2x Organic Traffic – Technical SEO Case Study Interview with ITviec

ITviec logoITviec is a growing Vietnamese website that focuses on quality IT jobs. Chris and his team were a pleasure to work with and Chris was nice enough to answer my interview questions. "

The Interview

1. What is your name and role at your company?

Chris Harvey - Founder & CEO

2. In your own words, can you give a quick overview of your business?

ITviec is a job website focusing on IT jobs in Vietnam. The service is free for jobseekers. Companies pay to place job ads on our site.

3. What was going on that led you to seek out an SEO Consultant?

I read some books about SEO when I created the site 3 years ago. Our URL structure, page titles and meta-data were ok. But my spidey-sense told me there was much more to learn and do re: SEO. I started to do more research last year and quickly realized our site would benefit from hiring an SEO expert.

4. What were the challenges you were trying to solve? What made that so tough?

I didn’t know what I didn’t know. That’s what made it difficult. I wanted to find someone knowledgeable. But after a bit of Googling I suspected that most SEO “experts” are little more than snake oil salesmen.

5. What else (if anything) did you use to try and solve these problems? What didn’t you like about those solutions – or why weren’t they a fit?

I tried doing my own research. But I found that doing so was like trying to treat a complex health problem yourself. There’s a reason to go to the doctor. I needed an SEO doctor instead of relying on self-treatment.

6. What were you nervous or apprehensive about before taking the plunge?

The only risk I saw was wasting money. I was already wasting time trying to do SEO myself instead of working with a specialist.

7. What factors were most important to you during the decision-making process?

Credibility. I wanted someone whose main business is SEO. I found Charles by Googling “SEO expert Vietnam.” I figured if he knew how to place his own site on top of search results he probably could help me too. I was right about that.

8. What was implementation like? How long did it take? How, specifically, did it meet/not meet your expectations?

Implementation took about 6 weeks. We worked through all the suggestions one by one, slotting into our dev queue between other projects.

The deliverable Charles produced definitely met my expectations. It was a simple, actionable list of items that we needed to correct. Each item explained an SEO problem, specific steps to take to correct the problem and specific advice on how to measure the outcome of the change. We just worked through the list methodically. It turns out our site need a LOT of onsite SEO improvements. Tech-wise they were quite easy to do. My understanding of SEO took a huge leap as a result of working through all the items. Now when we plan new site features I’m better able to design good SEO into them from the start. Or if I’m unclear I consult Charles. He now consults with us on an hourly basis, and we regularly top our our account with him. SEO is a topic that needs continual maintenance, as sites and Google algorithms are always changing.

9. How well has SEOCharles solved the challenges you mentioned earlier?

Charles did exactly what I wanted. He conducted an SEO “health audit.” He provided a list of specific, actionable items to change. And he explained how to measure the outcome. The changes were quite simple to make, but had a big impact on our SEO traffic.

10. Are there any numbers that you can point to that show the impact of working with SEOCharles?

In December 2015 we were getting about 700 organic hits a day. Now less than a year later in August 2016 we’re getting over 1,400 a day and still growing. I attribute a lot of that growth to the changes SEOCharles suggested.

11. Were other areas of the business were positively affected? How?

Traffic is life. The more qualified traffic we can attract the more our business can grow. Definitely the money we spent on SEOCharles’ service has been repaid through higher sales.

The Results

Organic traffic growth:

ITviec organic traffic growth

August 2016 in comparison to the previous year:

ITviec traffic increase numbers

The Pageviews increase and Bounce Rate decrease indicate a higher user engagement. Which results from changes that made the site more friendly to both the search engines and the users.