Strategic SEO Leads to 166% Traffic Jump for National Drug Screening

Bruce Clay’s SEO team helped this nationwide company achieve huge performance and traffic improvements by uncovering technical SEO issues and guiding them through a site migration, with stellar results.

Background

National Drug Screening, which provides drug testing for individuals, employers, court and probation throughout the U.S., came to Bruce Clay Inc. for help increasing website traffic and resulting sales.

Problems we initially discovered on the site included:

• Technical Analysis: Technical findings indicated that the website was not mobile-friendly and was extremely slow. There was no schema markup, no canonicals and security issues regarding mixed HTTPS and HTTP URLs. The XML sitemap included nonindexable URLs and orphaned URLS, and 18% of the site’s pages were not listed in the sitemap. We also found that 55% of the webpages had unsafe cross-origin links, and 81 pages returned 4xx errors.
• On-Page Analysis: We found that 38% of their title tags were duplicates, 53% of their H1 tags were duplicates of title tags, and 38% of the meta descriptions were duplicates. In addition, 13% of the image alt attributes had no description, and 7% of pages had low content.
• Internal Links: Site pages were not taking advantage of optimal internal page linking. Site navigation hindered the user experience. Also, the blog section that used parameter URLs was not searchable and lacked subject sections.
• Backlink Audit: The site was linked to by over 70% toxic websites.

Homepage for the new NationalDrugScreening.com website

Strategy

Their existing web development company had designed and developed this custom hand-coded website on Linux, PHP and MySQL, claiming to adhere to SEO site standards. However, the website was clearly under-performing, and the developers were not responsive in making the technical corrections we recommended.

Given this situation and what we uncovered in our analysis of their current website, National Drug Screening decided that they needed to hire a different website development team and build a new, responsive website. We helped guide this process, handling the on-page updates while working closely with the new developers to carry out multiple strategic SEO tasks to raise the search engine optimization of the new site, which launched in November 2020.

The steps we recommended and/or implemented to help National Drug Screening included the following:

• Redesigned the navigation and content siloing to provide a more responsive site structure and a better user experience.
• Content improvements included using H1 and H2 tags properly on content pages and bullet points to make page content easier to read. Informational content was improved especially dealing with various drug testing packages, and FAQs added to enhance pages. Videos were optimized and added to related website pages.
• Schema markup was added to all pages, including breadcrumb, video and FAQ.
• Toxic links were disavowed.
• XML sitemaps were updated, canonicals used and proper 301 redirects placed to new site URLs.
• The mobile site was structured for page experience, Core Web Vitals and speed.
• The blog was restructured, and an on-site search added.
• Through content gap and keyword analyses, we laid out a strategy for better content for the overall site and new content areas.
• Provided the website developers with Core Web Vitals analysis, issues and solutions.

Results

NationalDrugScreening.com started seeing better performance as page experience and Core Web Vitals thresholds were met.

Organic site traffic from Google jumped dramatically, as well. Comparing the six-month period January 2021 to June 2021 with two years prior, January 2019 to June 2019, traffic was up 166%.

The following chart compares organic traffic to the old website (January 1, 2018 – June 30, 2019) with traffic to the new and optimized website (January 1, 2020 – June 30, 2021). BCI began the SEO project in January 2020. The noticeable dip from about March to December 2020 relates to the time when businesses closed down due to COVID. During this period, BCI continued to guide SEO changes working with the client and their web team. The site updates proved helpful, as noted in the quick increase in traffic once the country began to open again.

Client Response

“Choosing Bruce Clay SEO services turned out to be the best decision for our website SEO and our business growth. We knew we could be doing better with SEO and needed to find answers for increased traffic and more sales. When the analyst at Bruce Clay exposed multiple points of failure, we realized change was needed fast. They along with our new web developers guided us through the whole process of developing and launching a new website, and when it did, our traffic more than doubled! Working with the Bruce Clay team is always a pleasure due to their highly professional project management and their expert analysis and advice. We’ve come to count on our Bruce Clay SEO as an essential part of our team.”

–Joe Reilly, President, National Drug Screening

Want to explore how Bruce Clay’s SEO specialists can help your business grow traffic and revenue? Request a conversation or call us directly at (866) 517-1900.

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