The SEO Battlefield

Chapter 9. Case Studies

We’ll be looking into some real-life examples of projects I’ve worked on, some solo and others with my team. Some were a sweet stroll to growth and others were downright abysmal. I hope that by sharing some of my experiences as an SEO at the helm, it will help you to recognize potential issues so as to avoid them in the future, whether client-side or agency.

Real names will not be used and some details have been changed to protect the innocent. Many of these cases happened while leading my own agency with clients in San Francisco and New York. I was the primary SEO for all of the accounts.

Each case study ends with what I like to call lessons learned.

Multimedia Entertainment Site

The first case study is a tale of a multimedia website that offered videos featuring up-and-coming artists from many disciplines. There was little to no text at all, which presented some unique challenges. Revenue for the entertainment site came from ad monetization. SEO was their ultimate desire, because it represented an especially lucrative flow of cash for the company; to them, it was a pure gravy train with biscuit wheels. Also, ad traffic is fairly hard to resell (or upsell) because there’s often a lag in data collection.

When we took over the website’s management, the first step was to set up analytics instrumentation properly, then monitor traffic coming in and out. The website generated revenue for artists and advertisers mainly by the sheer amount of traffic the site ...