With the team at 4eck-Media, you are in the best hands when it comes to digital media and e-commerce. Here, development happens at the “pulse of the moment” and no standard solution is delivered. Their expertise and commitment are unbeatable. The support ranges from the idea through implementation to reach generation. The highly dedicated owners and employees deliver their work as if they were developing the project for themselves—they are truly passionate about what they do and always strive for the perfect shop. The website Wald-zu-Tisch.de has turned out better than I imagined and is already the second project that I have successfully implemented on schedule with Matthias and Stefan.
Our SEO Year 2024: Best Cases for E-Commerce, Image SEO & International SEO
This year was strongly focused on our work surrounding SEO, PageSpeed, and multilingualism. Many agencies consider themselves particularly competent in these areas. But how can it be convincingly and credibly communicated that these core competencies actually exist?
Four months ago, I came across a post by Nathan Gotch on LinkedIn that left a lasting impression on me. I copied the content to remind myself again and again what really matters: the current results = real SEO expertise.
Nathan Gotch is absolutely right: It doesn’t matter if you have X years of experience, speak at conferences, write books, or have hundreds of thousands of followers. Even memorizing all of Google’s patents doesn’t interest anyone if you are not able to consistently make progress in the rankings.
Therefore, I would like to share a few charts from our own projects and the projects of our clients. This data is from today (!) and covers the period that can be recorded up to now. These are the freshest numbers, not selected periods where things went well, while it may look different today.
Ready for evidence of true SEO expertise? Let’s go!
1. Customer project E-Commerce: + 35 percent clicks
We compare the last three months with the same period of the previous year to exclude seasonal fluctuations and obtain an undistorted result.
The curve is clearly trending upward: As a result, 35% more clicks were generated. Furthermore, the overall development this year enabled double-digit revenue growth according to shop statistics compared to the previous year.
The budget for the SEO measures has so far been in the lower five-digit range, and the support will continue ongoing.
2. Customer Project E-Commerce: + 260 percent clicks
In this client project, it is also an online shop that we have optimized in several targeted SEO sprints. The support is not ongoing here, but sprint-based.
The clicks were at a low level last year, with only a seasonal boost noticeable just before Christmas. However, thanks to the SEO measures implemented, visibility has significantly improved, and the client is now achieving many top positions on Google in their segment.
An interesting observation from Customer Project 1 and Customer Project 2: Although the average ranking has improved, the click-through rate has either remained the same or even decreased. This shows that even with very good rankings, the click-through rate often remains disappointingly low. The reason lies in users’ search habits: Many click in Google Shopping or on the product snippet before they even reach the organic search results.
3. Customer Project Corporate Website: Patient lives, pulse is present again.
It is not always possible to achieve enormous increases in visibility for every project. A good example of this is this project from the HR sector, which operates in an extremely competitive market. When we started the relaunch, the project was essentially already seemingly dead. However, it is precisely such challenges that make the appeal of achieving sustainable results through targeted SEO measures.
After all, one can say: The patient is alive again and has a noticeable pulse. The clicks are still at a very low level, but the SEO efforts continue. The goal is to achieve a significantly higher level of visibility by the first quarter of 2025.
Image SEO: Thousands of clicks per day are possible.
The chart impressively shows how clicks through Google Images have multiplied ninefold over eleven months. The reason for this was the switch to the modern AVIF image format, which offers clear advantages from an SEO perspective. Additionally, the increase was achieved through the publication of new pages on the website, which were specifically optimized and equipped with suitable images. This strategic combination of technical adjustments, expanded content, and visually appealing elements has sustainably increased visibility and traffic. A clear demonstration of how technical and content-related measures can work together.
Another image sprint at the end of November, where we optimized the image metadata such as file names and alt texts, resulted in exponential growth in click numbers. These targeted measures significantly increased the discoverability of the images in search results.
International SEO: From 0 to over 15,000 clicks per day
Since the introduction of multilingualism in the spring, user interaction on the non-German pages has steadily increased. The chart (excluding German-language pages) shows the impressive development of click numbers, which reached over 15,000 per day during peak weeks.
The peak observed in August was abruptly interrupted by the Google Core Update in mid-August. This update marked the beginning of a phase of moderate declines that lasted until November. The subsequent Core Update in November then triggered a new growth phase.
Relevance of the References
Two months ago, somewhere between mid and late October, I saw the following post on LinkedIn, which celebrated the increase in clicks and was acknowledged by many others with appreciative comments.
The chart shows exactly the same outlier at the end of July as in our chart one image higher. Although the post was published in October, the author does not show what happened after the core update in mid-August. Her screenshot only shows the values up to the core update. My question in the comments also went unanswered, although I was honestly interested. The author of the post has over 30,000 followers on LinkedIn, and this chart has already been used as a case study in three posts. But always only incompletely up to mid-August, the time of Google’s core update.
What happened next with the chart … you can probably guess. It is suspected that this website was also negatively affected by the Google update. However, this doesn’t quite fit the celebratory post and is therefore better left unmentioned and unseen.
Another comment certainly caught my attention due to the bold appearance of the self-proclaimed SEO expert. To the right, I have placed the current Sistrix charts of the two referenced projects.
It is also evident here that time-based snapshots of charts should be taken with caution. The author was initially right with their first quarterly position at Sistrix. However, the success was very short-lived, as Google quickly recognized the AI spam as such and promptly demoted both sides again.
A third example, also picked up in my SEO bubble on LinkedIn, is also remarkable. Here, the author pointed out that the person on the right – an SEO consultant with over 20,000 followers – stole his chart to use it in her own success stories.
Exactly for such reasons, Nathan Gotch’s statement is confirmed: the current numbers are the only ones that matter. Otherwise, as a customer, you risk being stuck with incomplete, outdated, or improperly claimed evidence of supposed SEO successes.
The SEO market is fast-paced, complex, and characterized by constant changes. That’s why only one thing matters: transparent, up-to-date, and well-founded references. Success reports that only represent snapshots or remain incomplete can be misleading.
If you are looking for professional SEO consulting, make sure to work with partners who disclose how they respond to challenges such as algorithm updates and who communicate their successes honestly and transparently. Sustainable SEO is not a matter of short-term outliers, but rather continuous optimization, informed decisions, and the willingness to achieve the best possible results even in dynamic environments.
With the current numbers from our projects, we show exactly that: genuine, verifiable SEO expertise that has long-term effects. Contact us today for your project!
