Did you know that high traffic can be a vanity metric? It can! We saw it when we first started working with Medical Couriers. In this case study, we will show you how we knew that we were seeing vanity SEO traffic and how we solved it for them.
How We Identified Low Quality SEO Traffic for MCI
When MCI came to us looking to improve their SEO, we assumed that we were working with a website that had low organic traffic because that’s typically what we find with an SEO project. We will never make that assumption again. We started the same way we do with every search engine optimization project: a data dive. It helps us identify drop off, current keywords, and potential keywords. We found something fascinating: MCI had a lot of organic visitors!
What?
Alright, so we needed to look closer. We know from experience that high website traffic paired with low leads means that a website is not properly optimized.
But the website was functioning, it had an update less than a year prior, so that’s interesting. We also saw that the queries leading to pages were for relevant keywords for a medical pick up and delivery company. So.. what was happening? A real mystery there.
We went even deeper – the pages that were pulling in organic traffic were optimized for keywords that didn’t match the page content. AHA!
People were reaching the website with the right keywords, but they weren’t finding what they needed. That’s not a great experience – and it can leave a bad taste in a visitor’s mouth. Here’s something a lot of SEOs won’t tell you: optimizing for search isn’t about getting the most traffic to your website. SEO is about optimizing for the best traffic and bringing in the most leads.
So, what did we do to fix the traffic? We tanked their vanity SEO traffic, of course!
Our Method
First, we figured out which pages were pulling in the traffic we wanted to change.
Then, we systematically removed the keywords and content that weren’t bringing in the quality traffic for MCI.
Did that stop the bulk of their organic traffic? Yes.
Were we worried? Absolutely not.
After clearing out the vanity traffic, we were able to pull more accurate data. We had a clean slate to put a great SEO strategy in place that includes everything from core web vitals, page optimization, and regular content updates that drive SEO traffic and shows potential clients that MCI is active in the healthcare industry.
Today, MCI has more traffic and better leads organically than they have in their entire 50 year history!
