92% of queries in TOP 10 for the restaurant network

Client

Eurasia is the chain of Japanese and European restaurants in Kyiv and neighboring cities. The chain has more than 20 restaurants.

Our goal

Increase non-brand traffic in the priority direction.

The priority direction is sushi. This direction can be divided into 3 parts:

• Sushi self-delivery
• Sushi delivery
• General queries (Sushi, Sushi Kyiv)

The assessment criterion of our work by the client is the growth of ranking as an intermediate metric in the short term, followed by the growth of traffic.

Source data:

Region: Kyiv and neighboring cities

Start of work: June 14, 2022

Project features: Traffic on the project varies significantly depending on the situation in the country. For instance, traffic drops significantly during the large-scale shelling of Ukraine.

Language: Ukrainian, Russian (focus on the Russian version)

Search Engine: Google

Challenges

From the very start of working on the project, we regularly encountered critical issues that slowed down the promotion process, and sometimes almost completely disrupted it. The issues we encountered were as follows:

Software engineers on the project are not ours, but client’s. According to them, CMS is hard to refine and it takes much more time. This may slow down the process of placing MT, texts, and creating new pages, which should be created a lot, in order to cover all key queries we are interested in.

The priority of tasks is on the side of software engineers. Software engineers were often busy with other tasks not related to SEO, which also slowed down the process of creating new pages and technical revisions.

Chain letter. In February 2023, when some pages had already been developed and the website had a good ranking, our team received a “chain letter” from the CL:

Hello, sorry for writing on my day off, we had a trouble yesterday, disk was damaged on the hosting and the site data is now for July 2022 🙁

We will have to collect information in the next business day on what and where to post and restore.

So, as you understand, we’re rolling back to the very beginning.

All edits, texts, and MTs are gone.

I will ask CL to post the MTs and texts shortly.

ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING WE DID ON THE WEBSITE FOR HALF A YEAR HAS DISAPPEARED!

The most difficult thing in this situation – the lack of backup from hosting (hosting was not the best and we immediately asked to change it).The team promptly determined the works that should be restored as soon as possible, before Google saw the problem. The priority was given to:

1. МТ
2. Texts
3. Technical edits

Within a week or so, software engineers managed to restore almost all of the critical edits, and we sent the website for reindexing. We managed to avoid a significant drawdown of positions, but for some queries, we were not able to return the previous positions.

However, despite global, critical issues and long delays in making edits and creating pages, we managed to perform well.

Competitor and niche analysis

Large chains of self-service and sushi delivery restaurants are ranked in the top 10 in this niche for the majority of queries. Most of the restaurants operate not only in Kyiv, but have also expanded their chain to other Ukrainian cities. All projects are engaged in SEO promotion, expanding the structure of the website, and elaborating on filtering.

Our experts conducted a comparative analysis of the basic metrics of the promoted website with its competitors. Data was taken from Ahrefs.com.

As you can see, the number of donors is at a fairly optimal level compared to competitors, yet the quality of the (DR) is lower.

As you can see, evrasia.in.ua has a lot of organic traffic, however, most of the traffic is brand traffic. Looking at the frequency of branded queries, we can see this.

This is the reason why the task in the promotion sounded like “Increase of non-brand traffic in the priority direction”.

Based on the analysis, we have planned the work in two areas:

1. Gradually build up quality links, so that the website had only a high-quality link mass.
2. Expand the structure of the website as much as possible in the priority direction.

Searching for the points of growth of the website

To find the points of growth and expand the structure of the website we:

• analyzed pages and queries on which the competitors are promoted
• analyzed the keywords shown by the following services:
  • Google Keyword Planner
  • Ahrefs
  • Serpstat
• study queries in Google Search Console that have impressions, yet the positions are quite weak

All these methods help to maximize the quality of the website structure, practically in any niche. We have identified the following key points of growth for evrasia.in.ua:

• General queries (Sushi, Sushi Kyiv, Rolls, Rolls Kyiv)
• Types of sushi (California sushi, Philadelphia sushi, etc.)
• Names of sushi (green dragon sushi, tori maki, golden dragon rolls, etc.)
• Sushi sets (Philadelphia set, maki set)
• Kyiv districts + query “sushi” (sushi Troeshchina, sushi Obolon, sushi Poznyaki, etc.)

Work process

Technical optimization

From a technical point of view, the website was very poorly implemented. There have been issues with duplications, as well as elementary linking between the pages promoted.

Technical audit of the website included 41 points. Errors were found in 20 of them. All errors were assigned a technical specification for correction.

Semantic core

Having determined the points of growth, we started to collect the semantic core in Ukrainian and Russian languages. For the most part, semantics consists of more than 1000 search queries in 120 semantic groups (1 page = 1 semantic group in most cases)

Working with the content

Once our specialists collected the semantic core, they checked the position of the site across all SC to have a better understanding of which pages we need to write the texts on, and on which to rewrite the existing ones. Technical assignments on writing texts for the website pages have been compiled. In total, around 100 texts were written for the Ukrainian and Russian versions of the site.

Part of the pages we plan to create are still in the works on the side of KL software engineers. The implementation of our tasks on creating pages with the new design proved to be quite labor-intensive on this CMS.

Building up an external link mass

The first step when working on the link mass of any project is to analyze the current link mass. We carried out an audit and created the list of low-quality donors that could negatively impact the site. The entire list was rejected by Google Search Console.

The second stage of working on the link mass is building up quality links to the website. We used several methods to achieve this:

• Outreach
• Purchasing through link exchangers
• Registration on trust directories and platforms
• Registration on Review Boards
• Crowd-marketing

Results of the project

Despite the fact that some of the pages we have not yet created, the project has already shown very good results. As the frequency of queries in Russian version of the website is much higher than in Ukrainian, it was decided to place more emphasis on the Russian version. According to the positions below, it is clear that Ukrainian version of the site is slightly lagging behind the Russian version.

Sushi self-delivery

Sushi delivery

Sushi

Sushi bar

Rolls

Sushi Promo

We got very fast results for this page simply by correctly optimizing Title and H1.

Sushi

Sushi delivery

Rolls (Ukr)

Conclusion

Despite high competition, a relatively weak link profile and the difficulties described above, our team managed to show good, and on some pages, very fast results.

For example, it took only one week to raise the “Sushi Promo” group from the top 10 to the top 2 (see the screen above). The page “Rolls” from the top 50+ hit the top 1-3 only a month and a half after the start of work.

We achieved such results due to high-quality content, proper optimization and good selection of donors for link building.

Participants of the project

Project Manager: Kateryna Tymoshenko

Optimizer: Yurii Oshchapovskyi

Linker: Yevhen Fedchenko