Paying the wrong SEO Agency or Consultant a lot of money without getting results can be painful. So painful that it often can turn brands away from investing in SEO as a marketing channel.
The client featured in this case study had built their website on Shopify and unfortunately been working with an SEO consultant who wasn’t delivering, and unfortunately, the brand didn’t know what they should have been expecting.
All the knew was that SEO takes time and they had been paying a lot of money. But it had been months since they had received any kind of SEO report to update them on progress or given any indication from their consultant on how much progress they were making. Fortunately, the owners felt something was off. They weren’t moving product they should and were ready to work with a new agency or consultant.
Pain Points:
- Not receiving weekly or monthly reports from their previous consultant
- Felt they should be ranking higher on Google for some of their core products
- Were getting beat out by their direct competitors on Google
- Had trouble moving new product that had come in and was taking up valuable warehouse space
- Underperforming Year-over-Year metrics
Baseline Metrics:
Our initial performance audit showed the following metrics:
- YoY Organic Traffic +338% (Great!)
- YoY Organic Revenue +10% (Hmm? 🤔)
- Domain Rating (DR) had declined over the past several months from 28 to 24, even though they were building backlinks
- Over 24,000 keywords had lost or declined ranking, including some key brands and product keywords that they carry
Audit Findings:
As you can see from the data above, there we can across some confusing performance metrics.
How was traffic up over 300% but revenue only up 10%? Why was their domain rating dropping so quickly? How had so many keywords dropped off in ranking performance?
From my experience, this is a clear sign of ranking for the wrong keywords and also a sign that this brand had been building the wrong backlinks.
While traffic had increased, it had increased for informational keywords only, which is not helpful for an ecommerce brand. Ecom brands needs keywords that have commercial or transactional intent – meaning the person searching on Google is looking to buy something.
There were also signs of some glaring on-page and technical SEO issues that needed to be addressed to turn things around.
With the holiday season being so important and just around the corner, we rushed our a full Audit & Action Plan Project to get a clear picture of everything that needed to be worked on.
Our audit uncovered:
- 404s with Internal Links
- Improper use of no-index tag
- Keyword Cannibalization
- Pages Lacking Backlinks
- Pages without enough internal link coverage
- Pages with Poor Organic CTR
- Thin Content
- Poor SEO Performance
- Pages too deep in Site Architecture
- Unnecessary 301 Redirects
In our audit we also:
- Built out a Keyword Database to understand which pages and keywords were “low-hanging fruit”, meaning if we addressed issues impacting those pages we would get quick wins with high intent keywords for this brand.
- Designed a Content Strategy to map out how to revive their blog performance in a way that would help boost collection and product pages
- Conducted a Backlink Analysis to understand what types of links would benefit this brand and help them grow in authority to better compete on Google
- Manually Reviewed the Website to uncover issues that data and tools won’t find that needed the eye of an experienced SEO consultant
Once we completed this audit, we built out an Action Plan and reviewed our recommendations with this client to make sure we were all aligned with the approach.
Results:
Thanks to having a clear plan of action from our initial audit, we were able to jump into our one of our Ecommerce SEO Service Packages to turn things around in time for the holiday season for this brand.
As you can see from the images below, we were able to maintain strong Year-over-Year traffic growth, while better aligning with commercial and transactional keywords to provide a 61% YoY growth in organic revenue just 4 months into the campaign.
More importantly, we have also positioned this brand for future success by improving the rankings of over 2,300 page 1 keywords with commercial and transactional intent.
The website has also seen an authority boost thanks to improved backlink building. Going from a DR of 24 to 34 in their time working with us.
The improvement has allowed for them to be less reliant on ad spend and on networks like Meta and Google Ads, and has also allowed them to move newly stocked products faster than they previously had been able to.
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