How KIA Doubled Organic Traffic in 120 Days
Kia Motors Corporation was founded in May 1944 and is Korea’s oldest manufacturer of motor vehicles. From humble origins making bicycles and motorcycles, Kia has grown – as part of the dynamic, global Hyundai-Kia Automotive Group – to become the world’s fifth largest vehicle manufacturer. With a well thought-out plan Brandastic doubled KIA’s organic traffic and leads in 120 days while also, making lasting improvements to their website.
Project Highlights
Search Engine Optimization
Keyword Research
Search Engine Optimization
URL Redirects
Search Engine Optimization
Restructuring Site Layout
Search Engine Optimization
Open Graph and Schema
Growing Traffic and Leads & Making Lasting Improvements
Being able to double (2X) organic traffic for a site in 120 days is no easy task. But with a well thought-out plan, these types of organic search results are possible. As long as you know what you’re doing. Here’s how Brandastic worked with Kia to grow their traffic and leads quickly, and make lasting improvements to their website.
140%
Increase in overall organic users
720%
Increase in organic clicks
3,590%
Increase in dealer requests
How We Did It
1. Restructuring the Site Layout
Before starting on-page optimization the first step was to look at the structure of the website itself. The way Google reads a site compared to a person is slightly different. One of the challenges Kia faced is that all their pages were dynamically generated. Every page was pulled from a template that gave the website visitor a unique page depending on their query.
This created a lot of traps for the search engine crawlers because it would keep regenerating new pages. Google doesn’t reward sites that waste their time or resources, so this was something that needed fixing. Working together, the Brandastic developers rewrote the URL structure of the entire site.
The URL structure is very important for both SEO and UX (user experience). Especially for a website as large as Kia, having the right structure has a compounding effect across the site. It helps silo all the valuable content into condensed groups of topics. This allows for more accurate indexing when the Googlebot crawls the pages. Crawling web pages based on topic hierarchy allows Googlebot to make sense of how the topics relate to each other. This association between topics is what creates better rankings for keywords.
2. Redirecting Old URLs
When a website is changed or updated, the old structure is sometimes still stored in Google’s index. This causes a problem when the old page isn’t able to be found anymore. This is why any old URLs must be redirected (called a 301) to the new URL so Google knows about it and sends a user to the right links.
Once the redirect was setup Kia’s old pages transferred their link value and prevented any visitors from getting lost. Brandastic submitted the final canonicalized URLs to Google to request indexing. Doing this minimized the lead time for the new changes to be indexed by the Googlebot.
3. Implementing Open Graph and Schema
When sharing a link on social media or a chat thread, most websites will create a preview version. This is called Open Graph and helps users know what to expect when they visit the site.
KIA’s website did display an Open Graph, but they were not optimized for each page. The data was not being sourced from the Meta Description, which was causing all the previews to have a generic look.
Once Brandastic implemented optimized Open Graph data, it helped KIA to create better user experiences on social media. Another step was to work on website, organization, and individual structured data for all pages to attempt to capture featured snippets.
4. Researching Keywords
Knowing which words your site visitors are using to find you is important. Any word that helps Google to send people to your site is called a Keyword. KIA was unclear about the exact keywords that were bringing customers to their website. For this reason, it was hard to optimize the site with the right content. The Brandastic SEO team conducted a competitive keyword analysis to find out which keywords third-party dealers were using to outrank Kia.
Once the optimal keywords were decided, Brandastic worked to map out custom meta-descriptions, title tags, and alt tags to give Kia’s products a better chance of ranking.
5. Implementing Products and FTP Upload
With a custom PHP site such as KIA’s, having to change the Meta Description one at a time would be almost impossible.
Working with ITP Strategic, Brandastic created a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to enable us to do mass meta-data optimizations. This direct implementation system cut the time in half and created better workflow efficiency.
An Incredible Improvement over 120 Days (YOY)
From January to April 2019, KIA Accessories experienced a 111% Growth in Organic Traffic. The screenshot below was taken from Google Analytics. In conclusion, this lead to some amazing increases in users on the site, including:
140%+ increase in overall organic users
720% increase in organic clicks
3,590% increase in dealer requests
Overall, the project was a win for KIA and a great example of what can be accomplished with a team focussed on both technical SEO and improving the user experience.
