When evaluating the value of Snippetron as a Technical SEO tool, we wanted to find out if websites with low visitor traffic volumes would benefit as much as websites with high volumes.
Carways Australia is a family owned and operated vehicle transport logistics company. Their website, during 2019, has achieved good stable volumes of traffic month after month.
The aim when installing Snippetron on the Carways website, was to discover whether a website averaging 1,600 visitors per month could get an increase in traffic simply by having Schema markup added.
Adding Schema markup to your website is a Technical SEO tactic. Schema markup helps the search engine bots that index your webpages to understand the content in a way that makes it easier for ranking on SERPs.
Assessing the Impacts of Algorithm Updates on Website Traffic
To better understand how resilient the website was from an SEO perspective. We needed to go back in time and find out how the website responded whenever algorithm changes were rolled out by Google.
Like many websites, the impact of Google algorithm updates over the years is clear to see in the analytics profile for visitors and traffic. That means, every time there was a new update, the website was loosing its position on SERPs and getting harder to find.
Starting in 2015 with the “May Quality” update, followed by “Panda” in July and “RankBrain” in October the website visitor volumes began to slide.
Throughout 2016 there was more “Panda”, “Mobilegeddon” and “Penguin”. The website made some gains as well as losses.
During 2017 there were a total of 10 algorithm updates (that Google confirmed). “Fred” (which was rolled out on 7 March 2017), inflicted the most damage for the Carways website. Driving traffic volumes to their lowest point historically in April 2017.
Recovery was painstakingly slow, so from October 2018 the website owners made a commitment to invest in a $500/month Adwords advertising campaign. In a bid to regain their earlier traffic levels.
This additional boost from ads resulted in stable traffic volumes in 2019 – slowly trending upwards. In other words, SEO was being propped up and benefiting from paid search efforts.
Technical SEO Case Study
The plan was to install Snippetron and monitor analytics during January 2020 then evaluate the impact achieved from an SEO stand point.
As far as results were concerned, we were aiming for an increase in traffic of 20% or more for the results to sound credible; in favour of Schema markup having a positive impact.
This 20% target was determined by calculating the average increase in traffic between December and January over the previous 4 years – a figure of 16.55%.
We noted that the single largest increase in month-to-month traffic was 45% – this was achieved between September 2018 and October 2018 with the introduction of Adwords advertising.
In addition to monitoring traffic, we tracked the number of keywords indexed for the website. The number and position of the keywords are traditional measures of success for SEO activities.
From an SEO stand point, the more website pages that are indexed by Google, and other search engines, the more findable you are and the more traffic you can attract.
Benchmark figures were taken from the previous 90 day (one business quarter) period.
From SEO reports for Organic Keywords we knew that it was possible to get a jump of 19 additional keywords indexed, without doing any SEO activities.
Our target was set for an increase of 30 keywords and to make sure that Snippetron didn’t negatively impact any “Top 3” positioned keywords.
SEO Results from Snippetron
Mid-way through January it became apparent that Google had rolled out an update. Something that we had hoped to avoid – because it was evident from past results that the website was prone to negative outcomes with algorithm updates.
We started by looking at the Keyword situation.
Disappointingly we failed to meet the target of 30 additional keywords, falling short by 10. Our expectation that we’d see lower positioned keywords move up into higher positions also failed to eventuate.
| Position | Oct 2019 | Nov 2019 | Dec 2019 | Jan 2020 | Growth |
| Top 3 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| 4 – 10 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| 11 – 20 | 11 | 12 | 11 | 13 | 2 |
| 21 – 50 | 33 | 43 | 43 | 48 | 5 |
| 51 – 100 | 22 | 30 | 27 | 40 | 13 |
| TOTAL | 70 | 89 | 85 | 105 | 20 |
A review of the Google Analytics provided better news. Snippetron achieved the target with an increase in traffic of 25.15%.
Despite the algorithm update, the website did achieve small measurable improvements.
However, based on the targets set, it is inconclusive whether Snippetron contributed to these small improvements.
Moving forward. Carways have elected to keep Snippetron installed on their website to help with Voice Search results.
Early indications show that traffic volumes for the first 20 days of February 2020 are 27.38% higher than for the first 20 days of January 2020 and 28.31% higher than the same period in February 2019.