In 2022 we were approached by an ecommerce company who sells men’s personal care products — soaps, shampoo, beard care, that sort of thing. They had recently migrated from Magento to Shopify in early 2022, and we then engaged in the middle of 2022 to conduct a full site audit. After delivering the findings and project plan, we knew they didn’t have a full budget for SEO services for the remainder of the year, so we customized a short-term scope of work and got started on a few high priority technical projects, as well as classic keyword research, mapping and on-page optimizations of things like top products. We wanted to fit most of this in before the busy holiday season with plans to pick up the services again in 2023, which we did.
Challenge
From their audit review, we highlighted the focus areas listed below, prioritizing what would have the biggest impact, which allowed us to create that initial three month project plan, and then later a 6 month project plan in 2023 (unfortunately they hadn’t budgeted appropriately for a longer term SEO campaign). These focus areas are pulled directly from the executive summary of our audit findings, sorry if they’re a bit in the weeds;
Focus Areas for Optimization
Technical SEO
Critical Priority:
- Variant URLs, JS redirects and Canonicalization of product pages
High Priority:
- Page speed issues
- Externally linked 404 Error Page Clean Up
Site Architecture & Accessibility
Moderate Priority:
- Modify heading hierarchy across all website templates, particularly Collections
- Re-code all page links under Collections from filtered variants to clean URLs
- Add breadcrumb navigation and breadcrumb schema.org markup
Low Priority:
- Code and incorporate visible pagination navigation and apply tags in source code
- Ensure links to new product pages and variant URLs are in rendered code
Content & On-Page Optimization
Critical:
- Comprehensive keyword research
- Optimize core site SEO titles & descriptions
- Create goals in Google Analytics
High Priority:
- Change URL structure for “shop by solutions” and “fragrance” pages
- Create additional content based on frequent user questions
- Internal linking projects to better link to product pages
Moderate Priority:
- Edit navigation to follow grammar rules and highlight best sellers
- Review duplicate content & re-write
- Address unoptimized SEO titles and descriptions
Off-Page SEO & Competitive Landscape
Critical:
- Fix 404 errors with 301 redirects and reach out to linking domains asking them to re-link to the correct URL
High Priority:
- Fix social sharing widget/tags to ensure the blog post image is pulled into the post
- See social sharing recommendations to increase social signals, content sharing, and potential links earned
Low Priority:
- Begin pitching research resources to industry experts, journalists and bloggers
- Begin monitoring and pitching relevant media queries
- Create persistent sharing icons on blog content
Analytics, Reporting & Conversion Optimization
Moderate Priority:
- Optimize signup form on every blog post to increase subscriber conversions
- Create and test brighter contrast buttons
- Insert text links for collection and product pages in blog posts where appropriate
Low Priority:
- Create events and goals to determine which user actions provide the highest monetization level
- Turn on GA4 conversions for high value user action to begin tracking monetization and conversions
- Build GDS reports for GA3 and begin planning for GDS reports on events in GA4
Solutions
Technical SEO as a Priority
As you can see above, we stayed true to our SEO process; we start with Technical SEO as our foundation. You can’t begin content marketing and on-page SEO without a solid technical base. If search engines can’t access and understand your content efficiently (crawling and indexing) then they can’t and won’t list your website prominently (ranking) on results pages.
Due to some limitations in the build of this particular website, we were unable to implement all of the technical recommendations, and some are still in queue with the client’s web development agency, so there’s still a lot of potential for even better rankings. Some highlights of what was implement for technical SEO include;
- Fixed some of the native Shopify issues with variant URL strings and canonicalization issues (duplicate content)
- Redirected all the externally linked pages from their old website version to preserve the SEO value those links previously provided
- Fixed some page template html structure issues to give Google clear content outlines
- Helped the web dev team address some spam injection issues we have encountered on Shopify websites (check your Google Search Console for query string URLs that are not natural to Shopify)
- Provided a page speed technical ticket to the dev team (again, this has yet to be resolved but will have a huge impact on ranking on mobile and conversion rates. Honestly this is money being left on the table unfortunately)
Side note: if your Shopify product URL strings look like this, get in touch with us immediately:
/collections/collection-name/products/product-name
The “/products/” directory does NOT live under the “/collections/”, this is just so wrong.
On-page SEO, Critical to Ecommerce Ranking
On the on-page SEO side of the project we really were dealing with a website that hadn’t yet been optimized at all since the website migration. The default Shopify settings were being used, the product naming was a challenge and the way the variant URLs (different product types like “cedarwood body wash” and “sea salt body wash”, etc.) but by getting hyper-specific with our keyword research we made huge improvements to the keyword set we were tracking. After the keyword research was done, we mapped out which product and collection pages would be optimized for which phrases and got to work. In the end, we settled on 280 keywords to track, which did include some branded phrases. We typically wouldn’t include many branded phrases because if you’re not ranking for those, then you really have a problem. In this case, we had a problem, but it was a bit more nuanced as this brand. They sell their products on their website, but also through retailers like Amazon, Target, and Walmart. In some cases those retailers were outranking their content and for very specific branded phrases, but that’s mostly cleaned up now.
Here’s a brief list of some of the on-page SEO tactics we implemented – these are the basics, and they still work:
- In-depth keyword research and URL mapping
- SEO Title and meta description writing
- Internal linking to collection and product URLs (critical for all sites)
- Content clean-up to product descriptions and things like Heading tags
Results
Organic Search Visibility Improvements
Early in the year we started to see some fluctuation and then increases in total Impressions in Google Search (pulled from Google Search Console), as well as an initial increase in average ranking position. We then saw another “bump” followed by sustained increases in both of these metrics. Looking at the beginning of the year the average position on Google has increased about 10 positions, which is huge considering the breadth of their keyword visibility.
The improvements in clicks were the next to improve and we saw this happen a month or so before the beginning of the holiday shopping season. Search demand can help move this metric, but without the improved average position and impressions, we wouldn’t have seen this trend line the past quarter;
Keyword Ranking Improvements
Like I mentioned above, we settled on 280 keywords to track and got that list nice and clean around the middle of the year and uploaded them into SEMRush, our SEO tracking software. The SEMRush visibility and estimated traffic metrics mirrored what we were seeing in Google Search Console;
What stands out here for me is the search volume and the massive gains on competitive purchase-intent keyword phrases.
Summary of results
- 55 new keywords ranking in the top 3 positions on Google
- 54 new keywords ranking in the top 10 positions on Google
- Number 1 rankings on keywords that had almost no visibility prior to optimizations
- 180% increase in impressions on Google during Q4 vs. the previous year
- 235% increase in impressions on Google in December 2023 vs. December 2022
- 20% increase in Google Organic traffic during Q4 vs. the previous year
- 45% increase in Google Organic traffic in December 2023 vs. December 2022
Pretty remarkable!
What I also really like is, because these are transactional phrases, this brand can now reduce ad spend, resulting in more profitable marketing and advertising. More sales from less spend.
If you want to learn more about our Shopify SEO capabilities, please contact us for an audit quote.
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