To rank as #1 on Google is a sure way to increase revenue.
But what does it really take to rank as number 1 today?
There are thousands of factors that affect Google's ranking.
But we know what the two most important ranking factors are.
According to Andrey Lipattsev, Search Quality Senior Strategy at Google, the two main ranking factors are:
- Contents
- Backlinks
The way we think about content and backlinks is the following:
- Content helps you rank
- Backlinks helps you better
In this article we share the exact process of using content marketing and link building to help a online trader increase revenue by DKK 22 million.
Online retail: SEO case study
The customer we refer to is a online trading company based in the United States, which sells lighting to companies.
They contacted INEVO when they were hit by two penalties from Google within 4 months. This reduced organic traffic from 3200 visits per week to 1784 per week (a decrease of 45%).
When we looked back through their Google Analytics account, we found out that they had actually been punished even more by Google in the last 3 years.
We set ourselves, if we aim to restore organic traffic and increase the income of organic searches.
4 steps towards content strategy for online commerce SEO
- Technical SEO-audit
- Customers asked questions
- Add unique content to category pages
- Reach backlinks to categories pages when posting guest entries
1. SEO-audit
We did a technical SEO-audit for the website. One of the biggest problems we found was that many of their blog posts competed directly with their category pages. This led to Google ranking blog content (which did not convert) higher than the category pages (which converted).
An example is the two pages below which are aimed at the same keyword (explanated):
- Blog post: “X ways to buy stadium lighting“
- Category Page: ”Purchased stadium lighting services“
We've seen this at many online stores.
Blog posts compete against category/product content, instead of supporting it (also known as cannibalization, or cannibalisation in Norwegian).
What we ended up doing was actually “stucking” (no-indexed) 46% of the entire Google websiteSo let's say that this is the same thing as that. Which reduced the number of indexed pages from 1400 to 750. The pages that were removed were mostly blog posts that competed with category pages, which helped Google to increase the ranking of category pages in search results.
The greatest advantage of removing such a large number of pages from Google's indexing is to ensure that Google only ranks the best and most relevant content.
2. Customers asked questions
The next phase of restoring organic traffic was to include new contents on category pages. There are two locations where you can add content to the category pages; an introduction before/after the list of products and frequently asked questions (FAQ) below. We added new content to both sides.
What made the content we made unique compared to competitors was that we used live chat and sales meetings as a basis for FAQs.
Examples of some of the unique and specific questions we had from the buyers were:
- “Can I use 300 watts led-fluorescent for my advertising board?”
- “Do you have any outdoor floodlights for sale?”
- “Is there any requirement for how many lights I need on a football field?”
This, combined with insight from Séhrush and Google’s own “People Also Ask”, gave us unique insights into what customers were interested in learning about.
Three. Content based on questions
We are not experts in lighting equipment for companies, but it is our customer.
We therefore took the questions, categorized them by product category and then established a document containing the questions, which was shared with the customer to answer.
We did this for more than 120 categories pages, which led to more than 800 frequently asked questions (FAQs) in total.
As soon as the document containing the FAQ for the categories was completed, we uploaded this on the website and included real customer images of the installations of the lighting.
The full process was as follows:
- Ask questions from live chat and sales meetings in a document
- Let a professional expert answer the questions
- Have another professional expert examine the answers
- Correctively edit and edit style, grammar and tone content
- Optimize the contents for organic searches
- Add customer images where applicable
- Upload the contents of the web page
This unique content doubled the length of the page in terms of the number of words and context.
Below you can see the original category page on the left and the updated category page on the right.
4. Visitor post on relevant websites of the same industry
We had the contents. Now we needed the backlinks.
We therefore contacted business-related companies and the pitch that we could contribute to the content of their blog against giving us feedbacks to our customer's website.
The process of finding and securing relevant back links was cooperation.
We first found websites in Google (for example, the manual blog + “blog mail”), and then shared the website with the customer who approved or did not accept backlinks from this page.
The goal was to get 8-10 backlinks per month to important category pages. Within 6 months, we tripled the total number of back links to the customer's website.
Results of online trade work SEO
The original objective was to recover lost traffic. After months of cooperation, we took the website from 1700 visits per week to more than 5000 per week -- and reached 22,000 organic visits per month.
You can clearly see the decline in organic traffic from the penalties that were provided and the subsequent improvements as we focused on unique content for the customer.
In terms of organic traffic, visits to category pages doubled and went from 9% to 22%.
Of all the commercial search terms that we optimized for on the website, 50% of them had increases in rankings.
With the focus on category pages and conversions, the truly desired effect came from the customer; increased revenues.
When it comes to direct attribution, organic income has improved by 44%, and increased by $6 million. From $13 million to $19 million.
And even though the customer is working with the partners and paying for the search, SEO has played an important role in the overall growth of the company. They increased income from 45 million to 67 million dollars (a growth of 48%), and had a result of 22 million kroner.
In addition, there is more growth in waiting.
The customer already sees an increase of 45% in monthly income this year, and according to their CEO, they are heading towards a record year.
«Our search rate for the most important category search terms we targeted went from about 12% to now being around 33%. Online orders ranged from approximately 130 to 225-250. And our weekly session in Google Analytics is now up to 12,000 per week.»
Maybe a more personal highlight for us is how they managed to make an agreement with the largest space organization in the world, who did a Google search for one of the categories we optimized for. The space organization searched for “stadion light”, and clicked on the first organic result, which was our customer’s website.
Conclusion
Network commerce companies typically use content of social media - Meta, TickTok, etc.
However, there is a huge opportunity to use content, and this precise process, to increase organic traffic and revenue on your website.
To summarise in 3 main points:
- Make sure your website has a strong foundation (and remove duplicate content)
- Create unique content on your category pages
- Get backends from relevant web pages
Follow this approach for 6-9 months, and you will also see an increase in revenue. Do you want to learn more about this process and how SEO for online commerce can help your marketing targets for 2024? Book a meeting with one of our online sales experts today.