Each year we attend dozens of events and reach thousands of people with our keynotes, talks, and Q&As. We go to conferences and meetups, because we believe that our talks can potentially help online businesses flourish and we get to help people with their search related problems, but sometimes also listen to their success stories. It's really uplifting when we hear that, by following our advice, they achieved something great!
We want people to hear about these success stories, so we're starting a new blog post series that features case studies. They may, for example, help with convincing a boss' boss that investing in SEO or implementing structured data can be good for the business.
In this first blog post we're going to start with the overall basics of investing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and how investing in it helped a company.
We hope you'll find this blog post useful. If you're interested in contributing a case study, submit a talk proposal when signing up for a Webmaster Conference near you and we will consider featuring it. For more case studies and help content, head over to our developer site, help center, or YouTube channel. If you wanna get in touch with us, find us on Twitter.
Posted by Alice Kim and The Gary
Moon Tae Sung is a SEO Manager at Saramin, one of the largest job platforms in Korea. We had the opportunity to ask him a few questions about the effects of his team's work on Google Search after a presentation he did at a Webmaster Conference in Seoul.
Saramin offers job posting recommendations, company and salary information, AI-based interviews, and AI-based headhunting services. According to Tae Sung, "people come to the Saramin site not only to look for jobs and submit applications, but to also gain a variety of information related to job searches and receive high-quality AI-based services for interview preparation."
Saramin's SEO process started with Google Search Console. In 2015 they verified the site in the tool and spent a year identifying and fixing crawling issues. "The task was simple, but still resulted in a 15% increase in the organic traffic", Tae Sung said. The ROI prompted Saramin to invest more in SEO with the aim of even greater potential success. But first they needed to learn more about what else makes a site search engine friendly so they can better look for help resources. "We studied the Google Search developer’s guide and Help Center articles. These resources continue to provide up-to-date information for issues that we run into", he told us.
SEO is a process that may take time to bear fruit, so they "started following the SEO guidelines more closely and implemented more changes. The goal was to make changes to the site so that Google Search would better understand it", Tae Sung shared. They removed meta tags that were cluttered with unnecessary and unhelpful keywords, they used rel-canonical and removed duplicate content, and they explored the search gallery and applied applicable structured data, starting with Job Posting, Breadcrumb, and Estimated salary.
In addition, they used various Google tools offered as they worked on improving their site. "Errors on our structured data are dealt with by checking URLs on the Structured Data Testing Tool. Other tools like Mobile Friendly Test, AMP Test, and PageSpeed Insight provide us valuable insights for making improvements and helping us offer a better experience for our users," said Tae Sung.
Over time, Saramin saw the red-colored errors on Search Console’s Index Coverage report gradually turning valid green, and they knew they were headed in the right direction. The incremental changes reached a tipping point and the traffic continued to rise at a more remarkable speed. In the peak hiring season of September 2019, traffic doubled compared to the previous year.
"We are very happy about the traffic increase, but what’s more exciting is it also accompanied improvement in the quality of the traffic. We saw a 93% increase in the number of new sign ups and a 9% increase on the conversion. We believe this means Saramin’s optimization work was found delightful by our users," said Tae Sung.
Saramin continues to invest in achieving their SEO goals. They're trying to enhance their users’ experience by implementing more technologies and features from Google, and Tae Sung is enthusiastic about their work ahead: "This is only the beginning of our story."
