Client: Smile.io
Industry: Ecommerce | B2B SaaS | Loyalty & Rewards
Project Date: 2019 - Present

As a content writer at Smile.io, I updated dozens of blogs for accuracy to improve usefulness, SERP rankings, and organic traffic.

Objectives:

As the leading blog for customer loyalty, rewards, retention, points, VIP, and referral programs, Smile.io has a wealth of historical content. However, without any updates, search engine algorithms were not recognizing the content as active or valuable.

I spearheaded a content refresh initiative to update historical top-performing blogs. I hypothesized that updating existing blogs would:

Improve search ranking positions.
Generate more organic traffic via click-throughs from SERPs.
Improve user engagement, via lower bounce rates and higher average time on page.

Strategy:

I performed an SEO audit of Smile.io’s existing blog content to identify the greatest areas for impact. This involved:

Using Google Analytics to rank content in terms of total page views, average time on page, pages per session, and bounce rate.
Using Ahrefs to rank content by organic keywords, organic traffic search traffic, and the number of external do-follow backlinks.
Analyzing competitors’ top keywords and content to identify gaps or room to steal keywords.
Selecting a combination of top-performing content to ensure accuracy and inactive or dead URLs to update.

When updating a blog, I:

Performed keyword research with Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs.
Removed or rewrote outdated sections and added new valuable content.
Optimized on-page SEO through image resizing, ALT texts, meta-descriptions, page titles, page hierarchy, and more.

Results:

Over 6 months, I updated 26 blogs resulting in:

Organic traffic increased by an average of 112% per blog.
Average time on page increased by an average of 21%, indicating readers found the content more engaging.
500 new do-follow backlinks for one critical data-driven blog post, given updates to make it more authoritative and actionable for ecommerce merchants.