The Problem
In Spring of 2017, we were approached by an e-commerce company struggling with sales. Here’s a little background information on the company and their problem.
Here are the metrics the month prior to The Creative Momentum taking over:
As you can see, there were only 3 transactions for $1084.64 in one month. The goal was to increase traffic to the website along with increase transaction and revenue.
In order to do this, we needed to tackle a few major issues. The first issue was that the name of the company is actually a competitive generic keyword that receives around 5400 searches per month. The website was not in a top 10 position for its own name. The second problem was a terrible user experience that hindered sales which I will cover later on in this blog.
The Solution
Here is how we went about resolving the 2 problems mentioned above.
On-Page SEO
As mentioned before, our client did not rank very well for their own business name so you can imagine how they ranked for their products. The goal here was to set an SEO foundation for the important pages. Here are a few things that we did:
- Optimized Meta Titles & Descriptions: The website did not have any set meta titles or descriptions, so we felt like this was low hanging fruit to help the client rank better and increase traffic. The first thing we did was tackle keyword research. Then we used the keywords to create keyword-focused and user-focused meta titles and descriptions.
- Created H1 Headers: When we took over this account, the website did not have any H1 titles on its pages. Using the keyword research as a guide, we created H1 headers that read well, read naturally and accurately explained what the content was focused on.
- Created Internal Links: When users landed on product pages, we saw high bounce rates because there weren’t many options for users to navigate to similar products. We wanted users to navigate deeper into the site, so we focused on adding internal links that were natural to the content.
Canonicalized Pages with Duplicate Content
Our client has over 10,000 pages indexed in Google. Over 90% of these pages belong to products. The problem at hand was that every variation of a product had its own product page. For example, there may be 1 product that came in 10 different colors. Every color variation would have its own product page. Although this isn’t inherently bad, it was very important for us to canonicalized all of the pages with similar or duplicate content.
Automated Structured Data
In my opinion, structured data is essential to e-commerce SEO. It is important to capitalize on Google’s rich snippets because it dramatically increases your CTR. With the help of our full-stack developers, we were able to link the e-commerce database to automate the implementation process. This saved us hundreds of hours compared to manually creating J-SON structured data snippets. We focused on marking up the product pages to include ratings, images, product names, and product descriptions.
Created Buzz in the Industry
This is by far one of the most important items on the list. After spending a lot of work on on-page and technical SEO, it was finally time to start gaining exposure.
When we did a keyword search query on the brand name of our client, two of the top 3 positions belonged to user-generated aggregation sites. The first one was a Reddit sub-reddit. Reddit calls itself, “The Frontpage of the Internet,” and they normally have over 540 million visits per month. The cool thing about Reddit is that users identify what kind of content they want to be served by subscribing to sub-reddits. Sub-reddits are niche forums dedicated to a single topic. Because a user has to subscribe to see what happens in these sub-reddits, we know that CTR and conversion rates are much higher in sub-reddits. This is true because they are typically further along in the buying phase than someone who is searching for the product for the first time on Google.
Knowing this, we intentionally posted content and products from the client’s website in these sub-reddits to generate traffic and buzz around the community.
Not only did we focus on Reddit, we also submitted user generated content from the client’s website to be placed on sites that aggregate e-commerce deals and coupons for the specific industry.
Optimized for User Experience
The last thing that we wanted to focus on was UX. When the website was presented to The Creative Momentum, we notice a few big flaws.
First, the search function did not yield what users were searching for. Instead of serving users products that were most popular or most accurate to the keyword, the search function would serve users an alphabetical list of items that had to do with the keyword.
For example, let’s say you searched for something specific such as, “Samsung TVs.” Instead of being served a list of Samsung TVs, you would be served a list of all things related to Samsung TVs in alphabetical order. You would see batteries, then desks, then power cables, remotes, and then finally get to the TVs which would be buried in pages 7 or 8. This poor UX caused a ton of bounces out of the site. We used our development team to fix this issue so that when a person searches for Samsung TVs, they would be served a list of Samsung TVs that were in order by popularity.
Secondly, we wanted to address a shopping cart issue; the user was forced to create an account and sign-in before they could add anything in cart. This is not an issue for users who are determined to check-out; but it was a huge issue for users who were in the “ready-to-buy-but-still-comparing phase.” These users would want to add a number of items in their cart, see the total, then check out. However, the website had hoops for users to jump through before they could do that. We were able to fix this issue so that users could add to their cart without having to sign in first.
The Results
We took over this account at the beginning of May. What happened as a result of the optimizations and creating buzz in the industry?
As a result of creating industry buzz in the sub-reddits, we saw a 11,380% increase in sessions and more importantly $5000 in sales.
Optimizing on-page SEO elements and canonicalizing duplicate pages helped us make huge gains in organic traffic and conversions. We saw an 8% increase in sessions but more importantly a 363% increase in conversion rate, 400% more transactions, & 743% increase in revenue. Refer to the image below.
So, what was the final overall e-commerce results? We saw a 622% increase in revenue, 262% increase in e-commerce conversion rates, 265% increase in transactions, and a 98% increase in average order value.
If you need a marketing strategy to help you drive more traffic and increase conversions, please feel free to reach out to The Creative Momentum. We’ll be more than happy to hear your marketing pain points and then strategize a plan to help get you where you want to be.