Introduction – SEO Case Study for New E-commerce Website
Nexis Novus Technology been helping tons of clients for implementing SEO for a while now. We’ve had some crazy results for a whole bunch of clients – all in very different niches.
We’re going to share with you our latest SEO case study: How we help our client to growth hack their organic traffic increase 10x within their 2 months launch of their brand new e-commerce website.
We truly believe there was a key ingredient that accelerated this website – We’re going to share the whole process from the start. Why?
Each website is going to be different, so you will need to figure out what your site needs.
You need to go through the process & get your popcorn ready! SEO is a long term strategy!
Here’s a sneak peek of the growth. Now learn how we did it…
Initial SEO Case Study – New E-commerce Website Client
Since of the begining of our SEO works for various of clients, We’ve realized that working with multiple niche sites is hugely different from working with clients; especially most of the local Malaysian’s website has weak foundations in term of SEO – not to mention most of them chosen web design that without SEO knowledge to help them develop it cheaply.
At Nexis Novus, we know how exactly we want to help our client’s sites to look, so we build them using rigorous attention to detail: Including On page SEO & Friendly UI/UX.
But if you take a website that’s been developed without a certain level of SEO knowledge – there’s normally quite a lot of on-site and off-site to fix.
Here’s how we normally broke down the initial analysis for all our SEO works:
- Keyword Research
- On-Site Audit
- Backlink Audit
- Competitor Analysis
Keyword Research
Generally, we tackled keyword research with two main workflows: one is used to monitor the health of a website, and the other is for content gap analysis.
Whenever we’re looking to track keywords for a website – tracking some of the core terms are crucial, however also terms that are having problems such as keyword cannibalization!
What is Keyword cannibalization?
The term of keyword cannibalization refers to your targeted keywords of several pages on your website compete for the same keyword or phrase in Google.
If a term is suffering from keyword cannibalization that we’re trying to fix – it’s worth tracking this daily until it’s resolved.
Since this client of us only have maximum of 12 sku products & build by us – initial technical SEO been implemented during development phase.
This approach included breaking down all keywords for that industry, product branding keywords, and also implement keywords.
In total, this process took over 20 hours and included thousands of keywords chunked into neat topics. This work later helped with choosing page titles, headings and content.
Here’s an example of how we did it:
Step 1: Search a General/Broad keyword to Start With
Step 2: Review Parent Keywords of the Board Keyword
Step 3: Review Competitor on SERP & Check on their Keywords
There is the option to also export all of these keywords into excel documents and then filter them that way. But most of the time, a lot of the top keywords are fairly similar.
Here’s an example for the protein bar malaysia term:
- where to buy protein bar in malaysia
- buy protein bar in malaysia
- best protein bar malaysia
Based on the keywords above there are 2 keywords search intents – first 2 are search intent to buy protien bar while the last one is search intent for user to find the best protein bar in Malaysia.
On-Site Audit
Finding all the technical and content issues with the website requires a full on-site audit.
However, while big reports are easy on the eyes, the smallest changes make a huge impact on your search ranking!
We implement this site audit of the website and fix a whole bunch of technical issues, from lack of breadcrumbs, poor internal link structures, bad quality anchor text, and unoptimized titles.
A full on-site audit tutorial is too comprehensive for this guide, but here are some quick tips:
Site Search – By using Google’s site search (site:domain.com), you can find hundreds of issues with index management, outdated page titles, and multiple pages targeting the same keyword.
Page Titles – If your page titles 1 – 2 years ago, you may find that they’re outdated now. A quick check will find all your content that is either not updated or not yet crawled by Google. “Remember to update your page title with your targeted keywords accordingly too!”
Internal Links – A major way to pass relevance signals and authority to your core pages is through internal links. Make sure that your pages are well interlinked and you’re not using low-quality anchors from your power pages, such as “click here” or “more information” – this problem happeneds to majorirty of our clients!
Here are the sample overview of Site Audit Report for website using SEMRUSH – You can fix the errors through their detailed report and solutions!
Backlink Audit
Our client new website had a relatively small backlink profile & almost to none at start as is a brand new, which meant it lacked authority, relevance signals and entry points for crawling.
It also meant that a full in-depth link analysis was unnecessary for this project.
In this instance, the initial check revealed there was nothing to be concerned about as the website is new, so we started on the technical implementation of SEO.
Finding if the website experienced problems with the link profile, we would have done a full backlink audit to try and recover this.
Here’s what you should look out for when doing a backlink audit:
Link Distribution – Implementing too many links toward your internal pages instead of your homepage can cause lots of issues. So make sure that you’re not overdoing it.
Anchor Text Implementation – Using an exact match, partial match and topical anchors are a great way to pass third-party relevance signals. Too many of those keywords – will results of you being caught out over-optimizing, but too few and you won’t be competitive. Read more about our introduction of SEO.
Referring IPs – There are a finite number of IPv4 Addresses, so this isn’t often a big cause for concern. However, it’s worth making sure that you’ve not got too many links from the same IP address to avoid penalty.
To learn more about removing toxic backlinks – SEMRUSH have a good guide on how to do so when you toxic or spammy backlinks that dont bring values to your site.
Competitor Analysis
The difference between a SEO expert and data analyst is how you approach the search engines. A data analyst is focusing on reviewing the SERPs and finding what is working best today, while a SEO expert take a step further, wants to understand how things work and bring it to the next level.
At Nexis Novus, our team included competitor analysis which requires a keen eye for reviewing the SERPs and algorithm analysis update by Google to help client to perform better on Search Engine!
If you want to do SEO at a high level, you’ve got to constantly be reviewing competitors – which is why SEO is a long term campaign, it is not just one time job which many people think that!
You will notice that tons of best practices get ignored in the top positions and how you could actually to take advantage on this and outrank them.
In this instance, we found that both more content and more links would be required for long-term success.
In some cases, if your on page SEO are on point, your ranking still can outrank your competitors if their SEO is not done right!
Content Strategy
It is very important for building any long-term authority website in competitive industries, at this point you should know this now.
To achieve this, our strategies will include both authoritative link profile and content plans.
We reviewed client’s existing contents, looked at how other competitors in their industry wanted to help users and address them in 3 factors below:
User Intent – Highly importnat, before we did anything, we wanted to nail the user intent on every page by identifying three pillars of content for their site. We’ll get into this in further detail below.
Service Pages – Typically, these pages were dedicated to explaining what service was offered, how to contact and what was included with that offering.
Blog Content – Blog contents were dedicated to providing non-commercial, informative content that was interesting to readers – to build authority and interests on your brand.
User Intent
The biggest mistake I see all the time is the simplest thing to check:
What types of content is Google ranking in the top 10 positions?
If you’re serving 10,000 words of content in a huge blog post, but Google is only interested in serving service pages with 50 words of content – you’ve done it wrongly!
For the case of – Where to buy protein bar in Malaysia?
The search results are showing contents that recommending you the best protein bar in Malaysia and some others brands/ecommerce platforms that selling protein bars.
This is basically what you should target for if you are targeting for buyer user search intent for your e-commerce website!
Blog Content
The second factor – Blog contents, that we needed to create were informational blog posts as there were a lot of opportunities for interesting pieces of content for our clients.
For example:
Our client are selling beauty products on their newly launch e-commerce website – unfortunately we can’t disclose here but here are the strategy done:
We build content based on their niche – Daily Routine for Beauty Care step by step using their products in a blog post which educate their user base too!
It can help boost the rankings of your service page through targeting more cluster keywords on searchs & build better internal linking on your site.
Final Results – SEO Case Study!
Organic Traffic
The campaign has been a steady increase after the first month implementation, reaching a peak up until July 2021 (today)!
Note: Website being build earlier this year and launched in May 2021. We laid the foundation of on page SEO to get the best results up until date!
Keyword Increases
There was an exponential increase in keywords as you can see from 0 to 253 up until now since the start of the campaign!
Referring DomainsIn most cases, there is a direct correlation between the number of links we built followed by increases in the number of keywords they began to rank highly for:
But we manage to build with less backlinks while ranking for more keywords as shown as below within short period of time:
Traffic Breakdown
While client are doing minimum social media campaigns and some online webinar for their brand awareness, we manage to help them increase their organic traffic based on their google analytic report as shown within short period of time!
Conclusion
Every business niche is different and every site has its own particular needs in order to excel in google search.
In this particular case, you’ve seen how we focus mainly on on-page SEO & apply extensive keywords research to develop a good ranking good case study for new website owner.
In addition, the importance of getting the ranking going up with link building campaign can allow you to create an ultra-powerful, quality-over-quantity backlink profile – Highly important for long term!
To stress this again – Not every site needs the same strategy, is what SEO expert/agency need to help you to find out for!
If you need any help, you know where to find us.