One of the biggest successes in my SEO journey (yet) was with the website of a women’s health clinic. On the website, they ran a women’s health blog that was pretty popular in the client’s country.
Now mind you, I cannot share the identity of the client or their site as I signed a confidentiality agreement with their management team. But you will see ample proof in this study.
They did not run this blog as a marketing front to get more sign-ups and patients for their clinic, or to run ads. They were not in it for money. They genuinely cared about putting factually correct information related to women’s health out there. The lack of quality information and correct advice related to women’s health was a real social problem that they wanted to solve.
The blogs were written by doctors and medical professionals. They were peer-reviewed, cited, and triple-checked before being published. So, there should remain no doubt that the information provided was factually correct and fell under the category of ‘helpful content’.
The website had a management team that initially did the basic SEO upkeep of the site. They were not aware of the nuances, naturally, as it was not their area of expertise. The blog was launched in 2019 (ah those pre-pandemic days) and had seen huge online traction in the native country and in the United States as well(!).
In July 2023, they noticed their traffic going down consistently. They attributed it to a natural fluctuation but when it kept plummeting for two months, they got worried. In September, they hired an SEO expert (yours truly), to take a look at what was going on.
Obviously, not being a clairvoyant like other SEOs who claim to immediately know the problem (after one look at the console screen), I had to conduct a detailed audit to figure out what was going on with the site.
And boy, there was a lot going on.
It was not a surprise that their site was a mess- they hadn’t done any professional SEO and published thousands of pages.
Amongst the technical errors, the most concerning were:
60% of the pages that should be indexed were not indexed (almost 90% of the total were not indexed), most of these were due to issues like excluded by noindex tag, redirect issues, soft 404s, and duplicate without user selected canonical.
There were a ton of redirect loops. Instead of refreshing and updating the content on the same URL, they had redirected many old blogs to newer versions on new URLs, sometimes forming a redirect chain of 4-5 URLs.
There were issues with trailing slash versions of the URLs. In some cases, pages with ‘/’ and without ‘/’ at the end of the URL were both crawled.
Analyzing the backlink profile was not in the scope of my agreement with the client but I still ran a few checks. I had to make sure there wasn’t anything particularly harmful over there that would undermine our efforts later.
Their backlink profile was healthy enough- albeit thin. They had 367 backlinks from low authority but high relevancy domains, and 42 from high authority but low relevancy domains. Other than that, there were 112 domains that were pure spam. They could be dealt with later by a simple disavow file.
Running a few backlink campaigns after fixing all the important technical and content issues they had would take their traffic to new heights. I let them know that, but first, we had to fix the real issues.
The duplicate content error in the GSC indexing report indicated that there may be an issue with content cannibalization. For my future clients out there reading this (and if you don’t know the nitty gritty of SEO), this means that there were some pages on the blog that were targeting the same search intent or keyword.
For example, if you have a website on apples, and there are two pages explaining what apples are, it’s a problem. If someone searches ‘what are apples’, Google won’t know which page to show from your site for that, so it might refuse to index one or both of them.
This warranted a deeper content audit. I analyzed the keywords the pages were ranking for, the SERPs for the keywords, and the internal linking structure. For the pages that had suspiciously similar content, I manually read and analyzed the content.
And sure enough, there were culprits to be found. There were almost 400 pages that had cannibalization issues. Why so many you ask? Well, this was a systemic problem.
Let’s say they wanted to talk about a disease related to women’s health, Disease A. Instead of covering the Disease A topic on one page, they broke it down into multiple pages.
As you may have guessed, when writing the pages on ‘How to manage Disease A’ and ‘Medications and help for Disease A’ they would explain again what Disease A is, which was covered in detail on the page ‘What is Disease A’.
Similarly, the pages ‘Early signs of Disease A’ and ‘Symptoms of Disease A’ had repeated subtopics, as early signs can effectively be a part of symptoms.
Now that all the issues messing up the site were highlighted (which took weeks in itself), it was time to move towards fixing them. But we had a problem on our hands.
As I mentioned previously, the client had not monetized the blog and they did not want to. We had to make the best of limited resources. For that, I worked to identify 20% fixes that would bring 80% results.
I had a hunch (maybe I am clairvoyant after all) that focusing on content fixes, especially the cannibalization issues, would solve a major part of the problem.
For this, I analyzed the performance of the current pages and their engagement metrics. I was looking for pages that were bringing in traffic in the past but were losing it now. Then from this I narrowed down pages that were previously indexed but were now under ‘duplicate without user selected canonical’.
I compiled a list of 100 pages we would work on merging, combining, and re-writing.
From the illustration above about Disease A, one might think the solution might be to simply merge the two or three pages that were discussing similar subtopics for a disease. Sure, for some topics that would work. But for other topics, it was more intricate.
Analyzing SERPs for the keywords revealed that for searches about particular diseases, Google algo was greatly favoring the pages that had all the information about the disease on a single page. Sites like healthline, mayo clinic, and hopkinsmedicine were all following this strategy.
So, for those topics, the solution was to put all the subtopics on a single page and only have one page for those diseases. It was also necessary to make those well-structured, so even for searches related to parts of it, our page would be found.
We started making the changes one-by-one. Instead of changing everything all at once. This was a less-risky approach, because if the strategy wasn’t working, we may see signs and pivot our approach instead of going all-in.
Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and now I know that we did not need to do that. The strategy worked like a charm.
It took months but we finished the content updates by early December, 2023. It looked bleak for a couple weeks, as traffic kept going down after the changes were made.
But it takes time for our pages to get crawled and indexed. So, we waited. And the new year brought new blessings.
The pages we merged were indexed. The old pages that were losing rankings were on the first page again. The traffic started recovering slowly but surely. Every day brought higher spikes.
By just fixing the content cannibalization issues on 100 pages, we were able to recover more than 50% of the traffic, and the pages that were fixed were seeing record clicks that are still rising.
This is a huge traffic recovery for a blog that was seeing a down trend for months. The clients are very happy with the recovery and occasionally consult me about the new content they post. Once they have more resources to tackle the remaining issues, their website will see unimaginable growth. But for now, this is all she wrote.
If you are seeing a similar downtrend in your blog traffic, now might be the time to get it audited. All is not lost, maybe you can recover your traffic and achieve your goals (monetization, public service, world domination, etc).
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