Background story
Our client is an online magazine focused on agricultural topics — a WordPress website with a large volume of expert articles and a considerable number of visitors. Our goal was to bring in even more visitors from Google search through a comprehensive optimization process (without paid ads — purely through organic ranking improvements). Here’s what we did and what results it produced, backed by numbers.
seo audit and roadmap
As a first step, every client who requests SEO services from us receives a thorough SEO audit, which examines the site across three main pillars: technical SEO, on-page (content) SEO, and off-site SEO (link profile analysis), supplemented by competitor analysis. This uncovers all existing errors and further growth opportunities.
In every case, we run a software-based crawl of the site, which scans all subpages through internal links and evaluates them across various criteria — including HTML response code errors (such as HTTP 404 links pointing to non-existent pages), meta title and description issues (missing, duplicated, too long, etc.), which all need to be fixed.
The audit includes not only various paid software tools, but also extensive manual research — for example, E-E-A-T evaluation. E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) is a key ranking factor at Google, particularly for financial, medical (YMYL — Your Money or Your Life), and expert opinion sites, as well as e-commerce stores where credit card payments and personal data are involved. We assessed each criterion using our own checklist.
The result of this work is a Roadmap (Action List) that summarizes all identified issues and untapped opportunities in a concise format — helping improve rankings and drive more organic Google traffic.
These individual tasks (we call them tickets) are entered into an online project management tool, where we assign owners, deadlines, and estimated time requirements. They are scheduled within monthly sprints, and the client receives email updates, making our work fully transparent.
seo action list
Since this is a large website — containing more than 25,000 articles — there was no shortage of issues. We defined nearly 50 tickets, several of which required not 1–2 minutes but dozens of hours to complete. Due to the volume, developer involvement was also necessary; they received detailed error documentation for every technical issue. All fixes were verified in a test environment before being deployed to production.
Our agency consistently prioritizes data-driven decision-making, so we began optimizing existing content based on data collected in Search Console. Where warranted, we deleted, merged, or upgraded existing articles (for thin — i.e., short — content, we added original, high-quality text).
A key milestone in the project was training the journalists and editorial staff on fundamental SEO practices to help them work at an even higher standard. We covered keyword research, writing search-friendly content — including headlines, proper meta fields (title, description), image naming, alt text, formatting, lists, and more.
A priority task each month is defining the editorial team’s topics for the following month. This is preceded by thorough research that takes seasonality into account.
Thanks in part to this close collaboration, rankings began improving not only in standard Google search results, but the site also entered Google News — and today, Google Discover traffic has become the dominant channel for traffic acquisition.
results
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