration.

We were clear that everything should not and could not be tackled at once, without putting the project itself at risk. On the one hand, it was necessary to correct all aspects related to design and programming and, on the other hand, to see how the domain responded to the elimination of duplicate content, thin content and new web architecture. All of this managed at the same time can generate confusing signals for search engines. And end up generating drops in organic traffic and positions in the project. So we decided to approach the project in sequential and priority phases.

Solution: How do we approach the project from iSocialWeb?

Our approach to the project was divided into three crucial phases, each with a specific focus and purpose:

Phase 1: Cleaning Technical Bugs. Troubleshooting code and programming to eliminate 4XX errors and 3XX redirect loops.
Phase 2: Content pruning.Target URLs with “thin content” and duplicate content.
Phase 3: Evergreen Strategy. Planning new content based on a permanent focus on demand.

Between phases, we waited to see how the website’s organic traffic responded before deploying all the changes and starting a new stage. Now let’s see how we deployed the SEO strategy for our client:

1. Correction of technical errors

We mentioned that we performed a detailed technical audit to identify all programming and code issues on the website. This included identifying SEO errors as well. During this stage, we focused on fixing programming-related issues, web design, and website code issues inherited from the migration. Additionally, we resolved bugs, optimized redirects, and ensured that the technical structure was in top shape. It was an essential process to remove technical obstacles that affected the visibility of the site in search engines. And it involved a great deal of effort and tension, because before deploying the changes we had to confirm that Google responded positively to them. That’s how we managed to tackle optimizations in web architecture, programming, design and correct all the errors without any scares or negative surprises.

2. Content cleaning

Once the technical changes were in place, it was time to tackle the elimination of useless or duplicate content. So, we carried out a deep cleanup of the content on the site. To do this, we analyzed web traffic data, internal and external links, and user responses for a large number of URLs. In such a way, we were able to rule out false positives and exclude them from the pruning process. This is very important. Especially when you are going to act on a large scale. It is very easy during a content cleaning process to eliminate URLs that have value because they are recoverable, or have the potential to position better or even links and qualified traffic. Something that can have fatal consequences in the short term on the positioning of any project. So, we established a rigorous process to eliminate only what was superfluous. At the end of this process we managed to simplify the web structure and reduce the number of URLs. Leaving only the highest quality content. This allowed us to fix the problems of «thin content» and duplicate content. And avoid eliminating potential drops.

3. New and Improved Content Strategy

Finally, we began the stage of creating new content, a process that continues to this day. In collaboration with the client, we developed a strategy for creating new «evergreen» content that provides a solid foundation for visibility. The previous strategy prioritized the need to have content based on current events and that in many cases coincided with other portals related to the active ingredient manufacturing and laboratory formulation industry. Here, our team advised the client on the importance of incorporating content that would never expire for users and that would provide a base on which to continuously attract users. This allowed us to reduce the dependence on current topics, which tend to have very high demand peaks, but are more volatile and with little potential to generate online visibility in the long term.

The results: 590% increase in impressions and 194% increase in clicks on Google

This three-phase strategy allowed us to address the initial technical challenges, clean up and optimize the content, and finally focus the content strategy in a direction that would ensure long-lasting and sustainable visibility in the active substances and ingredients market. As you can see in the graph below:

The key to a project like this is to manage all the changes to be made very well to avoid the risk of falls. It is very easy to scale a project that barely has any traffic by carrying out a lazy action. But when the domain has established traffic, taking a radical change approach can cause strong falls. That is why, at iSocialWeb, when we talk about SEO, we always adopt the methodology that will provide the client with the best result. In this case, we test the changes and seek to confirm them with data to deploy the arrangements and configurations on a large scale, once we are sure of the results. For us, it is key to control the effects on crawling and indexing, to avoid abrupt drops or increases followed by a drop. For this reason, the results were staggered and took 5 months to accelerate. However, from March 31, 2023, we began to notice the effects of the proposed SEO strategy. And in the following months we managed to achieve:

5,300 daily visits from Google.
And 330,000 impressions per day.

Something that our client had never experienced before and that put their brand where it deserved due to their authority and status.

Conclusion and final thoughts

SEO can be a great ally for companies and organizations that base a large part of their income on attracting customers and users online. Nobody disputes this. However, it can also be a powerful ally for companies and business models based on traditional distribution networks to increase brand exposure and market recognition. This success story is a great example of the latter. Where a business strategy based on the physical distribution of the product can also take advantage of the strength of betting on a solid online presence, promoting the right content and creating a large website. By optimizing the website, programming and content, and avoiding SEO errors, the result has been a dramatic increase in online visibility over a 12-month period. Reinforcing the brand’s pillars and exposure. In addition to facilitating recognition among customers of the distribution network.

Alvaro Peña de Luna

Head SEO y coCEO en iSocialWeb | + posts

Co-CEO and Head of SEO at iSocialWeb, an agency specializing in SEO, SEM and CRO that manages more than +350M organic visits per year and with a 100% decentralized infrastructure.

In addition to the company Virality Media, a company with its own projects with more than 150 million active monthly visits spread across different sectors and industries.

Systems Engineer by training and SEO by vocation. Tireless learner, fan of AI and dreamer of prompts.

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