How we Helped Global App Testing Increase HMQLs by 163% in 12 Months

We worked with GlobalApp Testing to scale their organic traffic and MQLs. 

The goal was to invest heavily in recovering the traffic that had been falling for a year and a half and create a new, high-quality one to acquire new users to create stable growth.

Our team optimized and produced over 200 articles in 12 months. 

In Q4 2024, we achieved a 140% increase in organic traffic compared to Q4 2023, driven by a 163% increase in HMQLs.

This growth not only boosted visibility but also helped us reach more than 280k organic visitors during this period and led to higher conversions for the client.

Let’s dive into it.

Summary

During these 12 months, looking at the results with all the recoveries that have been done, we saw an impressive:

👉 1,100+ unique daily organic visits on average
👉 35,000+ monthly organic search clicks (and still growing)
👉 21,480+ organic keywords the website ranks for
👉 4,257+ organic keywords on the first page (+161.32%)
👉 1,024+ organic keywords in the top 3 position (+131.15%)
👉 140% organic traffic growth in Q4 2024 compared to Q4 2023, with 4 months being invested in solving the plagiarism.
👉 96% increase in MQLs from the organic search during this period, with a 163% increase in HMQLs.

But don’t just take our word for it—here’s what GlobalApp team had to say about their experience working with us.

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Wanna achieve similar results? Schedule a free call with us, and let's discuss how we can help your business grow!

Challenge

Before we started creating anything, we analyzed the performance of the website and existing content, which helped us identify many issues and areas for improvement.

The client faced multiple challenges that were hindering their traffic growth, including:

• Thin, low-value content that provided little to no benefit to users.
• A poorly optimized website with multiple on-page SEO issues.
• A lot of plagiarized and duplicate content that was negatively impacting search engine rankings.
• Numerous technical issues and broken pages (404 errors) without proper redirects.
• A cluttered sitemap filled with unnecessary URLs, leading to crawling and indexing issues.

Additionally, the website had been experiencing a steady decline in traffic for over 18 months.

• Significant content gaps were causing missed ranking opportunities.
• Many pages were not optimized for UX or SEO, affecting both engagement and discoverability.
• There was no clear long-term SEO strategy or defined keyword targeting plan.
• Several blog posts were misaligned with relevant keywords, poorly optimized, and underperforming in search results.

The challenge wasn’t easy at all. 😀

Which intrigued us to accept it.

Numbers before we began

These were the numbers before we began our SEO execution: 

👉 11,963 total keywords they ranked for
👉 1,629 keywords they ranked for in the top 10 results
👉 443 keywords they ranked for in the top 3 results
👉 12k monthly organic search clicks

You can see the keywords performance here:

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Results

• 1,100+ unique daily organic visits on average
• 35,000+ monthly organic search visits (and still growing)
• 21,480+ organic keywords the website ranks for
• 4,257+ organic keywords on the first page
• 1,024+ organic keywords in the top 3 position
• 140% organic traffic growth in Q4 2024 compared to Q4 2023, with 4 months being invested in solving the plagiarism.
• 96% increase in MQLs from the organic search during this period, with a 163% increase in HMQLs.
• Increased domain rating to 71, improving search engine trust.
• Increased the number of referring domains, growing from 1298 to 1819.

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Our solution - How did we achieve growth?

To achieve these results, we developed an action plan that included:

• Conducting a comprehensive website audit and implementing technical fixes to resolve the issues impacting performance.
• Developing a targeted SEO strategy, mapping out relevant keyword clusters.
• Auditing and replacing thin and plagiarized content with high-value alternatives.
• Implementing content optimization techniques to improve rankings.
• Creating feature, industry, alternative, and use-case pages to capture relevant search intent.
• Implementing an internal linking strategy to help us strengthen the clusters and make the website more authoritative for specific topics.
• Executing a high-quality link-building strategy through PR and blog outreach (without link farms).

This data-driven approach led to measurable growth, improved search visibility, and significantly increased conversions.

Here, we’ll explain them in more detail.

1. Solving technical issues

We conducted a thorough technical audit of the website to identify and resolve any underlying issues that could impact its performance and search engine visibility. 

This involved optimizing site speed, improving mobile responsiveness, fixing broken links, and enhancing overall website structure.

We worked closely with the client’s development team to enhance the website's health, ensure the pages were indexed properly, and deliver a better UX.

Once we restructured all the pages, deleted the unnecessary ones, and redirected them, we optimized the website's on-page and technical elements, including: 

• Title tags and meta descriptions,
• URL structures, aligning them with the identified keywords
• Structured Data, and
• Canonical and Open Graph tags.

This ensured search engines could better understand the website's content and relevance to user queries.

2. Conducting a content audit and prioritizing updates

Within the content audit process, we initially identified articles in different stages of the life cycle and implemented a prioritized optimization strategy.

How? By finding articles within each of the 4 stages:

• Early Traction: We monitored newly published content by the GlobalApp Team to ensure proper indexing and early ranking improvements.
• Growth: We enhanced growing articles with additional internal links and strategic updates to sustain momentum.
• Peak: We reinforced top-performing pages by strengthening backlinks and optimizing on-page elements to maximize conversions.
• Decay: We identified outdated content, added new insights, and re-optimized for relevant keywords to regain lost traffic.

For the content that we identified has decayed for 3 straight months, we knew something needed to happen with it.

So what do we do?
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1. Identified the decreasing content and sorted it based on the criteria explained below
2. Decided what to do with it by auditing the content in detail by analyzing each piece in detail 
3. Created an actionable plan for executing the updates so we can track the progress later.

Criteria for prioritizing the updates:

To maximize traffic and conversions in the shortest period of time, we prioritized the content to update by the following criteria:

• Conversion Potential (how likely the article/page is to convert based on the intent it targets),
• Search Volume (Highest Drop-offs)
• Quick Wins (Position: 4-20th)
• Zero-traffic pages

We’ve set to measure results by traffic and separately by conversion change, paying attention to the pages that lost traffic and conversions and sorting them in ascending order (to get the ones with the largest drop-offs first).

Based on this analysis, we got the exact list of pages that were most affected when it came to traffic, and we additionally analyzed them with a focus on conversions. 

We have gone through all the affected pages, analyzed them in live, and assessed things like:

• Content structure
• Content angle + intent
• Topic depth + coverage
• On-page optimization
• Use of tables, lists, and sub-headings
• Uniqueness of visuals
• Readability of content
• Skimmability of content
• The CTA placings within the article

For each article that we’ve prioritized for the update, we’ve created a “To Do” list on what exactly should be improved within each page. 

Based on this report analysis, we created tasks for each update and delegated them to our editors, writers, and designers to work on these improvements.

Here are the results we got after the updates of decaying pieces:

This instant growth was the case with over 50% of the content we updated (some of the content took more time to grow).

3. Pruning the dead content

Dead content is content that is not providing value to your business - not generating any traffic in the last 3 months or more.

To find it, we analyzed the pages within the GSC overview and sorted them by clicks in ascending order to get the pages with zero clicks first.

We exported this to get the list of articles with 0 clicks we should potentially update od remove.

Then, we analyzed which articles should be updated and improved (potentially reoptimized for different keywords) or merged with the existing content.

The content we found non-valuable was removed.

4. Finding and implementing new opportunities for growth

In general, there are two common types of content gaps we’re looking to fill - domain-level and page-level ones: 

• Domain-level gaps - content and topics competitors have content about, and we don’t.
• Page-level gaps - for pages that a competitor and we both had a page about the same topic, but they ranked for more keywords than we did. 

In most cases, this happened because they had more in-depth content than we did. 

So, we followed this process to identify both types of gaps:

How did we implement it:

We monitored the progress of each task in our project management tool and set up follow-up tasks for us to review the work.

By following this process, we ensured:

• Proper keyword integration.
• That content meets search intent.
• Optimizations close the content gaps identified.

Besides that, we found the potential to cover the BOFU content, as most of the content on the website was TOFU and MOFU, which was driving traffic but lacked MQLs.

We created BOFU articles related to queries that searchers who consider different solutions and are ready to buy are searching for. 

For example:

• “Review of {product}, 
• Best {products in a category}, 
• {Solution A} vs. {Solution  B}, 
• {Product} alternatives

5. Interlinking the content

Before taking any action, we audited all the internal and external links and checked the following:

• Are these internal working?
• Are they still relevant?

Here's how we improved internal linking:

We linked to other valuable resources within the website and credible external sources to establish authority and provide extra value to readers.

All that by focusing on the topic clustering model.

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It helped us strengthen the clusters and make the Global App website more authoritative for specific topics.

Here are the results of specific content updates that included internal linking, which helped articles drive around 400 clicks daily.

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6. Recovering from toxic backlinks & building authority

When our client approached us, they struggled with declining search rankings due to a high volume of toxic backlinks harming their website’s authority. 

These low-quality, spammy links negatively impacted their authority and search performance, making it difficult to compete for high-value keywords.

To reverse this trend and establish a strong, trustworthy online presence, we implemented a comprehensive backlink recovery and acquisition strategy, focusing on:

• Identifying and disavowing toxic backlinks that were harming the site's credibility.
• Building a high-quality, natural link profile through strategic outreach and content partnerships.
• Earning authoritative backlinks from relevant industry websites, blogs, and media outlets.
• Creating valuable, link-worthy content to attract organic backlinks from reputable sources.

The Results

Through this approach, we successfully:

✅ Increased the number of referring domains by 500+, significantly expanding the website’s reach and authority.
✅ Boosted the client’s Domain Rating (DR) to 71, enhancing their search engine trust and rankings.

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Final thoughts & next steps

Want similar results? 

Contact us today for a free SEO audit and discover how we can help you start growing your revenue today!