I’m going to show you how my team at Search Logistics increased our client’s monthly organic search traffic by 73%.
As a result of the strategies that we implemented, we increased monthly search traffic from 26,668 to 46,136–
I’ve broken down all of the steps below so that you can apply them to your own sites.
Before we dig into the details though…
…let’s learn a little more about the site at hand.
What Will I Learn?
A Closer Look At The Case Study Site
This eCommerce site operates within the home maintenance niche.
Apart from targeting keywords that have high commercial intent, the website also has lots of content targeting informational terms.
This way, prospective customers are able to:
Purchase the products from the online store.
Learn how to use and fix these items themselves via detailed tutorials on the blog.
When joining my team over at Search Logistics last year, the client’s main objective was to increase their standing in the market, targeting customers in the need of purchasing equipment and parts for their homes.
Our main focus during the campaign was to:
Make sure that the site was technically sound
Fix existing content issues
Although we did some light link building, most of our wins came from getting the foundations right.
The Biggest Challenges We Had to Overcome
Without having a technically sound website and great content that addresses the search intent of the keywords you want to target, your site is going to struggle to rank.
This site had some major issues with both.
Following our analysis of the site at the start of the campaign, we found that the site had…
Broken product pages that were returning a “HTTP 200 OK” status, but were rendering incorrectly and displaying blank pages
Numerous warnings with their Product schema markup, which was affecting the ability for these pages to show additional information in the SERP and losing out on the potential to increase CTR as a result
Mixed content where HTTPS protocol URLs were also loading unsecured HTTP resources, breaking SSL which is a ranking factor
No breadcrumb navigation was implemented on the site
Pages that were under optimised with a lack of keyword density and thin content
Missed out on several important keywords that they could have been ranking for
Because of these issues, the site was not ranking for nearly as many keywords – or as highly – as it had the potential to.
Google was unsure which pages to rank for those facing keyword cannibalisation issues and was not recognising pages with little-to-no keyword density as being worthy of ranking.
Overall, these issues had snowballed into a large buffet of both technical and content related problems that all needed to be addressed in order to help the site reach its full potential in search.
Especially given it already had a solid backlink profile to work with!
Create A Plan Of Attack
When it came to creating a plan of attack, the strategy was relatively simple.
First we completed an SEO audit to find all of the problems and understand where we were starting from.
Then it was mostly fixing the technical problems we found before making sure that the content issues were sorted and structured in the correct way.
Step #1 – Fixed Broken Product Pages
A common occurrence with any site is having pages that are broken or for whatever reason, don’t render correctly.
In our case, the site had over 50 product pages that returned a “200” HTTP status code, were indexed by Google, but were loading as blank “broken” pages.
This is an issue because:
It wastes precious crawl budget (important for eCommerce sites with lots of products)
It creates a poor experience for the user
We went through and removed each of these pages from the index by adding a “noindex, nofollow” meta robots tag in the HTML code of each page.
We also added a custom 404 page to let users know that the page no longer exists so that they can revert back to the homepage, or another relevant landing page.
Pro Tips: If you’re ever in doubt about whether or not a page is indexed by Google or not, a simple site: search can do the trick.
Use the “inurl:” operator to search for a specific URL. This is what you will see if the URL is not indexed by Google.
Step #2 – Fixed Structured Data on Product Pages
Structured data (or schema markup) is a way of providing Google with more information about what your web pages are about. Take a look at my FAQ Schema tutorial to learn more.
There’s a Schema markup for pretty much anything and everything-
Products
Books
Job Listings
Recipes
Events
Articles
Organizations
…And more!
In our case, we noticed that the client’s Product schema wasn’t implemented correctly as it had several warnings – we checked this using Google’s Rich Results Test tool.
You can see below that the original implementation was missing several key pieces of information such as the brand, description and the URL of the product.
We went through each of these errors for each product on the site and made sure that the properties were filled out correctly.
In doing so, we increased the chances of the client’s pages showing up with star ratings, pricing and product information in the search results page like this.
This makes your web pages more noticeable in the search results, which in turn increases the click-through rate (CTR).
So if you don’t want to end up with the same issues as our client, don’t forget to test the quality of your schema markup with a schema tester.
Step #3 – Fixed Mixed Content Issues
While the site was running on HTTPS, we found lots of issues with mixed content warnings where they were loading HTTP elements.
This is problematic because it allows the loading of unsecured content on an otherwise secure page, which in turn makes the whole page not secure.
Plus let’s not forget that HTTPS is a confirmed Google ranking factor, so it’s important it works correctly.
We found our clients site had this issue across a ton of pages!
So we updated the URLs of the unsecured resources so that they now load over a secure HTTPS connection.
Step #4 – Implemented Breadcrumb Navigation
Another change that we made to the client’s site was to implement breadcrumb navigation which was missing when they first joined.
Breadcrumbs are links that allow a visitor to track their path from the page they are currently viewing to the homepage of your website.
They appear close to the top of your page and reflect the hierarchy of your site.
But more importantly:
Breadcrumbs also help search engine bots like Google understand the overall structure of the pages on your site. If you haven’t got breadcrumbs setup, get them setup immediately!
Step #5 – Optimising Existing Content
During our initial SEO audit at the start of the campaign, we noticed that:
Many of the site’s core landing pages weren’t quite as well optimised as they should be for the keywords they were targeting.
Many of the pages contained thin content.
It’s important to remember that thin content isn’t just about pages with not enough “words” on them. It’s about understanding the user intent/purpose of your page and providing the right content to address that.
For example, with a collection or category page on an eCommerce site, you don’t want to read large blocks of text.
Instead, you want to see lots of products – this is because the intent of the user here is to buy and/or browse.
Over the course of several months, we improved the existing content by:
Optimising the core landing pages for further keywords.
Addressing the thin content issues by analyzing the user intent of each page.
The quickest way to do this is to do a simple Google search of your primary keyword and take a look at what the top-ranking competitors have included in their pages – simple!
We like to use Ahrefs to find new keywords to target based on what your competitors are ranking for, but you aren’t – it’s called the Content Gap tool.
All you have to do is enter your competitor’s domains along with your own and the tool will generate a bunch of terms that you should target.
Using this simple but effective method, we produced many pages of new content for the site which allowed us to target new, long-tail commercially focused keywords.
The Results Are In
Since joining Search Logistics and deploying those fixes, the site’s organic search traffic has grown by 73%-
The number of users increased from 23,014 to 40,877
The number of sessions increased from 26,668 to 46,136
Likewise:
Revenue has increased by 28.43%.
On top of this, the client is now ranking for 3,953 keywords in the top 10 positions compared to 1,412 keywords at the start of the campaign.
This represents an increase of 179.96%.
If you want help increasing your organic search traffic, you can check out my list of ecommerce SEO services or you can contact my team here.
Wrapping It Up
After implementing numerous fixes to both the site’s content and technical facets, our client’s site has seen a significant improvement in revenue.
While we were fixing technical issues, we were building links slowly to support the overall strategy but most of our wins came from fixing the on-page SEO problems.
I should also mention at this stage that we’ve also been building links (Use the link building checklist) on a regular basis for the client which will have helped move the needle – but it was by no means a core element of our strategy here.
What this case study shows, however, is the importance of nailing down:
Your keyword research
Your technical SEO
Your content
…Before focusing on links.
Next we are going to turn our attention to optimising the on-page elements of the core pages with a CRO audit while also turning the dial up on link building.
Thanks, I am going to perform these task and starting to read your blogs on continuty to get more inlight to my website, SEO and more information. You guys are doing great.
I love case studies because you can see results (or not) and it helps determine where to invest your time. I myself have been working on improving my content and key words and it has been making a huge difference. In fact I doubled my search traffic now that I have become better at it. I also liked seeing the technical errors you address to inspire me to make sure I don’t have any I need to fix.
Thanks for this wonderful post, i think sir technical seo is must for doing backlink’s work. If the technical work is not correct then backlink’s work will not be beneficial. Understand the google updates, it will help you to reach your goals.
What a Excellent Article !I got pleasured after reading this article that explains how to increase traffic on your website by fixing these 6 issues, wow. Thanks for the greatest article.Regards,Jyotish
I explained why in the post. But basically, you need to add your own site if you want the tool to be able to compare your site with your competitors’ site and give you the keywords your competitors rank for that you don’t.
Thanks for sharing your insights, Matthew.This reminds me of a great quote I heard years ago.”Extraordinary is ordinary with a bit extra” – Meaning get the foundation right consistently and go from there.Love how you 4 measure are about fixing things and 2 are about improving things. And the results speak for themselves.
Thank you for sharing this to us. Will implement this asap. Also, I would like to ask if do we need to fix all the “warnings” in ahrefs audits? Should it be zero errors, notices, and warnings? Thanks
Hey Darkstorm,Ahrefs “warnings” are basically low priority error that needs to be fixed once you’re done with fixing all the errors that Ahrefs is showing.You need to be mindful while analysing “errors” and “warnings” in Ahrefs audit as there are high chances that have 0 impact on your site but the tool still show them!Also, I would highy recommend to run screaming frog audit on your website, you’ll find much deeper insights with this tool.
Learn how we increased our clients’ new leads by 50%, overhauling their service pages, optimizing their Google Business Profile, and growing their domain authority.
This site was hit with a manual penalty from Google so we had to act fast. We cleaned up the site and had our reconsideration request accepted first time.
If you need help increasing your search & sales or recovering from a penalty please fill out\ the form below and one of our search specialists will review your site-
Wow it’s really nice information sir I am from India
Cheers 🙂
Helpful… Thanks for sharing
No problem!
Really helpful Blog !!VERY INFORMATIVE and USEFUL
Thanks, I really appreciate it 🙂
Nice keep it up
Thank you, Amir
Thanks, I am going to perform these task and starting to read your blogs on continuty to get more inlight to my website, SEO and more information. You guys are doing great.
Keep it up!
very good
Thanks 🙂
You shared a great post, and the case study is impressive. I will implement it on our website. It is greatly appreciated. Thank you so much.
No worries- Glad it was helpful!
Thanks again, Matthew
Amazing write-up! Really Good. Thanks for sharing.
No problem- Hope it helps!
Hi, This is really interesting. I was not aware of great pointers. I will definitely implement mentioned ways. Thanks
Keep it up, Chloe!
Such a great article. Reading the article from beginning to end was so enlightening. I’m so glad this came up. Knowledge is power.
Glad you enjoyed it- Cheers, Vicky!
I love case studies because you can see results (or not) and it helps determine where to invest your time. I myself have been working on improving my content and key words and it has been making a huge difference. In fact I doubled my search traffic now that I have become better at it. I also liked seeing the technical errors you address to inspire me to make sure I don’t have any I need to fix.
Great work. Keep it up!
Thank you for sharing this to us. It is so much helpful to me .
No problem. Glad it was helpful!
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No problem! Good luck with your new site.
Thanks for the information, I will continue to follow you
Glad to hear that, thanks!
nice article, easy read.
Thank you!
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Thank you 🙂
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No problem!
Thanks for sharing this useful information.
No problem, Rajesh!
Such a creative and informative article.
Thanks, Akhtar!
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No problem 🙂
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Glad it was helpful!
Your article is very inspiring for everyone. It will be great benefit to everyone. I will be waiting for your next article. Thank You So Much
No problem- Always happy to help!
thats right
Thanks for this wonderful post, i think sir technical seo is must for doing backlink’s work. If the technical work is not correct then backlink’s work will not be beneficial. Understand the google updates, it will help you to reach your goals.
Yep! Couldn’t agree more!
i loved the post you shared, and case study is impressive, will implement on our website. thanks.
Glad it was helpful! Keep it up, Jack!
I have went all the way to fixing all the errors on the website.From warnings to errors and now it feels kind of empty.
What do you mean by empty?
Hi sir,Thanks for sharing the information about. I really like the article and great work.
Thank you very much! Cheers!
Thank you for sharing your blog with us
Always happy to help 🙂
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Glad it was helpful!
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Glad it was helpful!
It helped a lot. Thanks!
No problem! Always happy to help!
What a Excellent Article !I got pleasured after reading this article that explains how to increase traffic on your website by fixing these 6 issues, wow. Thanks for the greatest article.Regards,Jyotish
Glad it was helpful. Cheers Jyotish!
Thanks for guiding me towards the right path. You are a fantastic mentor that is worthy of emulation. You deserve a big thank you from me.
Thank you very much, Rahul!
Nice post…thanks for sharing.
No problem!
Nice
Thanks!
Thanks for sharing useful details with us keep posting.
No problem! More great case studies are coming!
This is really very informative and useful article. Thanks for sharing this. Seo is also a very important factor for ranking the website.
Yes, it is!
its good
Thanks!
Thanks for sharing the information. It really helpful.
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Thank you sir for sharing with us.
No problem!
Nice work! I am learning SEO for Ecommerce. Now I can keep these points in mind and work straightly!
Keep it up!
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Thank you for this
Glad it was helpful!
Why are you putting your own website in Content Gap analysis in the competitor sections?
I explained why in the post. But basically, you need to add your own site if you want the tool to be able to compare your site with your competitors’ site and give you the keywords your competitors rank for that you don’t.
Thanks for sharing your insights, Matthew.This reminds me of a great quote I heard years ago.”Extraordinary is ordinary with a bit extra” – Meaning get the foundation right consistently and go from there.Love how you 4 measure are about fixing things and 2 are about improving things. And the results speak for themselves.
I couldn’t have said it better myself! Cheers, Edward!
Great Work Man!Can you let me know how we can remove the (Excluded error and pages) from the search console to save the crawler budget?
I would say block the crawling of URLs that shouldn’t be indexed. Google wrote a guide about this- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/large-site-managing-crawl-budget
Thank you for sharing this to us. Will implement this asap. Also, I would like to ask if do we need to fix all the “warnings” in ahrefs audits? Should it be zero errors, notices, and warnings? Thanks
Warnings are “alright” but errors should be fixed.
Hey Darkstorm,Ahrefs “warnings” are basically low priority error that needs to be fixed once you’re done with fixing all the errors that Ahrefs is showing.You need to be mindful while analysing “errors” and “warnings” in Ahrefs audit as there are high chances that have 0 impact on your site but the tool still show them!Also, I would highy recommend to run screaming frog audit on your website, you’ll find much deeper insights with this tool.