Parking installations manufacturer relaunches website and grows organic traffic by 500% in 7 months
About Quercus Technologies:
Quercus Technologies is an international consolidated company that offers solutions for any type of parking facility, simplifies their management, and improves the customer’s parking experience. The company is a world leader in license plate recognition, vehicle detection, and parking guidance systems. Quercus Technologies’ parking installations can be found worldwide in more than 60 airports, 80 shopping centers, hotels, universities, public institutions, hospitals, condominiums, and offices, among others.
Business Challenge: Boost the company’s online presence, especially for the new product division
Quercus Technologies has more than 20 years of experience manufacturing and marketing license plate recognition cameras for parking integrators and companies in this field.
In 2018, the company created two working divisions: the Detection Division was the regular sales channel for license plate recognition cameras, while the new Mobility Division offered integral guidance for parking facilities, including sensors, LED displays, a parking software platform, etc.
This meant not only a change of language in the content but also a complete redesign of the website and a demanding positioning challenge. As a result of these changes, Quercus was able to significantly grow the amount of organic and referral traffic:
September 2020 - November 2020 December 2020 - February 2021
To execute the campaign, the Quercus team needed to follow these steps:
- Identify the highest-volume keywords in the parking sector and define a content marketing plan;
- Establish solid criteria for SEO, extensions, and metadata when creating content for the blog and for all sections of the website in general;
- Follow a clear link-building strategy;
- Run regular site audits and maintain good site health.
“It’s impossible to define an SEO strategy blindfolded, without a platform that provides information for our particular sector and without knowing what other companies do,” says Adrià Miralvés, Digital Marketing Manager at Quercus. “So we turned to Semrush for this data.”
Solution: Site relaunch, SEO-optimized content, and link-building strategy
In 2019, as the first step of a major online visibility campaign, Quercus decided to design a completely new website that would show information about both divisions in a clear, strategic way.
To avoid repeating previous mistakes, it was necessary to detect the old website’s errors and keep a close eye on the site status every day.
Site audit to detect and solve web issues
From the moment the new website was launched in November 2020, the team kept track of the site's health with daily site audits in order to fix any issues that popped up.
Using Semrush’s Site Audit tool, the marketing team found problems such as:
● Broken links, images and pages;
● Redirection loops;
● Duplicate or missing title tags and meta descriptions;
● Pages returning a 404 error code;
● URLs with temporary redirects.
With the tool’s guidance, the Quercus Technologies team fixed these bugs and immediately improved the site's health. They have kept an average site health status of 87% during the 4 months analyzed up to the publication of this article.
“It seemed impossible to have absolute control over the website status and errors: broken links and loops, not found images ... but it wasn’t. Semrush detects and summarizes all bugs on our website in a user-friendly dashboard and we can correct them easily,” shares Adrià.
Keyword Research
The first step to a good keyword analysis is to carry out a study of each sector and the target audience. One could reinvent the wheel and try to find the most relevant, lucrative, and achievable keywords by trial and error, but Quercus went the smart way: they used Semrush tools to identify which keywords were used by competitors that were already well positioned in the sector.
Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool allowed the team to find which broad match keywords were appearing in Google searches from a root keyword. Quercus took into account the search volume, keyword difficulty and other metrics to select terms of sufficient quality to use in the optimization process.
Using the Keyword Gap tool, the team performed a comprehensive analysis of the keywords used by competitors, comparing up to 5 different domains at the same time. Thanks to the tool, Quercus extracted its rivals’ well-positioned and high-volume keywords in each sector.
Content optimization
Next, it was time to put the discovered strategic keywords to work and create optimized content.
The SEO Writing Assistant tool and its integration with Google Docs made the writing process a lot more efficient at Quercus. Using it, the team was able to write SEO-oriented content in all four languages they use. The tool helped identify the ideal word count for articles (600-800 words) and titles. It also helped the marketing team to know how original the content was and how easy it was to read.
“Writing might seem like an ordinary task, but writing for the search engines is not that simple. We didn’t know how many rules affected the SEO on every blog post or web page we launched. The SEO Writing Assistant is our cheat sheet,” says Adrià.
Position Tracking
Once the discovered strategic keywords were placed on the new website, it was time to track which ones started ranking and which were lagging behind. This information would guide Quercus' optimization for relevant terms and the elimination of those that were considered unrelated.
The Semrush Keyword Overview and Position Tracking tools allow Quercus to display these keywords in a centralized way with all the sectors of interest: parking, mobility, IoT, etc. With Semrush, the strategy is much easier to define, knowing the current keyword situation of the company's website, competitors, and other companies in the parking field.
Brand Monitoring
Quercus publishes a large volume of blog posts and corporate news on a regular basis. Before using Semrush’s Brand Monitoring tool, it was impossible to identify the reach of these articles in the sector pages (the team could only see the users and sessions for a page on Google Analytics), nor did they know how other sites mentioned Quercus.
Backlink Audit
When the team at Quercus began using Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool, they found a large number of backlinks they did not know about. Over 200,000 backlinks from 114 referring domains, most of them from parking portals, were discovered when analyzing the website’s backlink status
This data reinforced the team’s decision to keep creating blog content and get more backlinks organically.
Results
In the 7 months from the start of the campaign, Quercus Technologies achieved:
- 500% increase in strategic keywords ranking in Google’s top 10 pages;
- 500% organic traffic growth;
- 130% increase in the number of backlinks and 53% increase in referring domains, thanks to Semrush’s Backlink Audit and Brand Monitoring tools.
