About the client
Quit Chronic Fatigue is a health blog about chronic fatigue symptoms and recovery, read mostly by people searching for answers in English speaking countries.
- BusinessHealth information blog
- CategoryBlog
- Websitequitchronicfatigue.com
The challenge
Almost all visitors came from social media. Organic search brought only 139 users in six months, about 1.7% of traffic, so the blog depended on one channel.
The goal
Grow organic search traffic so the blog does not depend on social media. What the business needed from SEO, in plain terms, and how success would be measured for this health blog website.
What we found
The issues the SEO audit uncovered, grouped by area. These are the problems that most often hold back health blog websites.
Speed
- Low GTmetrix performance score and slow load time
- Too many requests and render blocking JavaScript
- No browser caching or compression
On page
- Main keyword rarely used on key pages
- Meta titles and descriptions missing or duplicated
- Weak H1, title and alt tags
- Sitemap using the wrong protocol
Site structure
- No internal linking strategy
- Generic anchor text
Authority
- Very few referring domains
- Low backlink count compared with competitors
What we did
We improved speed, rewrote posts around what people search for, linked related posts into topic groups and earned relevant links.
Speed
- Deferred JavaScript so pages render faster
- Set browser caching and expires headers
- Removed redirect chains and unneeded redirects
- Minified JavaScript and CSS and enabled Gzip compression
- Compressed and re-uploaded oversized images
On page
- Keyword research by search volume and competition, approved by the client
- Rewrote missing and duplicate meta titles and descriptions
- Optimised H1, title tags and image alt text around the main keyword
- Improved page content with the main and related keywords, without stuffing
- Rebuilt the XML sitemap with the correct protocol
Site structure
- Restructured internal links into a homepage, topic page and supporting post model
- Pointed descriptive anchor text at the most relevant page
Authority
- Earned relevant backlinks from authoritative sites in the niche
- Guest posts on related websites
- Competitor link gap analysis, then targeted the links competitors had and the site did not
Results
What changed after the work, measured in the client's own Google Analytics, Search Console or Ahrefs data. Users grew from 7,972 to 24,643 and sessions from 8,891 to 30,137. Organic search users grew from 139 to 968, and the site reached a GTmetrix grade A with a 99% performance score. More than 2,000 keywords improved.
