Our Ecommerce SEO Case Study

How we grew this luxury gifts ecommerce stores organic revenue by 141.31% in 12 months using the Searchant Ecommerce Growth System

This case study will walk through the exact process we used to grow this ecommerce store significantly in under 12 months.

If you’re serious about your ecommerce store, investing in SEO isn’t a nice to have, it’s an absolute must-do that you need to nail as soon as possible.

In our years of experience running SEO ecommerce campaigns for clients all over the world, organic search is nearly always the highest volume, highest revenue generating channel. 

And that’s because unlike paid channels, search appears when the buyer is specifically looking for your product, you are not interrupting someone who may have a vague interest in what you sell, rather you are right there when they are seeking out a solution.

In this ecommerce SEO case study, i’ll go through all the details of this specific campaign, from what we did, all the way through to the results we got and everything in between.

Stick around!

Choosing the right ecommerce agency

Before we get into the case study, if you’re seriously considering hiring an agency to scale the organic traffic and revenue to your ecommerce store, there are a few questions you should be asking potential agencies, those include:

• Do they have case studies to back up their claims (like this one)?
• Do they specialize in ecommerce SEO?
• Do they have a specific tried and tested system?
• Do they provide revenue based reporting, or just report on vanity traffic and keywords?
• Is their communication proactive?

Feel free to book a friendly, non-salesy chat with us if you want to learn about why we might be a good fit for your ecommerce store.

Book a demo with Marcus

(friendly chat, not a sales pitch)

I few good-to-knows about us and things we pride ourselves on:

1. We are ecommerce experts, not generalists 
2. We do revenue based reporting as standard, rather than focusing on vanity metrics
3. We are responsive and become part of your team
4. We are process driven, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel with every new campaign
5. We work on the things that matter, and drive the most revenue, rather than working through a checklist
6. Our service is done-for-you, and won’t requires hours and hours of your time

Developing the strategy

Okay back to the important stuff.

A lot of SEO’s make the mistake of jumping straight into a campaign without really knowing what should be prioritized, that generally leads to disappointing results, as you end up working on activities that won’t move the needle.

Our onboarding and month #1 process ensure we spend the time to really understand what needs doing, that includes:

• Conducting a detailed technical audit and prioritised actions (rather than blindly implementing all possible technical SEO issues)
• Conduct a content audit to see how content is performing currently
• Identify and start tracking your VIP / most important keywords, that will drive the most revenue when they start to climb the rankings
• Set up revenue based reporting, to truly understand where revenue is coming from and work in a revenue-focused way

Here’s a quick overview of our overarching strategy:

After the month #1 activities for this particular client, we found 3 main areas that needed to be tackled first, those were:

1. Technical SEO
2. Content strategy
3. Authority building

Let’s go through those one by one.

Prioritised Technical SEO

For ecommerce stores, technical SEO can be a HUGE headache.

You may have hundreds of thousands of URLs, different product variations  

and across different languages. 

It only takes a few small mistakes for issues to compound and you can easily leave thousands of pages out in the lurch, under-optimised or even completely un-indexed.

In this particular case, the major issues we found were:

• Broken canonical tags
• Broken HREF lang tags

Combined these issues were causing a whole range of issues, such as:

• The wrong country URLs showing up in the wrong countries
• The wrong page entirely being shown on google (e.g a page that was built for a PPC campaign)
• An increase in keyword cannabalisation due to Google not understanding which was the main page for a particular keyword

There was also a bunch of minor technical SEO issues such as:

• Images too big
• Poor internal link structure
• Broken title tags

All in all, to clear up all of the above technical issues took around 3 months.

Combined with the other tactics, fixing these issues led to an immediately positive trend emerging. 

Content strategy

Next up, as we see with many ecommerce stores, this client faced 3 major content issues:

1. Lack of category pages
2. Lack of meaningful content on existing category pages
3. Keyword cannibalization coming from informational blog content

These 3 issues represent massive growth opportunities.

Building new category pages

Having solid category pages is the foundation of any good ecommerce store.

If may sound very obvious, but if you aren’t:

a) Optimizing your current category pages to their full potential
b) Maximizing the total addressable search volume for your range of product(s) via category pages

Then it’s very likely you are leaving significant money on the table.

This is something we see all too often with ecommerce stores that we work with, under optimized category pages and a load of missed search volume.

The plan on this one was simple.

1. Take sparse, content-thin category pages, and write rich, deep and meaningful content on them, show both users and search engines what these category pages are about, to increase the current rankings of them, and also increase the keyword spread.

The perfect 1-2 punch, rank better and rank for more keywords per page.

2. Use our tried and tested category expansion process, to x10 the total addressable search volume for the current set product range, this strategy is core to our holistic process, here’s a quick video specifically on that process:

Next, tackling the keyword cannabalisation 

It’s nearly a universal rule (unless you are Amazon) that the 80/20 principle applies to the product range of most ecommerce stores.

Typically 20% of the products are driving 80% of the revenue.

And what that means is, that 20% receive so much focus, that they end up becoming over-optimised.

You can over-optimise is many ways, but one of the most typical ways we see it happening is creating informational blog content about the primary product(s) again and again.

Often, you end up with 5-10+ pages that are inadvertently targeting the same keyword.

That could be 1 category page, 1 product page, and a bunch of blog posts.

This is probably the number one issue we find with ecommerce stores, because it’s such an easy trap to fall into, it makes complete logical sense to keep talking about your core products and pushing out new related content about them.

But - all of these pages confuse search engines, they don’t know which page to rank for your primary keywords of those products, what ends up happening is this yoyo effect where rankings are constantly up and down, and typically hit a page-2 glass ceiling and struggle to break onto page one.

Similarly to the issue of under optimised or lack of well targeted category pages, keyword cannabalisation is such a big issue, that fixing is is a core part of our strategy.

Starting the journey to fix keyword cannabalisation can be a tough pill to swallow for ecommerce store owners.

‘You mean all of that blog content i’ve paid for has been harming us?’

Often that is the case, and not only is that blog content potentially harming your rankings, the double whammy is that it was potentially a complete waste of time and resources.

**Before you delete all of your blog content, I am not saying all blog content is bad, far from it, this only applies to content that is currently causing keyword cannibalization and confusing search engines, you have to check that is happening before making any changes, or you could be in an even worse situation.

The fix for keyword cannabalisation actually is quite simple, but requires a good amount of planning.

Once you’ve identified all of the keyword cannabalisation issues that you have, first plan what you will do with each instance, and you typically choose from the following options:

• Merge pages
• Redirect pages
• Unpublish pages (and let them 404)

In order to decide what action you should take with every instance, you need to consider:

• How much traffic does each individual page get, even if it is yoyoing and up and down, is there a greater risk?
• Do the pages have really good content on that can be used elsewhere
• Do any of the pages have links to them that should be redirected to maintain the link authority

Here’s a more detailed overview of keyword cannabalisation, how to find it and how to fix it: 

For this particular store, the core products all had serious keyword cannabalisation issues, that took planning and significant work to correct.

But keyword cannabalisation is nearly always worth fixing, once corrected, your important keywords will be ‘released’ onto page one, if they were previously cannabalised and were hitting that page #2 glass ceiling.

With SEO you should be very wary of ‘quick wins’, but fixing keyword cannabalistion is about as close to a quick win as you can get. 

Link building - increasing the stores ‘authority’

Now probably my favourite part of most ecommerce campaigns, link building!

If you are unfamiliar with link building it’s fair to say it has quite a checkered past.

Done badly, link building can tank your rankings and ruin the reputation of your store. 

Done well, it can skyrocket your rankings.

In this case, we built links in 3 different ways, the aim with link building is to keep things as authentic as possible, and aim for the highest standard you can.

Link building method #1 - ‘inbound PR’

Inbound PR is basically making use of services like connectivity, featured.com, qwoted and the few others that now exist.

On these platforms you will find expert-hungry journalists who are looking for quotes from experts on very specific topics.
Those topics usually span everything from business, travel, finance, technology and everything in-between.

Here’s an example of how an inbound PR link might end up looking:

This example is from hubspot.com - a DR93 website that gets tens of millions of visitors each month.

It doesn’t take too many of these branded links to have a decent impact on search rankings.
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Link building method #2 - ‘outbound digital PR’

Digital PR is the modern iteration of link building; it’s all the rage these days.

And for very good reason, with a solid digital PR strategy you can end up with some of the best links that it’s possible to get, in terms of metrics and in terms of them being very low-risk, digital PR links come with basically zero algorithmic risk.

National brands often do digital PR campaigns ongoing, as they offer side benefits on top of the impact of links, such as brand awareness.

But in this particular case, we ran digital PR campaigns for 3 months and ended up with around 50 high tier links, with the average DR in the 70’s.

That was enough to give search engines a little nudge to reconsider the site, and re-ranking it for some more difficult terms.  

Here’s an example piece of digital PR coverage:

This is a link on a DR84 huge news site that gets millions of visitors each month.

The beauty of outbound digital PR is that it is effectively one-to-many compared to inbound PR, that means you can pitch the same story to thousands of journalists and end up with many high-tier links if the campaign is well received. 

Link building method #3 - ‘traditional links’

Traditional links are how I would describe guest posts, niche edits, skyscraper campaigns, competitor links and similar methods.

They are the tried and tested link types that have been done for years, and still absolutely work.

Over the years link builders have tried to shortcut traditional links by building networks to sell links on, and other nefarious methods, so these types of links can get somewhat of a bad name.

But when done correctly, they can absolutely help impact search rankings positively and send strong signals to search engines to take more notice of the site you are building links to. 

Results & outcome of the campaign

Our approach is always revenue focused, unless we can directly connect a task or activity to revenue in some way, then we consider does it really need doing.

With that kind of focus, you get outsized results from an SEO campaign, because you trim the fat of the usual ‘SEO checklist’ activities.

Here’s how we ended up finishing this campaign:

Campaign period - 12 months

Traffic increase - 62.07% increase in organic traffic

Revenue increase - 141.31% increase in organic revenue

ROI of campaign - 1,866.38%

Need results like this?

If you run an ecommerce store and like what you’ve read here, let’s find out if we can do the same for your store, here’s a few ways to get involved:

Ready to discuss - book a 15 minute call with me here:

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I send out weekly battled tested ecommerce SEO strategies and processes that are working right now. 

Until next time.