1 Million Website Visits from a Search, or How We Promoted an Online Store of Sport Goods

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Sounds impressive? It does indeed if you’re an ecommerce website owner.

What do you need for it? A bit of patience and experience. If you promote your online store or plan to step on a market with a new product, you’ll probably be interested not only in digging into successful copies but also in specific SEO techniques.

Outsource SEO is what our agency is specialized in. Throughout the whole time of our work we have collected quite a lot of interesting cases some of which are worth to be shared.

In this post, we will share with you results of website promotion and give a few recommendations that can help you reach the same figures.

So, we’ll talk about an ecommerce SEO case study of one of our clients, who has quite a big online store of sport goods that was given to us for SEO outsource services. And let’s emphasize that 30% of the goods are in high demand during summer.

It was 2015, the business we’re talking about was growing, sales were stable.

What else would you wish?

A bad businessman is the one who doesn’t want to achieve more. Especially, when it’s about the website belonging to such a competitive niche. That’s why the client chose a new goal for further website promotion:

“Increase sales by means of getting more website visits from an organic search”.

After the very first meeting, the work got hectic.

Proper planning is half the battle

At the beginning of our cooperation, we built an SEO strategy that helped us achieve perfect results in the website promotion. Besides, we had an advantage, since the client was already promoting his ecommerce website according to our recommendations.

An increase of content and links amount was the main direction of SEO.

All of the works planned we divided into several blocks:

1. An additional analysis for the improvement of behavioral factors on the ecommerce website.
2. Preparation of new content for optimization according to the queries giving higher conversion.
3. Making changes in the website structure with an aim of fast promotion of the online store.
4. Comprehensive monitoring aiming for elimination of possible mistakes.

The first block (analytical) allowed us to find mistakes and some hidden opportunities for SEO. With such an aim we set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console and connected Plerdy Heatmap after some time.

Due to the heatmap, especially, the option of tracking custom tags, we saw that users on the website:

• didn’t go to the section “special offers” which, in fact, happened to be empty;
• didn’t click on banners on the main page;
• actively used website search;
• didn’t visit the section “Selected” and didn’t use the option of goods comparison. Consequently, we removed them from the category pages;
• used the filter “Brands” first and foremost;
• read description thoroughly;
• were interested in goods of one type.

The second block (content preparation) consisted of the following parts:

• creating new posts for the blog;
• preparation of articles for categories and product cards;
• writing guest posts on other websites in the niche.

The third block (webpages optimization) included the following tasks:

• updating and extending the semantic core of the ecommerce website – up to 10 thousand word combinations that we clustered. The main goal was to rank the website according to low search volume;
• optimization of meta tags and a change of titles on product category pages according to the words that every category is ranked by;
• a search and fixing of mistakes found by search crawler;
• an improvement of internal website structure. We did a complete internal linking according to low search volume;
• giving a crowd marketing service with an aim to increase the amount of visits from other authoritative informational resources.

In the last block, to understand the overall situation on the market, we analyzed prices of 12 competitors according to the prioritized product categories (more than 500 items).

Apart from working with the website, we did a small research as a “secret customer”. It was necessary for evaluating the work of managers who answer phone calls. Since there was the option of ordering by phone, it was important to check the possibility of losses in sales on that stage.

Behind the scenes: results after 2 years of website promotion

Now, let’s see the results of the website promotion, after 2 years:

And here’s the achievement in organic search traffic in the period from December of 2015 to October 2017:

On the screenshot you can see that a drastic increase of the number of users from an organic search happened in 2017. It was due to the analysis of competitors, the change of SEO strategy, the improvement of HTML markup, and the faster loading of webpages.

Let’s see visits from different devices (Dec 2015 – Oct 2017):

• Desktop 54,78%;
• Mobile 37,51%;
• Tablet 7,71%.

Now, to see the results of the SEO promotion, that happened after 2 years, let’s compare the figures during January-October 2017 to the same period in 2016:

Desktop traffic growth + 17,60%
Mobile traffic growth + 89,25%
Tablet traffic growth + ​​19,31%. Let’s also mention the part of tablet users disappears year by year among desktop and mobile ones.
Besides, during the last half a year (May-October 2017), figures of sales from search traffic (+ 91,31%) and completed transactions (+ 69,17%) increased, comparing to the same period in 2016:

ACHIEVEMENTS OF MOBILE TRAFFIC

Let’s concentrate on the mobile traffic for now:

On this stage, we decided to pay extra attention to fixing of mistakes in the responsive version of the website. The result came fast.
First of all, the number of visits from mobile devices increased on 76,94%

Second of all, visits from Google search increased on 89,25%

The amount of visits influenced one more important figure:

And it is sales from the mobile traffic that increased on 132,20%!

NEW EDGES FOR SEO

As a consequence of a comprehensive promotional work, in September-October 2017, we got into TOP 10 positions according to 4157 keywords! Our current task is to bring the next 2946 keywords to TOP 10.

Just a few days ago, we compared figures of organic traffic increase with the same time period from the last year. There was a growth of +50% (from 890 to 1400-2000 per month):

Also conversions in a free search reached 70,06%!

THE MAIN ACHIEVEMENT OF THE PROMOTIONAL CAMPAIGN

How do you think: what figures on your ecommerce website are the most important?
That’s right! It’s your monthly profit increase!
The effective website promotion helped to increase the profit of the sport goods online store on 31%.

“Secret” elements of ecommerce SEO: can we do it again?

As you can see, this SEO case study has several constituents that helped achieve desired results in the website promotion. So, it’s better to keep them in mind:

1. Do a technical SEO-audit. If it’s been a while since the last time you checked your website on mistakes, start with that. All the recommendations regarding any improvements and implementation of new ideas should be based strictly on the SEO-audit. Online store promotion won’t bring efficient results without it. If you don’t know how to start an audit, find an SEO outsourcing company that you can delegate this work to.
2. Create new and interesting content for your audience. Base your texts on topics from product categories of your ecommerce website. Build a semantic core and cluster it. Writing of articles requires time and a creative approach, so, outsource copywriters will definitely help to prepare some quality texts for your project.
3. Ensure proper descriptions for every product and product category. If you want to sell your product, make its description sound appealing, so that customers prefer your online store rather than your competitors’ one. Ecommerce SEO is impossible without quality product descriptions.
4. Make sure customers leave some feedback. Product reviews are an important part of ecommerce SEO. Offer your customers to leave some feedback for, let’s say, a discount for the next purchase. Reviews influence not only decisions but also enhance promotion.
5. If your website has good indicators of growth, start to work with low search volume. Since our client had already done the work with the semantic aspect, we took care of low search volume. And it brought expected results. But we recommend to come to this stage only in case you are in TOP-10 according to high search volume.
6. Use opportunities that crowd marketing gives you. Be experts in your niche and share useful information with people curious about your stuff. In this way, you’ll find more loyal customers and your website will get the necessary amount of links. Ecommerce SEO is not only about solving technical problems but also an interaction with real people.
7. Monitor metrics. First of all, it’s necessary to determine what metrics is important for your online store, website, or startup. Second of all, besides checking reports, check the metrics personally: this will help you understand how users behave on your website.
8. Be patient. Results are not immediate.

If you have any doubts or questions on a certain stage of your project’s development you can always reach your SEO outsourcing company for support. It can be a one-time consultancy or a comprehensive management of the project, it all depends on complicacy of tasks.

This SEO case study is prepared based on 35 months of the website promotion. But we never stop and have a bunch of new ideas!

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