It was a common beginning we often hear. CellularOutfitter had been burned by past agencies, who over promised and under delivered. As such, they were extremely reluctant to engage another SEO agency, but wanted to gain market share in a highly competitive space.
Content marketing
Public relations
SEO
Won
Rankings over Amazon and Best Buy for valuable keywords
159%
Organic revenue growth
Challenges
An initial audit revealed an extremely spammy backlink profile which could have detrimental impacts with the imminent Penguin 4.0 launch. As a large ecommerce company, the client’s website had over one million pages and over 773K backlinks. Detoxing the client’s backlink profile was no small feat. Once the initial backlink cleanup was completed, the client engaged in a full six month SEO campaign.
In order to improve Organic traffic and revenue, the client had to overcome a number of challenges including a: spammy backlink profile, limited indexing strategy, lack of on-page content, and a low Domain Authority. Competing with major ecommerce giants and industry leaders (Amazon, BestBuy) would be a challenge for an established brand without technical issues.
Solutions
The strategy included an integrated approach with SEO, Organic PR/Outreach, and Content, while working closely with the client to ensure priorities were aligned. The SEO campaign focused on a few core areas.
First, we improved the health of the website to boost rankings and revenue. The first step focused on cleaning up an extremely toxic and spammy backlink profile – over 773K external links were manually analyzed and assessed. In combination with the link clean up.
Simultaneously, our Digital PR/Outreach team worked to secure highly relevant, quality links which would further improve the site’s backlink profile and pass authority. Building the site’s authority was crucial based on the highly competitive marketplace.
Secondly, we developed a highly focused indexing strategy. Based on the highly competitive search landscape (dominated by Amazon, Best Buy etc.) our indexing strategy focused on identifying less competitive keywords. However, these were keywords for which the client’s website could actually rank on page one. Although these less competitive keywords had lower search volumes, we were able to drive more qualified and engaged visitors, thus building a strong foundation and significantly increasing CTR. As the search engines crawled and indexed the site, the client gained rankings and eventually broke onto page one for the initial target keywords as well as the highly competitive keywords. Throughout the campaign, we consistently gained new keywords and moved keywords up. Once the top Organic traffic and revenue-driving pages were optimized, we worked closely with the client team to identify top-performing pages and target keywords based on PPC performance. Using a semantic search strategy (how the search engines use Artificial Intelligence to understand related queries), we optimized on page content.
Lastly, we continued optimization of top converting pages to drive more traffic to the website.
Through ongoing competitor analyses we continued to identify new opportunities to improve rankings and CTR. As the campaign progressed and we gained more rankings, we were able to start including Amazon and BestBuy as part of our competitor analysis. In addition, we analyzed the CTR of keywords to identify optimizations to improve the CTR based on industry standards. By updating the meta-data of underperforming queries we were able to improve overall CTR.
Results
During a six month campaign, Organic traffic, transactions, revenue, and keyword rankings for CellularOutfitter skyrocketed. The brand gained 24K additional keywords with an 888% increase in keywords ranking in positions 1-3. Rankings drive traffic and with more qualified traffic coming to the site, Organic traffic increased 232%. Furthermore, Organic revenue increased 159% driving an addition $116.2K.
The biggest campaign win was outranking Amazon and Best Buy for highly valuable target keywords. As of January 2017, CellularOutfitter continued to rank in above Amazon for a number of target keywords. When comparing the six month period (June – December, 2016) to the same period in 2015, Organic traffic and revenue doubled. Although the SEO campaign wrapped up in December 2016, we continued to see incredible ranking gains in January 2017.
