E-commerce SEO Case Study: the story of how we increased sales by almost 5400%
Guys, I am grateful to everyone who came to this page! I am very happy to present this case to you!
I love working with big companies and outstanding individuals, while achieving outstanding results. Therefore, I decided to devote my current case to this aspect.
So, I had one customer, about cooperation with whom I want to tell you. I had the opportunity to work with him while I was working for Delta Grown, a digital marketing Agency based in Toronto. My responsibilities included not only developing the strategy, but the main body of work concerned its planning and implementation.
So, in this publication, I will tell you:
what we managed to do for the customer using SEO;
what steps have we taken to get there;
what should be calculated at first, if you want to succeed in SEO promotion.
Well, if you finish reading this publication, you will get something special!
So, let's go!
The customer is number one
Website: https://www.bargainsgroup.com/
Website type: online store (however, to make a purchase, you must send a request via the form on the site).
Scope: wholesale sales to non-profit organizations; advertising industry products.
Results
During the period of working with the project, we achieved a 490% increase in traffic to the Google YoY site on the website of the Bargains Group of companies! We also managed to increase sales by 5.433%. In addition, our experts have not created any new categories for the transition of buyers!
Natural increase in traffic for an online store
To date, the result is unique, and many factors have helped us achieve it. And this is not the least of the site's reputation that has been built up over the years. However, this does not mean that for your sites, these methods applied in the same way as in our case will not bring you dividends. They will be useful to you in any case. But how much growth they will bring to your project depends only on you.
A little about the group of Transactions
For a better understanding of the complexities that awaited the Brains group, let's take a little dip into their history.
The Bargains group of companies started back in 1988 (a long time ago, right?). They have made it their mission to help philanthropists throughout Canada by supplying them with wholesale lots of products at a low price. This became the motto of their founder Jody Steinhauer:
Returns make good business sense
And the Bargains Group began providing assistance to such entities as Crime Stoppers, Habitat for Humanity, Raising the Roof, the Canadian Mental Health Association, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and many other organizations.
Breathtaking, right?
Difficulties that had to be overcome
Group Of Contracts
A couple of the failed redesign of the website
The sales group contacted DG due to a sharp inexplicable decrease in their attendance at times.
They did several redesigns, and with the last one, almost all the traffic from Google disappeared.
No movement to add new products and categories
Another key point was that the web project was gradually developing, with different webmasters working with it, but they did absolutely nothing in terms of creating pages for new products or categories. As a result, a number of categories simply duplicated each other (I'll tell you: do not make such a mistake, regardless of what your site is).
Lots of repetitions in the content list
The worst thing was that the site had a lot of repetitions among categories related to different business areas:
⅓ The range concerned wholesale sales;
⅓ Was an exact copy of it, but concerned wholesale sales for charitable foundations.
What about goals?
We set a goal to achieve a four-fold increase in traffic from the Google search engine based on annual indicators.
But we also need sales. Therefore, our main goal in this direction was to increase the number of search queries to five during the day.
And you know, we managed not only to achieve our goals, but also to exceed the plan at times. And if you want to know how we did it, stay here with us.
Now, it's time to talk about secrets, okay?
Now, perhaps, the most interesting thing will begin.
I have already told you about the results achieved, and now I will tell you about the methods of achieving them.
But first of all, I want to note that in fact there are no chips that would help us in this case. First of all, this is a good strategy and clear implementation. After all, any success is the result of several years of hard work. And you can't argue with that.
We focused on two areas:
1) optimizing content;
2) correcting SEO errors. Want to know the details?
Great, look.
We have optimized the content. First of all, this affected the header tags on the sales group's website. They did not match the users ' binges, and did not give information to the Google search engine about the content of these pages. Often, page tags were created automatically, by type, "Sock Archives". Agree, it is unlikely that anyone will look for such nonsense at all. Or rather, no one will do it.
Therefore, the first thing we did was to examine the keywords registered under the main categories and refresh the header tags with up-to-date information. As a result, the page tags have the correct search engine optimization headers. Instead of the old version: "Socks. Archives."new:" Wholesale Socks for men in Canada". "Well, this is logical," you will notice. To which I immediately ask a counter question: "So why then and today most companies do not make these logical steps?"(Toto!)
And, by the way, these edits gave a significant improvement in the final results.
Next, we removed the technical problems. The main problem I described just above was duplicates in the categories of transaction groups. In truth, this is a fairly common problem among online stores. Often, the user gets to the page of the same product by different roads, for example:
1) Wholesales supplies
- > Women's clothing - > socks for women
2) Wholesale supplies - > socks - > Women's socks
This problem was inherent in the website of the Bargains Group of companies.
I had to collect all the duplicates in the list, analyze the transitions to them, and select the options that are suitable for the roles of canonical pages (that is, Google will see the canonical category and "glue" its options to it).
As a result, I created a canonical map that looked like this:
Category URL:
/ Wholesale-products / men's socks
/ Wholesale-products / socks / men
The canonical purpose:
/ Wholesale-products / men's socks
/ Wholesale-products / men's socks
Developments... and shortcomings
The work done was very useful!
Everything was great and wonderful. But!
All this keyword monitoring and the creation of new custom header tags for each individual category took a lot of time and effort. Therefore, it was necessary to find methods
optimize these processes to recommend and implement innovations in a short time.
And then we came up with the idea to register new page title tags in a more global way. Based on previous experience, we wrote templates and used them to instantly rewrite the header tags of the remaining pages.
The magic worked perfectly!
And this is despite the fact that one third of the site had to be removed altogether…
Just above, I already mentioned that wholesale pages that worked with a Bang were completely duplicated by wholesale categories for non-profit organizations. The client didn't need such duplicates. Therefore, it was decided to delete the ⅓ part of the site.
But, on the eve of removal, I created a map of all the pages that were subject to removal and selected the best of the existing ones.
Note: the canonical page must match the pages in the main categories. Example:
And the results
the study of e-Commerce SEO case:
1) 490% yoy increase in organic transitions;
2) 657% yoy increase in visitors from Google;
3) 5400% yoy increase in requests per day from Google.
That is, traffic and profit for this customer showed a significant increase!
The main achievement was the successful invention and testing of a more scalable and faster solution that helps save resources.
Increase your traffic and profit from SEO in 60 days!
What's next?
A couple of months passed. We did some more manipulations, for example, we deleted the site name without losing any visitors.... And this is another reason for creating a new case.
In the meantime, we have a whole string of tasks that are waiting to be solved, among them:
* category content;
* optimization of product pages;
* optimizing navigation;
* optimization of the conversion rate.
Ready meals
The best cases are really workable for online stores (and for other types of sites!)
And armed with a clear strategy for developing new products and creating new sections, you can go a long way. Often the potential lies in the ahs. You just need to find time to work on it. It's like dieting or running in the morning: everyone knows that it should be done, but many people neglect it. And some do it wrong. And that's the secret. Therefore, it is important to have a competent adviser who will always prompt and help. Or just solve your problem yourself. (Well, in the case of CEOS, you can't have an entire army working for you, I'm sorry).