Editor’s note: Finding a good ecommerce SEO company isn’t easy today. The reason is that the market is flooded with countless SEO agencies which makes it difficult to filter the ones that are good. That said, it isn’t impossible either. All it requires is some research, and thorough delving. Over the years, we have helped several ecommerce businesses improve their search rankings and visibility. Connect with us if you too want to benefit with our expertise & experience.
What was the challenge?
Our client is one of the top ecommerce fashion stores for women apparel based out of the U.S.
They had been facing a consistent decrease in website traffic and revenue for the last 6 months.
It was after this fall when the client approached us to help identify the issues and improve its traffic.
Our goal was straightforward, increase traffic, generate sales and achieve a good ROI in less than 6 months.
SEO Benchmarking
We first started with benchmarking the key SEO parameters so to have a baseline that can be compared with the subsequent month’s data. The baseline was taken in September 2019.
Steps taken for Optimizing SEO –
1) On-Page SEO –
We worked on the following activities for fixing On-Page website issues.
(i) Content –
The content of a website plays the most important part in helping the website rank within the top search results. For improving the content, we did the following things from SEO perspective –
- Emphasized the product benefits by repeating several times
- Used power words suited for psychological need of the product
- Created a Blog section on the website and regularly posted new content with topics ranging from latest trends to product reviews
- Made an FAQ page comprising of answers to frequently asked queries
(ii) Keyword optimization –
Keyword analysis and optimization forms one of the most critical parts of SEO. Targeting the right set of keywords is essential to improve website traffic.
We first created a list of 48K+ keywords that our client’s site was ranking on. Then we identified the keywords which were having a high volume, low competition, and high conversion rates.
Eventually, we finalized 18 keywords to work on. We went ahead and optimized them by building backlinks on these keywords as the anchor text. (text with a clickable link)
We focused on niche-specific and long-tail keywords such as “winter clothes for women” since it was super relevant and had a low keyword difficulty.
The table below describes the KW rankings before and after the SEO –
(iii) Product descriptions –
Proper description of the products goes a long way in helping the user decide whether he/she would like to go ahead with the purchase.
We created detailed product descriptions on our client’s site. This included a detailed sizing chart as per US, UK and European conventions.
We also included information on apparels and models’ body types, along with size by size dimensions including shoulder-length, body length, sleeve length, etc. All pictures were in high resolution.
In addition, we also included the following information –
- Front, back, and side images of “models” wearing the items
- Brief paragraph description of the items, including information on the fabric and how it wears on the body
(iV) Canonical tags –
A canonical tag is a way of telling the search engine which version of URL you want to show in search results. This has been one of the biggest SEO concerns for eCommerce apparel brands.
Since there were variations in size, colors, and designs for a particular apparel, the plugin generated a unique URL for each version. The problem was that each URL carried exactly the same product description, title tag, and H1 tag. This created duplicate content.
Duplicate content is frowned upon by Google and can result in a drop in search engine ranking via algorithmic penalty.
To address this issue, we implemented Canonical tags to indicate which product pages we wanted indexed by Google. This was implemented by our developer team.
(V) Meta description –
Meta description is an HTML attribute that provides a brief summary of a web page. Search engines such as Google often display the meta description in search results which influences clickthrough rates.
We optimized the meta description by including the most relevant information for the visitors. We kept the description as per the best SEO practices at 160 characters in length that helped avoid the truncation of meta description in SERPs while sharing all important information about the store.
We took the following steps to decide the content of the meta description –
- Set the tone that was consistent with our client’s brand
- Included relevant keywords
- Took advantage of trending social headlines including fashion, and award shows
- Made the meta description specific
2) Off-Page SEO –
The following steps were taken for Off-Page SEO optimization –
- Link building – Link building is the most important part in off-page SEO. It is aimed at increasing the number and quality of inbound links to the site/pages with the goal to improve search rankings and boost organic traffic.
- We got 40 contextual backlinks during these six months through guest posting & blogger outreach. All websites were in a similar niche and of high quality.
- This significantly helped improve the domain authority which went up from DA 45 to DA 52.
- Social signals – Social media plays an important role in increasing visibility and sales. The most recent figures on local search engine ranking factors attribute 4% to social media.
- With this in mind, we significantly increased the social media activity on Instagram, Facebook and, Twitter pages. We also ramped up efforts to promote the brand through these networks.
The activities included regular updates on new arrivals in store, ongoing deals, discount offers, and lucky draw contests. We also emphasized on putting video content describing various products and engaging users in comment sections.
A brief snapshot of activities undertook for On-page and Off-Page SEO
Final Results
We saw improvement in the following areas –
- Total monthly traffic increased by nearly 60%
- The number of organic ranking keywords increased by 40%
- The organic impressions on the website doubled
- The total number of keywords ranking in top 3 Google doubled as well
See what the table and graph looked like between September 19’ and March 20’
Before SEO, Report as drawn on 3 Sep 19’
After SEO, report as drawn on 3 Mar 20’