Case Study
Client Overview
BioClarity is a clean, green skincare company that focuses on providing healthy alternatives to traditional skincare products. They use plant-based solutions to help improve your skin, and offer acne products, moisturizers, sunscreens, and more.
Client: Bioclarity
Website: bioclarity.com
Business Type: E-Commerce
Services:
Content Marketing Link Building Full Service Orchestrated SEOThe Situation
BioClarity started in early 2016 and we were in discussions with them on partnering even before they had a website. This is one of our favorite ways to start working with a company, as it really does provide us the opportunity to set the site up for success long-term and be involved in the initial build.
As a huge piece of being successful in the organic channel requires site changes, we normally find the biggest roadblock to success comes from the inability to make these changes. There are various reasons this can happen, but the most common are a lack of development resources or de-prioritization of SEO initiatives. It’s also true that at larger companies (enterprise size, for example) making site changes takes more negotiation and communication. As BioClarity had a small team and a desire to grow quickly, their startup mentality meshed well with ours and we hit the ground running.
What Happened
The first project in the engagement was a large competitive analysis and “Site Wish List.” The competitive analysis dictates many of the items in the “Site Wish List”. Our goal with this analysis is to uncover who is winning in the space. For BioClarity at the time, they were 100% focused on winning the acne space with their healthy approach to an acne regimen.
Our initial analysis dove into the current acne keyword universe and the competition, uncovering numerous pages of recommendations and target keywords that we wanted to dominate for. As there was no site yet, our recommendations were implemented during the actual site build which kicked off shortly after our research was completed. We worked with the development team closely to ensure everything our documentation had produced actually made it to the finished development site, and then ran final QA procedures on the production site as soon as it went live.
While the site was being built, we were still working, but we were focused on building out the large base of content we needed to target the massive set of keywords we wanted to rank for. The following is a list of rankings we were able to achieve at the site’s peak:
| Keyword | Position | Search Volume |
|---|---|---|
| how to get rid of acne | 1 | 74000 |
| how to get rid of pimples | 1 | 4950 |
| how to get rid of acne scars | 1 | 4950 |
| whiteheads | 1 | 33100 |
| red spots on skin | 1 | 27100 |
| red dots on skin | 1 | 18100 |
| how to get rid of back acne | 1 | 18100 |
| clear skin | 1 | 8100 |
| tiny red spots on skin | 1 | 6600 |
| acne pills | 1 | 6600 |
| cystic acne | 8 | 90500 |
| small red dots on skin | 1 | 5400 |
| what are blackheads | 2 | 18100 |
| how to get rid of bacne | 1 | 4400 |
| how to clear acne | 1 | 4400 |
| how to get clear skin | 2 | 14800 |
| benzoyl peroxide | 8 | 60500 |
| back acne causes | 1 | 3600 |
| what are whiteheads | 1 | 3600 |
| white head pimple | 1 | 2900 |
| pimples on cheeks | 1 | 2900 |
| ice on pimple | 1 | 2900 |
| what causes acne | 3 | 14800 |
Our research helps us understand what the right approach for every client, and BioClarity is no different. As it was a brand-new domain with 0 authority, we knew from experience we needed to create stellar content to be competitive in the first year or two of the engagement.
In some ways we look at content and authority as being inversely related. You’ll see a lot of authoritative sites with average content ranking well, but you’ll never see a site with very little authority ranking an average piece of content. For low-authority sites, the content really does need to be 10x. Due to this, we created deeply informative, medically focused content.
Strategy 01
Long-form Content / Topical Authority
These 3,000+ word articles took hours and hours of research and were written in a highly educational tone. Think of them as Encyclopedias, and we had the entire set for acne.
The reality is Google loves niche sites. Knowing this and seeing it across dozens of industries, we wanted to convince the search engine that we were the ultimate answer for everything acne related. So, we did just that and created 100+ articles backed by medical research.
By year two of the engagement, the majority of indexed pages were editorial content pieces created to help answer a user’s query. We started seeing very positive results as traffic ramped up, but that’s not because we just wrote content and posted it. There’s much more to having a piece of content rank than simply posting it and leaving it.
Strategy 02
Content Success Management
We hear it all the time- “I’ve created content but it’s not ranking.” There is always a reason why content isn’t ranking, and as SEOs, it’s usually pretty easy to figure that out after diving in.
One issue we see often is that people post content and forget about it. Creating a piece of content, posting it, and then never re-visiting it again is the complete opposite of how we approach making sure a piece we write is performing how we want.
We utilize a “Content Success Management” framework that forces us to constantly revisit and reoptimize our content that has been posted. This framework includes:
Page authority and actions
Internal linking recommendations
Content refresh recommendations
Keyword optimizations
Featured snippet optimizations
These strategies and iterative process were a key point of success on the BioClarity account. After approximately 2 years of working together, the relationship between bioClarity and Inseev ended for reasons not related to the specific engagement. This occurred about 2 months before a series of Google core updates that changed a multitude of industries in SEO forever.
The Medic update (www.seroundtable.com/google-medic-update-26177.html) was the first of many updates focused on expertise, authoritativeness, and trust-worthiness (EAT). These algorithm updates changed the industry as a whole and forced companies to pivot completely with their content and on-page strategy.
Unfortunately, bioClarity falls into a Your Money, Your Life (www.searchengineland.com/quality-raters-handbook-your-money-or-your-life-177663) category. The rankings we had earned with a strategy that worked very well at the time were now being held to different standards, and with no SEO resources in place to start correcting for it, most of the traffic was lost.
Noticing the impacts on the business and reconsidering strategic initiatives about a year later, the team contacted us again and wanted to refocus on SEO. We knew the first step was performing a deep E-A-T audit that produced itemized actions that will help get the site in line with newly formed (and unforeseen) best practices.
Strategy 03
E-A-T Audit
An E-A-T audit contains numerous checks, all focused on improving signals around trustworthiness. A few of these are:
Contact us page
Does the contact us page have a real address and way for users to get in contact with the business?
Does the site even have a contact us page?
Authors
About us page
Content freshness
Results
Key KPIs (Aug 2018):
+$500k
Estimated traffic value
+300k
Visitors per month
Key KPIs (Current):
+50%
Rrecovery of traffic at its peak-
+$135k
Estimated traffic value 
+146k
Estimated traffic
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