Seair Exim Solutions · Trade data & research
They were getting found. They just were not getting asked.
- Client
- Seair Exim Solutions
- Sector
- Trade data & research
- Engagement
- Apr–Sep 2025
- Scope
- Organic SEO, email
+30%
qualified leads over 6 months
−45%
spam score
2 wks
diagnostic before a single fix shipped
The problem
Seventeen years of authority in global trade data and no shortage of traffic, but almost nobody filling in the enquiry form. Every interface-level metric looked acceptable, which is what made it hard.
What we did
- Spent two weeks on diagnostics across content, schema, technical SEO, breadcrumbs and the backlink profile before proposing a single fix.
- Audited and disavowed the toxic and irrelevant referring domains, then earned placement in trade, logistics and export-import publications.
- Rebuilt breadcrumbs across the data-page hierarchy and interlinked related countries, HS codes, products and ports so a researcher had a second step to take.
- Marked up organisation, dataset, breadcrumb and FAQ layers so a trade database stopped looking like a blog post to a crawler.
- Split email into two journeys: a sequence moving new researchers toward a demo, and data-update contact for existing clients.
Most of the SEO problems we get called into are visibility problems. A company cannot be found, and the work is to make it findable. Seair was the opposite. The brand was established, the domain had history going back to 2009, and traffic was arriving. It just was not arriving from the one who wanted to buy trade data.
That is a harder brief, because every interface-level metric looks acceptable. Sessions were fine, the site was indexed, nothing was obviously wrong. The only number that told the truth was the enquiry form, and it was quiet.
What two weeks of diagnostics turned up
We went through content, schema, technical SEO, breadcrumbs and the backlink profile before proposing anything. Three things came out of it.
Inappropriate backlinks were created
This was the root cause, and it was not subtle once we pulled the profile apart. A large share of referring domains had nothing to do with trade, logistics, customs or commodities. Some of it was old directory and reciprocal-link activity of the kind that used to be standard practice and stopped being safe a decade ago. The result was a domain with a meaningful spam score and a stream of visitors who had no reason to want a shipment database.
Those visitors still count as sessions. They just never convert, and they drag every behavioural signal down with them.
The site attracted visitors but failed to retain them
We analysed the journey properly across entry points, path through the site and exit points, because we wanted to stop guessing about where people were dropping. The pattern was consistent: someone would land on a country or HS-code page, get exactly the one fact they came for, and leave. Nothing on the page invited a second step. Breadcrumbs were inconsistent enough that visitors lost their place in a site with thousands of data pages, and related pages were not linked to each other in any deliberate way.
A researcher who wants Vietnam export data usually also wants the HS codes underneath it, the ports, and the comparable lane. Seair had all of that; the customers were just unable to find it.
Lack of schema implementation in the required places
Seair publishes structured trade information — countries, codes, shipment fields, pricing tiers, FAQs. Almost none of it was marked up with schema, so a trade database and a blog post look the same to a crawler. That costs you rich results, and increasingly it costs you citation in AI-generated answers, which is where a growing share of research-stage queries now get resolved.
The diagnosis
Seair did not have a traffic problem. It had a traffic quality problem caused by its link profile, compounded by a site that gave qualified visitors no reason to go deeper.
The roadmap
Three workstreams, sequenced so the cleanup happened before the acquisition push. There is no point earning good links into a profile that is still carrying bad ones.
| Phase | What it covered |
|---|---|
| Technical rectification | Crawl and indexation fixes, breadcrumb rebuild across the data-page hierarchy, deliberate interlinking between related countries, HS codes, products and ports |
| Schema markup | Structured data across organisation, dataset, breadcrumb and FAQ layers so the catalogue is machine-readable |
| Backlink remediation and rebuild | Audit and disavow of toxic and irrelevant domains, then earned placement in trade, logistics and export-import publications |
Alongside it, we put visitor-journey tooling in place so the next round of decisions would be made on observed behaviour rather than assumption.
Email, built as a journey rather than a newsletter
Seair's existing email activity was broadcast — the same message to the whole list. We rewrote the content and mapped it to where someone actually was: a first-time researcher who had downloaded a sample needs something different from a subscriber three months into a plan.
Two jobs, split cleanly. For new contacts, a sequence that moves someone from a single data lookup toward a demo. For existing clients, ongoing contact tied to data updates and trade developments relevant to their sector, which is the difference between a subscription that renews and one that quietly lapses.
What changed
Spam score came down 45%, and bounce rate improved as the irrelevant traffic fell away and the visitors who remained had somewhere to go next. Enquiries rose 30% — and the part that matters more, the enquiries arriving were from people the sales team could actually work with.
The session count is a less flattering number than it was, because a chunk of what used to be counted was never real. That is the trade we recommended and it is the right one. A smaller number of qualified visitors beats a larger number of accidental ones every quarter.
What makes us different
We did run the backlink disavow earlier. We sequenced it inside the same phase as the technical work, and in hindsight it should have started on day one of implementation — the cleanup has a lag before it shows up in rankings, and starting it a fortnight sooner would have pulled the whole curve forward.
Same shape of problem?
If you have traffic that does not convert, a link profile you inherited from an older era of SEO, or a catalogue of genuinely useful data that search engines cannot read, the diagnostic is where we would start. Two weeks, no implementation, and you get the findings whether or not you continue with us.
Two weeks. Content, schema, technical, links and journey. You keep the findings.
Published with the client's review and permission. More work
Next step
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