Restoring organic rankings after a manual action from Google

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Brief

Wide Span Sheds engaged Dejan to recover their organic search presence. Wide Span Sheds is one of Australia’s leading steel kit building suppliers. With 26 manufacturing plants across the country, Wide Span Sheds custom designs and supplies steel kit buildings tailored to residential, rural and commercial applications Australia-wide.

Wide Span Sheds discovered that Google had de-indexed their website and that it was no longer appearing in Search results. This was due to a ‘Manual Action’ – a report produced when a human reviewer flags pages on a site that are non-compliant with Google’s webmaster quality guidelines. Once a Manual Action has occurred, Google generates a list of known issues on the website and provides information to help address the problem.

The two core objectives of the campaign were to:

Recover organic traffic levels to their previously held positions and;
Advise on strategy for long-term growth

Activities

SEO strategy
Penalty recovery
On-page optimisation
Phrase to URL mapping
Content strategy
Backlink audit
Link integration guidelines
Competitor research
Link consolidation and partnership outreach
Channel alignment

Achievements

After Dejan implemented all actions, within four months the Wide Span Sheds site recovered much of its traffic and is now showing outstanding results.

Organic traffic increased 72% from the start of the campaign and sustained 36% growth YoY. Prominent Page 1 rankings across target keyword selection increased 45% (+23k) over the next year.

The Dejan Marketing team have been working with SteelX, across SEO and Google Adwords, for several years. They have resurrected our organic traffic growth and have assisted in seeing many of our brands grow nationally and into international markets. In particular, I would like to thank the team who worked on our campaigns. The SEO team for their expertise in all things SEO and understanding of our business and especially, for taking Wide Span Sheds from a de-indexed site, penalized by Google, to a prominent page 1 website with continuous year-on-year growth, recovering our online presence. The PPC team for streamlining our AdWords efforts to match the rapid expansion of our franchise networks with high conversion campaigns, even with the strictest of budgets.

 5/5

Callum Wallace, Online Business Manager, Steelx

Why Google might remove websites from search

With so much Spam online, legitimate websites can get buried under irrelevant results – making it harder for people to locate the right information on the right site. So, Google is constantly working to improve search for people looking for relevant results, and will suspend some sites from Search with a Manual Action. The Manual Action page lists site-wide matches (actions that affect an entire site) and partial matches (actions that affect individual URLs or sections of a site

An intensive strategy

After reviewing Google’s Manual Action list, Dejan started by looking at Wide Span Sheds’ internal SEO processes. We developed a new suite of staff processes to ensure they were compliant with Google’s guidelines, and also reviewed a number of other technical issues. This worked to get the site’s online presence not only back to where it was, but improve long-term results.