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Promotion of a Decor and Lighting Online Store

Promotion of a Decor and Lighting Online Store Revenue – 2,16 million UAH ROI – 199.38%

The project was launched back in 2014, to be precise it was the 31st of March. At that time, the online store was still closed from indexing and remained on the stage of content creation. Taking into account that the store was newly created, the whole first month we spent on technical audit and website adaptation to search engines requirements. Only from the second month we moved to promotion.

Project Overview

Subject:

Decor and lighting

Location:

Ukraine

Main goal:

Comprehensive website development

Additional information:

The project lasted for 2 years

Services:

SEO

Overall budget:

126,000 UAH

Search Engine Optimization

1.FIRST STEPS

The first stage of work is audit + installation and configuration of all services necessary promotion (GA, Search console, parsers, services for ranking checks and project monitoring, internal company services for work organization, and more).
During the first month, the site was closed from indexing and opened only after we corrected all technical flaws found during the audit and set basic meta tag templates (at the promotion stage, when landing pages are optimized it is necessary to

It is worth to note that starting from 2014, indexing requirements have slightly changed. Now if you close the main js scripts and CSS files from indexing, this can greatly harm your website, especially its search ranking on mobile devices.

So the first steps we took were mainly related to the technical changes necessary to prepare the website. Whereas from the second month, we already worked on site promotion and traffic increase.

2.Tasks

Our task was to turn the newly created online store into a significant player in the decor and lighting segment of the market.

During our cooperation we:

did a full SEO-audit of the site;
corrected errors based on the audit results;
did keywords research;
optimized pages and categories;
published articles on third-party resources;
increased external link mass;
improved website credibility;
created a Ukrainian version of the site;
created static pages of filters to be later optimized;
did some additional work.

We also completed monthly monitoring and control tasks. Based on their results, we changed our working strategy, focus, and priorities for several times.

3.What we did

As it was already mentioned and, actually this is a usual practice, we started from the SEO-audit, which checks:

CMS functionality;
duplicate content;
h1-h3;
meta tag templates (and their formatting);
website response;
website semantics (if there are no excessive words on the pages);
image optimization (alt-title);
presence of duplicate pages;
download speed;
dead links, etc.

In general, it is more than 150 questions to be checked..

All the found problems were analyzed and resolved.

Also in the course of the SEO, audit we analyzed competitors and defined the strategy of work for the next 6 months.

We decided to work steadily with a quite low budget.

So during the first months, we mainly tried to cover as many keyphrases and links as possible to improve the website ranking.

In 6 months of promotion, we handled 48 landing pages of categories, which allowed us to cover more than 1,000 of targeted search requests.

We also placed more than 50 links (we don’t work with weak links, including Sape, but focus on the quality of links) that allowed as to get first top positions in search results.

The achieved results were quite promising, so we continued with this strategy for the following 6 months.

So during 1 year of our cooperation, we completed the basic tasks: formed the semantic kernel, analyzed search queries and divided them into groups, created content, and worked on links. The working strategy for the next 12 months was already much broader and consisted of many additional steps to get maximum SEO results.

We planned to improve the website usability and at the same time work on relinking and external PR, namely place informational articles in the mass media.

We also created the Ukrainian version of the site that allowed to double the number of pages.

And now it gives 20% of organic traffic.
(all Ukrainian pages of the website have “ukr” identifier in their URLs)

Consequently, all category pages of the Ukrainian version were also optimized to match targeted search requests. Generally, we got over 200 categories in both languages. So there were 400 groups of search queries with more than 4,000 search results to be ranked.

If to talk about links, we used both contextual and trust links. Again, all of them were permanent.
Around 15% of all links came from the mass media and the article we wrote. Such articles have the best effect on ranking growth but they are pretty costly for clients. Therefore, the optimal choice is to keep the balance between cheaper contextual links and links in the mass media.
During 2 years, over 200 links were placed:

Here is the distribution based on anchors:
20% Brand/domain.
40% — URL.
30% — Partial matches.
10% — Exact matches.

As for the pages, 15% of links led to the home page, while the rest were divided between landing pages (both categories and products).

Such work on links greatly increases ranking. During our promotion we managed to propel almost 1,000 of keywords to top 10:

As the result, out steps ensured relatively high traffic and in addition, doubled the return of funds invested by our customer.

Over the period of our cooperation, the total expenses on SEO reached 126,000 UAH while the revenue was 2.16 million UAH (revenue does not include sales from paid advertising channel and direct calls).