Ecommerce SEO Case Study: +369% Organic Revenue

In this case study, I’m going to show you how we helped our client to:

…resulting in a 369% (£165,586) increase in revenue while competing against major international brand names such as Ikea!

Keep reading to learn the exact strategies we used to achieve those results.

A Closer Look At The Case Study Site

The brand was well established when it came to us, with a good offline reputation built on the quality of the furniture they designed and sold online.

They had a reasonable link profile, mostly from natural blogger reviews and PR coverage.

Their main obstacle to growth was how competitive the SERPs were for their core keywords.

The top 20 places for all but the most niche of long tail keywords were dominated by international home furniture giants such as Ikea as well as huge ecommerce brands such as Tesco, John Lewis, Argos, Debenhams and Marks and Spencers.

As a result of this competition, the brand had very little visibility on the first two pages of Google for key, traffic-driving terms and were struggling to rank for longer tail keywords.

Therefore our main campaign goals were to:

The Biggest Challenges We Had to Overcome

When this client came to us, their brand was already well established with a good offline reputation built on the quality of the furniture they designed and sold online.

However, when we completed the SEO audit, we noticed some major issues and challenges that needed to be addressed not only to increase search traffic, conversion and revenue but also to avoid a Google penalty.

So here is the list of the biggest challenges we had to face:

As a result of the above issues, the client’s site was being held back from ranking for many important transactional keywords related to the products that they were selling.

So to overcome the issues mentioned, we created a solid plan of attack that I’m going to show you in the next part.

Creating The Plan Of Attack

The central strategy was to:

Step #1: On-Site Optimisation

The first thing we had to take care of was to fix the on-site SEO issues that created a really bad user experience for both Google and the visitors.

Not only that but the lack of on-page SEO optimization was impacting the site’s performance negatively.

URL Structure

Our top priority during the auditing process was making sure that the site would rank for as many relevant long-tail keywords as possible.

While in the long term, we were confident that we would rank the site for broad, high volume terms…

The quickest way to rapidly increase organic traffic and the number of sales through organic was to rank the site for more specific terms.

Extrapolated across their product range,

Therefore, our priority was re-structuring the site so that these long tail keywords had specific category pages targeting them.

Previously the website had a very simple physical silo structure in place with one category page targeting a wide range of different keywords:

example.com/dining-furniture/dining-tables

Instead, the site now has category and product pages nestled in very targeted content silos, meaning that each related set of related products has a specific SEO landing page targeting keywords relevant to it:

example.com/dining-furniture/tables/extending-tables

Page Structure & Content

Another major issue holding back the performance of the site was page structure and content.

Title tags across the site were unoptimised, lacking keyword research and often too long/duplicated.

We overhauled not only the title tags, but also used other key HTML elements, such as the heading tags to target associated, semantically similar keywords around the main keyword, in order to build each page’s keyword relevancy.

Content, or lack thereof, was a similarly large hindrance to search performance, with category pages containing very little unique paragraph content and product pages containing almost none.

We assisted in populating all of the category and product pages with rich, unique content added in a way that did not detract from the design of the site or its ability to convert.

Step #2: Link Building

Although the site and the brand were well-established before we began working together, their link profile was underdeveloped.

As a result of this, we had to be careful with regard to link velocity coming to the site and anchor text distribution.

As a result of this, we began the campaign by building very conservative numbers of links with naked URL, branded and generic anchor text.

Despite these links not being particularly targeted, the resulting improvement of the site’s domain authority resulted in a good deal of keyword and traffic growth.

As a good foundation of links was developed, we began to target the key category pages, using exact match anchor text sparingly yet effectively to rapidly push these pages through the SERPs for a variety of broad and long tail keywords.

While our ecommerce focused link building strategies were behind much of the improvement, we simultaneously ran a more traditional, outreach-based link-building campaign.

This helped bolster niche relevancy and the link profile as natural looking as possible.

This outreach campaign netted us over 60 links from sites such as:

The Results Are In

With the recommendations from the audit actioned in early December and links being pointed at the key internal pages, traffic continuously grew month-on-month.

By June, organic traffic was up 122.27% compared to the previous December, with June receiving 42,635 visits compared to December’s 19,182.

Similarly, the number of new users had increased by over 115%, with 22,545 new visits in June compared to 10,469 in December.

Return On Investment

For any ecommerce store, the best measure of successful SEO is traffic that converts.

The brand saw

, with 480 transactions made in June compared to 110 in December.

The new traffic we were bringing to the site was also highly targeted and relevant to the brand, as demonstrated by the 96.3% improvement in conversion rate. In June 1.13% of visitors bought something, compared to just 0.57% in December.

Organic traffic revenue increased 369.43%, generating £210,408 in June compared to £44,822 in December – an increase of £165,586.

Seasonality has an effect on buying habits in this niche, so a year-on-year revenue comparison gives us a more accurate idea of growth.

June saw a 187.4% increase in revenue from organic traffic, generating £210,408 compared to £73,212 in June the previous year – an increase of £137,196.

Keyword Improvements

Between December and June the follow year, the number of keywords ranking in Google.co.uk increased significantly:

Tracked Keyword Improvements

Across the 133 core keywords that we track in-house, there was an overall increase of 755 places.

A number of high volume keywords entered the first page, and a number of highly competitive terms entered the index and continue to rapidly ascend the SERPs:

If you want to increase your search traffic, e-commerce sales or recover from a penalty, please get in touch with us now.

Wrapping It Up

As we’ve shown in previous SEO case studies, you can always find a way to rank even when competing against big international players.

Having implemented the above strategies and overcoming the challenges laid out at the beginning of the case study, the client’s website has seen continued improvement in both organic visibility and revenue.

To recap, in this case study, we focused on:

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(I’m also available for private consultation here.)

If you have any questions about the case study, feel free to leave a comment below!