About the business
The client is a specialty eCommerce business in a highly competitive food and beverage B2B & B2C niche. With a combination of online sales and half a dozen brick-and-mortar stores throughout Australia, they had built a reputable brand despite fierce competition both online and offline, but needed support on their SEO strategy since in-house expertise and resources were limited.
The Challenge
Our client’s niche is an extremely competitive online retail marketplace and has many established competitors with (literally) years’ headstart. To get a sense of where they stood and what to expect from an SEO campaign, the client initially engaged us using our Detailed SEO Audit service. During the audit, we identified that they had:
- No keyword research or targeting done
- Virtually zero content on all category pages
- Under-optimised product pages sorely lacking in product information, imagery, videos, social proof, and other conversion aids
- Little to no supporting content in the form of blogs, FAQs, how-tos or buying guides
- A host of technical issues including missing Title Tags, image alt text, over-sized images, and a Shopify page duplication issue causing rampant keyword cannibalisation
- Extremely well-established competitors with highly optimised websites
Our Approach
Due to the size of the addressable market, there were no shortage of keywords to target, but we needed to prioritise which ones to optimise for first to get the client the most valuable results for their investment. Mobilizing our team, we:
- Cleaned up all possible technical issues on the website, including adding image text to and downsizing 500+ images, removing broken links and unnecessary redirects
- Researched & clustered keywords, and mapped them against priority pages based on highest to lowest commercial search intent
- Updated and optimized 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
- Built high-authority backlinks to our hero pages to improve their relevancy and authority, ultimately driving their rankings higher
- Collaborated with the client to ensure that all content published was “on brand” and fit their target audience’s needs
The Results
Although this campaign is only a few months old, you can already see the impact we’ve had on the keyword positions:
- Ranking for 700+ new keywords in Google (+37% increase)
- Top 10 ranking for 88 keywords (+239% increase)
- Top 3 ranking for 28 keywords (+55% increase)
Here’s the organic traffic to just a single page we optimised – which previously had 0 traffic coming to it:
Moreover, across all the client’s tracked keywords, we’ve achieved a 53% increase in average rankings, the highest by far in the niche, while 9/10 competitors have declined their average positions over the last 6 months. We can measure this by tracking all the client’s competitors and their keyword rankings, as shown below:
Although we still have a long way to go before we can consider this niche “conquered” for our client, this is typical of a highly competitive industry and in the coming months we expect to start kicking more and more competitors out of their complacent top 10 positions.
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