How I tailored my packaged SEO approach to help a WordPress travel blog achieve a +2,000% impression boost.

Opportunity

• Blog: build up visibility of a family-oriented travel blog with a posting strategy targeting interested searchers
• Brand visibility: boost blog’s “brand impression” with a WordPress theme update & redesign (provide WP theme comparison and weigh in on design with UX, SEO, site speed and competitor considerations)
• SEO: identify top organic keyword opportunities based on search behavior, map out a strategy for posting and improving onsite & offsite authority

The Way Forward

March–April 2019: A blogger found my profile through the site Upwork.com and approached me for work, and I was intrigued by the opportunity to prove the worth of my onsite/ offsite SEO package format for a website situation that typically falls outside of my niche as an SEO consultant – blog/media site SEO.

It’s no easy task to build up a site’s authority in search markets like travel blogging that are hyper-competitive (and also tough to generate revenue in)… but given the site had already amassed a hundred or so posts and had existing – albeit very low – search positions to build off of, I saw opportunity to deliver a really comprehensive keyword research that would identify new targets by topic and also work to improve relevancy for existing pages/posts onsite.

Improving brand credibility via a WordPress theme update was also mentioned as an immediate concern, so we had our work cut out for us. But branding and UX (or user experience, including site speed from a UX perspective) are both aspects I evaluate in terms of competitors for every SEO package I do; so it didn’t look nearly as daunting once I delivered some recommendations based on competitor analysis for a clean, lightweight WordPress theme that worked great across devices.

In general, I wanted to deliver as much value as I could for both SEO & UX right off the bat, and was able to make the consulting package fit by tailoring a bit to some specific considerations.

I think what makes the organic search results you can see in the Search Console screenshot above (last 12 months of performance data) so impressive is really the client herself – she was very receptive to immediate suggestions that impacted her blogging approach, asked questions for medium-term tactics, and was dedicated to seeing the long-term strategy recommendations through.

{
“@context” : “http://schema.org”,
“@type” : “Organization”,
“@id” : “https://pathdigitalservices.com/#organization”,
“name”: “Path Digital Services & Consulting”,
“url”: “https://pathdigitalservices.com/project/blog-seo-wordpress-how-to/”,
“image”: “https://pathdigitalservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/path-digital-logo-new-2-1.png”,
“address”: {
“@type”: “PostalAddress”,
“streetAddress”: “1248 W. Addison 3C”,
“addressLocality”: “Chicago”,
“addressRegion”: “IL”,
“postalCode”: “60613”
},
“telephone”:”+1-872-256-1610″,
“makesOffer”:{
“@type”:”Offer”,
“price”:”$1800.00″,
“itemOffered”:”Service”,
“additionalType”: “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimisation”
}
}