There’s a common misconception in the digital marketing industry that SEO is dead, doesn’t work, and doesn’t offer any benefits.

We completely disagree with it, here we present our very own DiviFlash case study to prove you wrong.

About DiviFlash

DiviFlash is one of the most popular Divi plugins, especially designed for Divi theme users. It offers 50+ modules, 25+ full website layouts, extensions, and more.

DiviFlash was released in October 2020, and until March 2024, its website had 15k monthly visitors and counting.

However, this wasn’t always the case.

Back in 2021, DiviFlash had only 1200 organic visitors and even fewer conversions, and then we took over.

The Challenges

The client wanted us to work towards making DiviFlash a high-authority website within the Divi industry. Their main source of revenue was the Divi Marketplace and they wanted to make their website the primary driver of sales.

Although the Divi industry is relatively small, so ranking in this industry shouldn’t have been hard. However, the state of the DiviFlash website was in shambles because of the number of SEO mistakes they had made and that’s why we had a lot of ground to cover.

The Website Architecture Was a Mess

The first major problem we noticed was that the website needed a proper site architecture.

Proper website architecture is mandatory for a positive user experience and improved crawlability and indexability. But DiviFlash’s website was far from it; it had three severe issues-

Poor menu structure that made it easier to navigate.
A deep website architecture; some pages needed to be more clicks away from the homepage.
A couple of orphaned pages that had no link to the other pages of the website.

Website Design Wasn’t Conversion-friendly

Another issue that we thought was severe was that the website wasn’t conversion-friendly.

Since the website architecture wasn’t right, the conversion process itself was difficult. Other than this, there were no separate pages for the modules which we think is a missed opportunity for conversion. Also, there were only a few CTAs that were also not optimized.

Landing Page Keywords Were Cannibalized

DiviFlash website had very few landing pages and unfortunately, these landing pages were not getting the results they were supposed to because of keyword cannibalization.

The same keywords that had been targeted in the landing pages were also targeted in the relevant blogs and documentation. That means the landing pages were competing against the blogs and the documentations and as a result, the visibility of the website was suffering.

Backlink Profile Virtually Non-Existent

We were initially impressed with the backlink profile of this website. However, after investigating a little, we could see that the acquired backlinks are either from spammy or irrelevant websites.

Since these backlinks were useless and were actually dragging the site down, the website virtually had no backlinks.

Blog Section Had Only a Few Blogs That Weren’t Indexed

After we had found all these issues in the technical and off-page SEO, we finally had time to look at their content and it was horrendous, especially their blog section.

When we took over, DiviFlash had already been in business for more than a year. Considering this duration, their blog section should already be well-developed.

However, they had less than 15 pieces of blog content, which means they produced less than one content per month.

Moreover, the produced content on different topics, the content quality was very poor, and the content was not created following the SEO best practices.

So, it’s no wonder that most of their content wasn’t even indexed.

Instead, Irrelevant Pages Were Indexed

Rather than the blog content which was supposed to be indexed but wasn’t, some irrelevant pages like the blog categories, archive, pagination, etc. pages were.

The Strategies

Now that we have identified the key issues, we devised the following strategy based on our very own SEO checklist to get the DiviFlash website up to speed:

1. Web Architecture Were Redesigned While Maintaining SILO

After looking at all these issues and prioritizing, we decided that fixing the web architecture should be our number one priority. Here is how we redesigned the web architecture with a SILO structure-

Planned the SILO structure: The SILO structure is how a website’s content is organized into a hierarchy based on its main topics and subtopics. This helps search engines understand the relationships between different pages on the site and improves your website’s relevance for specific keywords.

Here’s a breakdown of how we planned the SILO structure:

Main Silos: First we identified the broad topics that made up the entire website.
Sub-Silos: These are subcategories that fell under the main silos and cover more specific topics of the main topics.
Content Pages: Lastly, the individual pages on the website that are relevant to your sub-silos and main silos.

Mapped pages according to the SILO structure: Once we had the SILO structure planned out, we assigned the existing pages to the sub-silo and main silo. We also deleted irrelevant pages that didn’t fit the SILO and created new pages to fill gaps in the information architecture.

Internal Linking: With the SILO structure planned and implemented, we then linked all the relevant pages internally. By linking the relevant pages together within the silo structure, we established a clear hierarchy for search engines and users to follow.

Updated Menu: To make the navigation easier, we implemented a new mega menu that consisted of all the pages within the website.

301 Redirects: Since we deleted and added new pages to the website, we used 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones. This helped avoid broken links and transferred link equity from old pages to new ones.

2. Solved Indexing Issues and De-indexed Irrelevant Pages

After we had fixed the website architecture, we saw a lot of improvement in indexing the web pages in Google. However, indexing in the other search engines, like Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc was still a problem.

After some investigation, we found the sitemap wasn’t submitted to these search engines. So, we went ahead and did that, and eventually solved the indexing issues that DiviFlash had.

Also, DiviFlash had many irrelevant pages that were indexed which were not necessary. These pages included the author page, categories page, tags page, etc.

Now, to de-index these pages, we did two things-

We used the search console to submit a removal request to de-index the URLs.
We used the RankMath SEO plugin to change the meta tags of those pages to no index.

When the indexing and de-indexing issues were resolved, we ran a site audit with Screaming Frog to make sure that there were no more technical issues left.

3. Redesigned the Whole Website

To make the web design optimized for conversion, we had two options, either only make the necessary changes to improve conversion or go all the way to give it a boost and redesign the whole website. Obviously, we went with the second option, and here is roughly the changes that we made:

Chose a different color palette that reflected the brand better and was more appealing.
Applied a combination of content structures to show off the features and benefits to the visitors.
Added more content to emphasize the features and benefits of the product and made sure that the content was engaging.
Used high-quality and trendy images and visuals to relate to the user.
Placed CTA’s throughout the landing page with different CTA text.
Added a testimonial section and a logo bar to the homepage to gain the visitor’s trust.
Added an email opt-in form to the homepage for generating leads.

Keep in mind that we didn’t do this in one day or only focused on this task pausing the SEO. All the elements that were implemented in the web design were single-variable tested and finalized after months of monitoring performance.

This was the best approach to ensure the highest quality and performance and that’s why we had to redesign the website and simultaneously work on the site’s SEO.

4. Keyword Research

Keyword research is the most basic yet the most fundamental part of SEO that can make or break your whole SEO campaign. So, when the time came to find out keywords for DiviFlash, we treated this with the highest priority.

DiviFlash operates in the Divi industry, a relatively small niche that is a subtopic for the comparatively huge WordPress industry, and the WordPress industry is part of the web design/development industry.

Considering this, our primary focus was being an authority in the Divi industry along with a level of dominance with the other two industries.

So, our main goal was two things- build topical authority and increase conversion.

To that end, we targeted BOFU keywords for conversion and MOFU keywords as supporting content that will create topical authority.

For example, the main keyword we wanted to rank for was “best divi plugins.” So, we will create some content with MOFU and BOFU keywords that will work as supporting content.

As for the MOFU content, we focused on finding long-tail problem keywords and also we researched some keywords to publish research articles.

To find these keywords we used traditional research tools, like SEMRush, Ahrefs, Google Search Console, and Keyword Planner.

After multiple rigorous keyword research sessions, we had all the keywords we needed. Now, it’s time we start creating content based on these.

6. Created SEO-friendly Landing Pages

At that time DiviFlash had 30+ modules in their plugin, but they only had one landing page on their website. We believe that each module should have a landing page that is SEO-friendly and describes its features well to attract customers.

So, other than creating attractive landing pages, we followed these methods to make them SEO-friendly-

Find a balance between creativity and SEO-friendliness: Landing pages must use creative copywriting to attract potential customers and also implement focus keywords so that the landing pages rank.
Minimalism: Using too much content and design elements can negatively impact UX. So, we used as little content as possible that has the most impact.
Implement keywords in the right places: Using the right keywords in the right places like in the headings can boost the visibility of the landing pages.
Implement internal linking: We made sure to link relevant content and pages to the landing pages.
Using images and videos: We doubled down on using attractive visuals and videos to hook the audiences and get them to convert.
Single variable testing: We designed each landing page a little differently than the others to find out the best-performing version and update accordingly.

7. Published New Content + Updated Old Content

At the time we took over DiviFlash, the blog section had a lot of outdated content. So, we needed to update all of the old content as well as focus on creating new content.

Also, we needed to create user-oriented problem-solving content specific to the product. That’s why we also had to focus on writing documentation and usage guides.

While creating and updating content, we had the following things in mind-

Our content was created and updated to match our target audience’s search intent.
A key part of our content strategy was making sure that E-E-A-T goals were met.
All content was optimized maintaining SEO and conversion best practices to improve visibility.
Our focus was also on creating shareable content that naturally attracts backlinks. Not to brag, but the content “Web Design Statistics” got backlinks from giants like HubSpot, Neli Patel, and others.
Rather than scraping the SERP and merging the top results, we ensured our content offered freshness and originality.
We created a blog calendar and published the content at regular intervals to send positive signals to search engine bots.

Also, apart from the blog content, we used the documentation and how-to guides to make videos for YouTube.

8. Implemented Link Building Strategies

Backlinks are the backbone of any SEO campaign, so besides creating quality content, we focused on getting quality backlinks too. But first, we needed to get rid of the spammy backlinks.

Here’s a summary of how we got rid of the spammy, low-quality backlinks-

We performed a backlink audit using Google Search Console and Ahrefs to pinpoint the low-quality links.
We created a list of harmful backlinks identified for outreach to webmasters or disavowing.
Requested removal of unwanted links from linking sites from the webmasters.
Prepared and submitted a disavow file via Google Search Console for links that couldn’t be removed manually.

Then we built our own link-building strategies–

Our main link-building strategy was guest blogging. Of all the links we have built for DiviFlash, 40% of them were through guest blogging.
Our next best strategy was link insertion. About 30% of the backlinks we built were through link-insertion.
About 10% of our backlinks came from HARO, and the rest came from brand mentions.

The Results

With these SEO strategies and implementation, we believed that it was enough to get DiviFlash where it needed to be and we were able to do so. We started seeing tangible proofs after 2 months of fixing the website architecture and the real profit started to come after 4 months when the traffic hit from 200 to 1800, a whopping 900% increase in 4 months.

As for our KPI, we measured the following metrics, and you can see the before-after comparison of them-

Traffic

Dwell Time

Bounce Rate

Conversion

Monthly Recurring Revenue

Revenue Per Mile

Conclusion

The DiviFlash SEO case study is a shining example of how well-executed SEO strategies can drive traffic to your site. In just four months, this 900% growth proves the effectiveness of innovative SEO tactics, as well as the fact that any business can grow exponentially if it has the right strategy.