Ecommerce SEO Case Study

Consistent growth is one of the most common challenges for businesses today.

Here’s the story of how I managed the SEO for an ecommerce website and generated 59% more SEO traffic and a 75% surge in revenue.

All within one year!

Bookmark this post, because you never know when you’ll need a killer SEO case study to convince someone of the importance of SEO!

The Client’s Initial Situation

This client felt stuck.

After 10+ years with my agency, their performance marketing metrics had stagnated.

They’d spent years at that point optimizing content and media spend.

As a result, their revenue eventually plateaued.

And they thought SEO might be the solution.

So they reached out to me for help.

The SEO Audit: Laying the Groundwork

We kicked off our work with an SEO audit.

We reviewed all their technical and on-page elements to see what could be improved.

That’s how we discovered some pretty big issues from poor metadata and missing on-page content to questionable technical SEO practices.

All the following optimizations came from this initial audit.

Technical Optimizations

In this section, we optimized all the most important elements that help Google crawl and index our pages.

XML Sitemap

Their XML sitemap listed countless URLs that didn’t exist, which impacted the site’s crawlability.

After updating the sitemap with the correct pages, we sent that over to the developer team.

They uploaded our recommended sitemap within the hour, and Google instantly started crawling the site more efficiently.

International SEO

Beyond dead URLs, the XML sitemap also included zero HREFLang tags for their international site.

These tags help Google understand which market each page belongs to.

After updating the ideal sitemap with HREFLang, Google started showing the right version of the page to users based on their location.

Pagination

We also noticed that the load more button on category pages was JS-dependent.

That meant Google wasn’t crawling most of the products on their most important category pages.

We recommended implementing HTML pagination on these pages, and instantly noticed Google indexing significantly more product pages.

On-Page Optimizations

In this section, we optimize our landing page content to ensure that Google finds our content valuable. As a result, it will consider our site authoritative and deserving of ranking for our target keywords.

Landing Page Content

Their landing pages had been optimized previously, but we found many optimizations that had been implemented were suddenly removed.

It was a classic “Too Many Chefs” situation.

We re-optimized their landing pages with new keyword-optimized metadata and on-page copy.

As an added measure, we also started tracking these ranking elements with custom Screaming Frog crawls to detect any unexpected SEO changes.

Internal Links

We also revamped their internal linking strategy.

I noticed that most of their links were found in the navigation and sidebar menus, which were both JS-dependent.

Google couldn’t really crawl these links, so I recommended new links:

Breadcrumb links for navigation
On-page copy links

We started noticing stronger rankings from these link changes almost immediately.

Site Speed Recommendations

The site also had a poor Core Web Vitals score which negatively impacted both their UX and SEO rankings.

After collaborating with their developer team, we made the necessary changes to improve their site speed and UX.

After our SEO recommendations, the website loaded nearly twice as fast and improved site-wide revenue by 32%.

This recommendation shows the value of SEO optimizations beyond organic search.

The Results

I spent the next few months after completing the audit implementing the technical, on-page and site speed recommendations listed above.

And frankly, the numbers speak for themselves:

59% rise in SEO traffic
75% increase in SEO revenue
32% increase in non-SEO channel revenue

Key Takeaways

This example shows the potential of SEO for every business, even well-established brands.

Sometimes all you need is a new approach from an SEO Specialist who’s managed SEO for brands like Nike, Tommy Hilfiger and Virgin Atlantic 🤷

Sometimes the smallest change has the biggest impact

That’s why you should always work with the best

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Most of the time, the smallest change has the biggest impact