SEO Case Study

This case study aims to provide actionable, topical SEO takeaways for eCommerce businesses.

In the past 5 months, we increased our non-branded organic traffic from nearly 0 to 56,000+ sessions per month.

We’re very bullish on SEO because, unlike paid ads, SEO has not been impacted by iOS 14 and its benefits accumulate and drive more sales month after month without incremental cost.

We’re going to keep this client, a CPG pet company, anonymous so that we can provide more details.

So, let’s imagine our product was “dog beds.”

Here’s how we did it:

First, we wrote blog posts on several high-volume, low-difficulty topics like “dog walking.”

We added internal links between our blog posts and acquired backlinks by building a network of link brokers.

We quickly began ranking well for keywords like “dog walking” and receiving significant traffic from our blog posts.

We’re sure you’re thinking: “That’s great. Did this sell more dog beds?”

Nope! But, we didn’t need it to.

The next step was to leverage the blog pages that had high rankings to improve our ranking for keywords with high buying.

We created internal links from the blog posts to our dog beds collection page with anchor text like “dog beds” or “calming dog beds” (the keywords we wanted the collection page to rank for).

We wrote additional content featuring every FAQ or subtopic for “dog beds” and added it at the bottom of the dog beds collection page.

We acquired more backlinks.

We began to get first-page rankings for our extremely difficult-to-rank-for keywords with high buying intent.

We even ranked 3rd for a keyword with 62,000 searches per month and a 46 keyword difficulty.

And we’re on track to drive 56,000 or more sessions from non-branded keywords in the next 30 days.

Here’s how you can do the same thing:

Phase 1

Goal: Rank blog pages for high-volume, low-difficulty keywords (and likely low buying intent).

Process:

1. Find keywords with high search volume and low difficulty. (You can find these keywords by searching what industry-leading blogs rank for on ahrefs.com).
   
2. Create blog posts for each keyword. Include the keyword you want to rank for in the slug, title, H1, and meta tags.
3. Create internal links between blog posts.
4. Acquire backlinks to the site from websites with high organic traffic. Backlink acquisition can be difficult to do yourself and it may be better to find a done-for-you solution. If you want to DIY, check competitor backlinks with Ahrefs and use Hunter.io 2 to email each site asking to write a guest post. DFY solutions include backlink brokers, agencies, and freelancers.

Phase 2

Goal: Rank products or collection pages for high-volume, high buying intent keywords (and likely high difficulty).

Process:

1. Find keywords with high search volume and high buying intent. If you’re running Google Ads campaigns, a good way to do this is to look at which search terms are driving the most revenue.
2. Write additional content around the keyword topic and add it to the collection or product pages that you would like to rank.
3. Add internal links from the blog posts from Phase 1 to your targeted collection and product pages.
4. Acquire backlinks to the site from websites with high organic traffic.

Think SEO is worth it? Is it part of your strategy this year?

We’re happy to answer any questions!