How Ulku Logistics Turned Traffic Around for Online Piano Instruction Website, Then Increased Growth

The Client

The site owner had a problem. It was late 2018 and he felt like he’d just been beginning to get his feet underneath him as a business owner. A musician by trade, the owner had hung his sign as a piano teacher and digital entrepreneur.

Like many of other SEO-savvy entrepreneurs, he knew it wasn’t going to be easy when he set out, but he’d been doing fairly well. His website was doing about 3,000 visitors per month, and better yet, he had a core base of very pleased supporters of his service. Things were looking good.

The Challenge

At least things were looking pretty good until September 2018. After Google rolled out its Medic update, our client’s site, like hundreds of others, start hemorrhaging traffic. The owner didn’t just worried, he panicked. His livelihood, and his income, suddenly looked to be falling off a cliff.

He knew he needed the help of an experienced SEO professional. What’s more, he needed that help immediately, and he needed it to work right the first time. There was no room for error.

The Solution

This is where we met the owner and his piano instruction website. Like most of our clients, found us through Upwork. Client competition can be fierce on Upwork, but he said he appreciated our clear explanation of how SEO works and our proven track record of exemplary work.

We knew all too well the kind of stress an algorithm change can put a digital business owner under, and we dove into action immediately. Over a 6-month period, our business and the owner thoroughly reviewed the website to make the modifications we felt were necessary to turn the tide of his traffic and set him back on a path toward growth.

We like to think of SEO as an open book test. If we want to find out how to rank for a given search query, we just need to type that query in Google search. Google will then happily show us its favorite websites to answer that query. We analyze the data from Google search results for a given query to plan what we need to have to outrank the existing sites.[1]

In this case, it was clear to us that Google’s algorithm change had made some slight, but critical, adjustments to the types of results that were displayed at the top of search engine results. Because we could identify some common themes among the new websites at the top of the list, we were confident we knew what we needed to change about the client’s piano instruction website in order to achieve the results he was looking for.[2]

The Results

SEO can sometimes be a tricky Success Story to tell if you don’t know what to look for, because results take time. If you’re looking for an immediate payoff, you’re better off playing with advertising dollars. But in the long run, we think the Search Engine Story is a much more compelling one, and this owner.

We worked on his website from September 2018 (the beginning of the algorithm change) through March 2019. The website had been slowly bleeding traffic, falling to 2,500 monthly users from its previous 3,000 just before the algorithm change. When we rolled out our final updates in March 2019, we were ready for some much-needed improvements. The change didn’t take long. The client watched his website quickly rebound to its previous levels, then rocket past them, and continue to climb over the next year. Nine months later, the webssite was bringing in over 17,000 users - 6 times the monthly visitors it had when we finished our work in March 2019. And it shows no signs of stopping.

The owner, for his part, passed 3,500 users of his product in 2019, and was certainly no longer worried about his website livelihood drying up.