Google Media Penalty Recovery for Perfect Glasses, UK

Introduction:

Perfect Glasses (Perfectglasses.co.uk) is a leading player in online prescription eyeglasses and sunglasses in United Kingdom and across European Union. They supply top-quality prescription glasses with plastic, polycarbonate, and glass lenses and one can choose from a collection of over 1000 pairs of glasses for men and women.

Perfect Glasses has made buying prescription glasses easy, you just need a prescription from an optician and you can choose to buy a pair of prescription glasses on the website. Enter the prescription online or click it using your smartphone and email it to them. Once the order is placed, you can expect to receive them within 7 working days!

About Google Update:

In August 2018, Google announced a broad, global, core algorithm update with a focus on medical, health and YMYL (Your Money Your Life) related websites. This update was dubbed as the Medic Update because of its focus on the medical and health space.

Broadly speaking “Your Money or Your Life” pages are those focused on money and daily life events and which offer financial, legal or medical information or offer advice on related life issues.

The medic update was to drop down the rankings of medical and health related websites that were not user friendly or that has low quality content or providing misinformation and or lacking credibility.

Challenge:

Perfect Glasses website, Perfectglasses.co.uk got caught in Google medic update and the website severely lost its organic presence, organic traffic and thus conversions. From 1977 top ranked keywords before the update, the website was left with only 231 keywords positions by the time the update got settled in December 2018. The organic traffic dropped by 70%.

Google medic update left a bad impact on Perfect Glasses’ business and they contacted SEOValley for SEO Consultation and Google Penalty Recovery services in January 2019.  With contract signed, SEOValley started SEO services for the website in last week of January 2019.

Strategy:

The Google Medic update is one of the most impactful updates in the recent past. After the update Google makes a big deal out of a new acronym – E-A-T – which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Google would value YMYL websites more which are Experts in their space, has Authority and can be Trustworthy.

The first and most important step was to put together an initial list of issues which might have triggered the penalty.

Experts at SEOValley did a detailed on-site and off-site technical evaluation of the website, did thorough analysis of Google webmaster & analytics data, conducted deep backlinks study and with previous hands-on experience of medic penalty, came up with following action plan to improve the E-A-T factors on the website.

  • Website changes to improve brand reputation and enhance authority – Detailed content enhancement recommendations covering optician profiles, association/ hyperlinks to medical bodies, new pages highlighting awards, press mentions and recognitions, prominence to customer support & return policies etc.
  • Regular social media outreach campaign to boost brand authority and trustworthiness.
  • Detailed technical SEO audit included not only suggestions to fix serious problems such as duplicate URLs, SSL URL problems, etc. but also focused on improving crucial site elements such as Google data structure, Breadcrumbs, Pagination, and URL Structure.
  • Researched and finalized a list of targeted key phrases that the site can be targeted for, from thousands of potential keyword options.
  • Flagship Content Development – Creation of flagship content pieces in the form of How-to Guides, Webinars, Research Articles, Infographics, and more. Refresh all existing content on the website.
  • Perform backlinks audit to identify and remove/ disavow toxic links in accordance to Google webmaster guidelines.
  • Analyze backlinks profile of top competitor and plan and execute new link building opportunities.

Since different sections of the site required separate optimization approaches, individual recommendations were provided to improve the performance of Categories, Brands, & Blog section. SEOValley worked in close co-ordination with Perfect Glasses IT team in timely implementation of all recommended changes on the website.

Services Applied:

SEO Services
SEO Consultation
Technical SEO
Ecommerce SEO
Google Penalty Recovery

Results:

Within 3 months of starting the campaign and execution of SEO strategies, Organic rankings improved by over 60% and Organic traffic improved by 180%. Improved organic visibility helped increase organic conversions on the website by 90%. Improvement in organic visibility is directly related to improvement in website authority score.

With traffic growth from all the sections, Categories & Products saw the highest number of new visits from Google SERPs. SEOValley’s robust SEO optimization not only improve the rankings of mid-tail and long-tail keywords but ranking of primary target keywords as well, such as – Glasses online, Prescription glasses, Designer glasses etc., These primary keywords accounted for over 40% of overall search traffic on the website.

To learn about SEOValley’s SEO service contact us today.