Case study – How to increase online sales in the e-commerce industry with SEO

Running an online store is undoubtedly a challenge, especially if it is in a competitive market. One of the oft-overlooked elements of success, one that determines a store’s visibility and revenue potential, is how optimized is the e-commerce platform for search engines (SEO). An effective SEO strategy can lead to success, and there’s no better way to illustrate this point than by presenting real-world examples.

In this article, we will present how we helped an online store selling children’s products successfully penetrate the German market and see a meaningful increase in both sales and revenues. We hope it helps you understand the value of SEO and what a typical SEO campaign for an e-commerce platform looks like.

Laying the Groundwork

In order to properly respond to market conditions and get a leg up on the competition, every good SEO campaign needs to start with a thorough research and planning phase.

Campaign goals need to be set according to the e-commerce platform’s current performance on search engines and detailed market analysis. The goals need to be useful, measurable, and realistic. Search engine optimization takes some time to bear fruit and ensuring our clients have a realistic expectation of what’s possible helps avoid misunderstandings and slowdowns in the campaign.

With this out of the way, let’s go over which elements we pay special attention to during the planning phase:

Keyword research

Arguably the most important stage of the planning phase, keyword research is among the first things we perform when we get a new client aboard. Every e-commerce platform naturally appeals to certain demographics, and these demographics use specific keywords and key phrases to search for products on Google, Bing, and other search engines.

By identifying the relevant keywords, determining their importance, and gauging how difficult they are to rank for, we learn gaps in the market we can exploit to improve our client’s performance.

Content planning

Now that we have a list of keywords, we need to target them by creating tailor-made content for them. This content will take into account the manner in which the competition approached the keyword, the user intent behind typing that keyword into search engines, and more. This approach helps us determine which keyword should have its own subpage, category page, or maybe even a blog post.

If our client’s website has specific pages that naturally correspond to popular keywords, we work on optimizing and editing them. Otherwise, we create entire categories and subpages from scratch.

Internal linking

Internal linking refers to the strategic placement of links to other parts of the same website. Internal linking not only improves the user experience (UX) but also allows Google’s bots and crawlers to better understand the structure of a site, which translates into better SEO results.

At Neadoo, internal linking is planned already at the keyword research and content planning phase – By grouping phrases into clusters, we can internally link related topics, increasing the website’s domain authority and user retention rate.

The Structure of the Navigation Menu

Optimizing the menu structure is another important aspect of SEO. In our client’s e-commerce store, we made a series of changes that improved clarity and ease of navigation for end users by ensuring that the most important product categories were easily accessible and that the menu was intuitive and clear. This approach also improved internal linking.

Well-Organized Category Structure

Well-organized and easily accessible categories are important for both UX and SEO. We worked with the client to reinvent the categories in such a way that they answer to the needs of the customers while being consistent with SEO principles. We made sure to group products into logical categories and subcategories while ensuring they included the necessary keywords.

Content Unique to Each Category

It is vital for each category to have content unique to it. This is not only important to introduce users to specific products/services, but it also helps Google and other search engines distinguish between various categories and rank them for appropriate keywords.

When working with the client, we made sure that each of the categories contained unique, valuable content that helped users understand what they could find in a given section. The content was also saturated with appropriate keywords without sounding and feeling unnatural, which helped us improve our positions in the search results.

Content creation for e-commerce platforms has its own quirks. At Neadoo, we generally divide the content into two parts:

Short Content in the ATF Section

For e-commerce websites, the “above the fold” (ATF) section refers to the part of a landing page that comes before the list of products and services.

Here, we created snappy introductions to each category. The purpose here is to introduce users to the products without being long-winded and overshadow the products themselves. While we still make sure it contains the necessary keywords to rank high on SERPs, the experience is tailored to the users.

Long Content Hidden to Not Overshadow Products

Of course, a snappy category introduction isn’t enough to rank high on search engines’ results pages (SERPs). This is why we create keyword-filled, long-form content at the bottom of the page. This content still sounds natural and contains valuable information, but it has a different focus.

Good External Linking Strategy

Apart from internal linking, a key element of our SEO strategy was external link building. We built our link profile by placing links to our client’s website on other thematically related websites, which helped us strengthen our visibility in search engines.

Repairing Technical Aspects

The technical competence of a website is also relevant to SEO. Long loading times and dead links will harm both SERP rankings and the user experience. This is why we also help our clients improve the technical aspects of their websites as well.

For this particular client, our team improved redirections, repaired links leading to non-existent pages, and excluded empty categories. These changes helped us improve the overall quality of the client’s site and made it easier for Google’s bots to analyze the site.

Results

From an average of 749 users per month, traffic to the client’s website grew more than five fold to about 4880 users per month. All over the span of a single year.

Let’s see how the situation looks in terms of the website’s ranking for specific keywords:

Results achieved in a year:

• Phrases where the client is visible in the top 3 positions on Google: an increase from 20 to 140 phrases.
• Phrases where the client is visible in the top 4-10th positions on Google: an increase from 26 to 276 phrases.
• Phrases where the client is visible in the top 11-20th positions on Google: an increase from 92 to 433 phrases.

The obtained traffic, of course, translated into increased online sales. Every new user is a potential customer and a chance for more sales and more brand awareness. The chance for remarketing also increases. So with a good SEO strategy, you can effectively improve the performance of paid sales channels, as well.

Summary

The right SEO strategy is important for the visibility and viability of e-commerce platforms as our experience with this client shows. Through effective use of SEO, you can increase online visibility, attract more customers, and increase sales. SEO is a process that takes time, but this investment certainly pays off. If you want to learn more about the opportunities for developing your business online – contact us.