50% growth in ecommerce revenue despite COVID supply issues

Snapshot

Experimenting with title tags, tweaking product names, and optimizing for secondary keywords grows organic traffic by 24% YoY and grows revenue by 49% for ecommerce store.

Our client is a top online seller of electrical wire and cable products, competing with the likes of Home Depot and Lowe’s.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, prices were rapidly increasing and sales were decreasing as a result. Add in the fact that our client had recently relaunched their website with all new product page URLs (meaning many URL redirects, which anyone who works in SEO knows will inevitably hurt organic traffic for a time), and our client was in need of an organic strategy to specifically target their main categories and products in order to meet their bottom line.

Our results

Despite a large increase in prices, we were able to achieve the following year-over-year improvements in organic traffic and revenue:

• Record organic traffic for the entire site: 37% increase in organic clicks
• Organic revenue growth: 49% increase in organic revenue
• Top category growth: 59% increase in clicks to their top category and its products
• Key category growth: 78% increase in clicks to a smaller, but key category for their business

The challenges

Competition

The client exists in a crowded online market, having to compete against:

• Huge household names like Home Depot and Lowe’s
• Smaller companies like them who specialize solely in online sales of electrical wire and cable
• An extremely crowded paid search market, meaning organic traffic is simply harder to come by — with PPC ads filling up the search results, it’s harder to get solid click-through rates in the organic results

COVID-19

While the COVID-19 pandemic initially offered a boost to their online sales (since more people were choosing to shop online vs. visiting their neighborhood brick-and-mortar supplier), this trend hadn’t continued into 2021. The lingering effect of the pandemic on their business was a substantial increase in prices, which led to a 27% decrease in ecommerce conversion rate for their store.

Our approach

Title tags

Based on the data we were seeing in Google Search Console, the client’s click-through rates were not at the levels they had been in the past, even for pages that hadn’t dropped in rankings. We identified that Google was rewriting title tags at an alarming rate: Google had removed branding for the vast majority of category and product title tags, and our organic results were lackluster as a result.

To get the title tags to stand out in the SERPs against the competition, we experimented with forgoing branding in the title tag and instead including one of our client’s primary value propositions: that their products are “Sold by The Foot.”

Product names

By doing keyword research, we were able to identify that many of the client’s products weren’t using the most popular search terms to describe their products in the product names. In this industry, there are often many different ways to describe any given product, so by changing product names to reflect the most popular terms, we were able to target the highest value keywords with the H1 (from the product name) on each product page.

Secondary keyword targeting

As mentioned, there are many different ways users search for any given product in our client’s industry. While we targeted the most popular search terms with the H1s and product names, we wanted to make sure the content on each product page also targeted these alternate terms that searchers use. We used the keyword research to plan out secondary and tertiary keyword targets for product pages, and optimized the product information content to target these keywords.

A few other strategies we employed

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Breadcrumbs on product pages

Their relaunched website failed to include breadcrumbs on product pages, meaning there were no links to category pages from product pages. This was hurting in two ways:

1. Internal linking — Their category pages were suffering from a lack of internal links. By including breadcrumbs on each product page, we improved the overall structure of their site in the eyes of search engine crawlers and afforded more importance to their category pages.
2. User experience — Without breadcrumbs, it was impossible for users to return from a product page to the entire category of products they might be interested in. Especially for users who land on a product page, it was critical to let users navigate easily to the category page to improve their shopping experience.

Formatting of the product information/specifications

The client has detailed product information and specifications on each product page, but the formatting left something to be desired from an SEO standpoint. By improving the formatting of this on-page content, we were able to get this information to start to display directly in the Google SERP. You can see that the organic result looks really nice due to the added product details: