About the business
In this case study we examine the incredible impact of rolling out an SEO-focused content strategy across not one but FOUR eCommerce businesses.
The Challenge
eCommerce SEO comes with a number of unique challenges, including:
- Hundreds of product pages to write descriptions, Headings, Titles and Meta description content for.
- Category pages which often compete or overlap with one another, sabotaging the website’s rankings through duplicate content and keyword cannibalisation.
- Load-heavy website themes that are more focused on design than UX, and slow down the website, hurting conversion rates and SEO.
- Navigational/structural issues making the site hard for users to complete a purchase or learn about the products.
- Inconsistent (or inexistent) blogs that are not well-optimised and don’t support the site’s most important products and pages.
Our Approach
Depending on the size of the client’s website, we generally recommend using our Detailed SEO Audit service, which is an extremely comprehensive review of your website’s traffic, user experience, SEO rankings, technical factors, and content. Armed with this knowledge, the business (or Ape-X’s team) can immediately prioritise and take action on completing tasks that will move the needle in conversion rate optimisation or SEO, to get more sales and traffic to the site ASAP.
Invariably, “thin content” (i.e. very little content on the website) is the #1 challenge faced by all eCommerce businesses and to conquer this we develop a Content Roadmap that we priortise based on commercial value to the business – roughly speaking, we’ll optimise pages in the following order:
- Home page (if applicable – most eComm home pages are designated for brand keywords)
- Level 1 Category Pages
- Level 2 & 3 Category Pages
- Product Pages
- Supporting blog content / buying guides
All our work is guided by one simple principle:
More content = more keywords = more traffic = more sales! 
The Results
Client #1 - 62% increase in monthly organic traffic & +$200k in sales in 3 months
The client is one of the largest motorcycle accessories retailers in Australia. They needed our help in building out the website with content, everything from their Brand pages to Categories and Top Selling product pages. In just 12 weeks we:
- Performed keyword research for each page to designate the target keyword
- Stood up a team of writers
- Produced and published 283 pages totalling 141,586 words on their website, including content research, proper formatting of headings
- This new content helped the client rank for an additional 16,000+ keywords, including an additional 1,700+ keywords ranking in position 1-3!
- This generated an extra 20,000 organic website visits (+62%) for the client and resulted in $201,685 of revenue, just by adding new content to the site!
Client #2 - Doubling Organic Conversions for Brand New Site
This client is a Brisbane-based, speciality high-end retail business. Their website was brand new with extremely thin content (about 100 words per page, “good enough” according to their previous agency). We quickly identified the need to fortify the site with proper optimisation, and implemented a content roadmap to optimise their most important pages followed by a supporting blog strategy:
- Performed keyword research based on users’ search intent and existing SERPs.
- Used our paid Content Optimisation Tool to create web page content that out-scored all competitors, and published it to the client’s site.
- Performed internal linking with optimised anchor text to increase website crawlability and keyword targeting for Google’s robots
- Build out supporting content in the form of FAQs (added to the pages), added schema to the pages, and rolled out a blog content strategy tackling long-tail informational keywords to attract search traffic at the top of the sales funnel and build the website’s Topical Authority.
Although the site is still young (the domain is less than a year old; the site itself live only for 6 months), the results are already showing:
Client #3 - 239% increase in top 10 rankings in 6 months
The client is a specialty eCommerce business in a highly competitive food and beverage B2B & B2C niche. They had almost no SEO done on their website and despite the thin content had many competing pages on their website.
To help Google better understand the website and improve keyword targeting, content density, and rankings – and ultimately, the site’s traffic and sales, we:
- Researched & clustered keywords, and mapped them against priority pages based on highest to lowest commercial search intent
- Updated and optimised Title Tags and H1s for all critical pages
- Removed duplicate title tags and H1s from non-critical pages to prevent them from competing with our “hero” pages
- Created a new category page template that could accommodate content and images (the previous Shopify template couldn’t, greatly handicapping the pages’ ability to rank)
- Applied this template to all our hero pages and populated them with 1,500+ words of optimised content
- Developed a content roadmap of frequently asked questions, guides and supporting content to build the website’s topical authority, and began publishing frequent blog articles on the site
Client #4 - 147% increase in organic traffic in 6 months
The client is a national supplier of agriculture & construction equipment, with a well-established brand and existing operational infrastructure. Their website, however, lacked some basic optimisations, causing them to struggle to rank in the top 5 positions for some of their most important keywords.
Key issues we identified needing to be fixed:
- Thin content on most important category pages
- Multiple (or missing) H1s on many pages
- General lack of internal linking causing crawl issues and competing pages, especially on such a large site as our client’s
- Important keywords not properly mapped or targeted by relevant pages
- Lack of supporting content to reinforce subject matter expertise and capture long-tail search queries
- Overall website and page-level authority lacking compared to biggest competitors
We executed the following actions to remedy the issues on the client’s site:
- Keyword research to identify most commercially valuable (bottom-of-funnel) search terms
- Mapped keywords against most relevant pages; created/updated page templates as necessary to house additional content
- Produced SEO-optimised content
- Created internal links to and from all key pages
- Built high-authority backlinks to our key pages
The Results:
With it now being clearer for Google what the pages were about, and which one should rank for which keyword, the website performance spiked:
- 72% increase in search impressions (indicating the content we added to the site is positively affecting search)
- Average position increase from 30.46 to 6.7 across 40 keywords
- 147% increase in organic traffic compared to previous year
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