Showcasing the value of SEO

Wednesday, April 08, 2020

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 Gary Illyes

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,
Naviqasiya izi, 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.”