May 2012 Post Archive - Spiderscope Blog

Driving 264% Increase in Organic Search Traffic

Back in September, a new client came to us looking for help with their brand new site. They were to sell heating products online through a newly setup eCommerce site and was looking for optimisation to drive an increase in organic traffic. This is precisely what we do, so how did we help them?

The new site targeted one brand of products specifically and aimed to be an expert in these. This immediately gave the site a core set of terms to focus all our efforts on, which helped as the site had no links or traffic because it was so new.

So our very first job was to get the site ranking for brand related keywords that we knew were popular.

Optimisation drives increased organic traffic

Whilst the site was well built on a platform that didn’t harm any SEO efforts; there were a number of improvements we needed to make to the structure to ensure pages were properly keyword targeted. As with many eCommerce sites, it’s the detail that matters for driving organic traffic, so we had to thoroughly analyse and update key parts of the site.

The majority of our starting work focused on this, moving from area to area on the site and getting everything optimised properly. With a good set of pages that were keyword targeted, it wasn’t long before we had a sniff of success with some pages almost immediately ranking well for brand terms.

Then disaster struck!

Changing domain names doesn’t always mean bad news

The original domain name contained the name of the brand too; and unfortunately, they asked us to stop using this. In some instances, this could spell disaster and be a major problem. However, we were quickly able to pivot onto a new domain with some optimised redirects that ensured our hard work up to this point wouldn’t be in vain.

With a new, long term domain name established, we just had to wait for the new pages to be fully indexed and we can continue. At this point, we introduced a properly optimised Google Product Feed.

We take care in optimising Google Product Feeds and know that there are a couple of areas which if you get right, you can see some good results very quickly. It also helps that our client had some very competitive prices, which made their products extremely attractive to the end users, further encouraging Google to rank these well.

Internal linking still important for driving organic results

The next step in our optimisation strategy was to look at the internal linking structure and ensure this was as optimised as possible. It’s easy to overlook internal linking, but we find that this is very important for eCommerce sites and getting this right will often have a big positive effect to your organic results.

A sound plan was deployed here that resulted in the site having a complete internal linking overhaul. The effects of this weren’t immediate though, because Google took a little time to re-crawl and index all the pages.

Off site SEO to boost organic traffic growth

At this point, the site was looking well optimised for the brand terms we wanted to target, so we turned our attention to off site efforts. While social media is important for any online marketing, we decided to begin focusing on traditional off site methods before any social campaigns were to start.

This naturally started with some link building with focused on two main areas: top level directory links and guest blogging with good content. For the first, we didn’t spam request our site to be placed into every directory known to man, but instead just focused on valuable directories that benefit UK sites, including local and national levels.

The guest blogging focused on providing good content to relevant blogs. This worked well as it not only improved linking, but also the traffic generated was good for the site.

What effect on organic traffic growth did this have?

This body of work was undertaken over the last 7 months. Organic search traffic in October compared to April saw a 264% increase. This was only from search engines and doesn’t factor in the additional traffic from referrals, which also saw a big increase too.

The site now ranks very well for brand related terms and traffic continues to grow. The current plan is to continue expanding traffic by slowly encroaching on more general, industry related keywords to further promote the site. All signs look good!

We can drive an increase in your organic traffic too

Are you looking to increase the amount of organic traffic to your site? We can help. Contact us today on 0800 081 1688 to discuss with our experts on how we can improve the success of your site and drive an increase in organic traffic.

Posted by: Spiderscope on May 15^th, 2012 @ 4:39 PM
Tagged with: eCommerce, eCommerce Optimisation, Marketing, Optimisation, Search Engine, SEO, Web Marketing

 

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