E-Commerce SEO efforts increase traffic

E-Commerce SEO efforts increase traffic by 40.34%

Situation Analysis

The Alpine Shop is Burlington-based outdoor goods retailer with two brick and mortar locations. When we began working with them, they had a growing online presence, selling skis through eBay and on their website, alpinesportinggoods.com. The company wanted to expand their e-commerce sales and make it easier for employees to manage inventory.

Strategy/Methodology

Brandthropology began by reviewing their existing e-commerce infastructure. Through interviews with employees and probing the website, we understood the need for an alternative e-commerce platform. Our solutions was Magento, an open-source content management system that was not only more cost efficient, but would also be easy for employees to use, increase tracking and still provide a great user experience customers expect. Of course, even the best e-commerce platform is useless if there’s no traffic on the site. To increase the number of visitors, we devised a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that would increase the company’s ranking on various search engines for high-conversion keywords. Similarly, we developed a search engine marketing (SEM) plan that would utilize keywords to drive increased traffic, and ultimately sales to the site. Additionally, the customer revealed that they had a sizable holding in Volkl skis, which they hoped to liquidate as soon as possible. To expedite sales, we strategized to create VolklSale.com, a vertical site that would focus exclusively on selling Volkl skis. With a dedicated domain name, SEO, and SEM strategies in place, we developed an online strategy that would ensure quick rewards from/through search engines. Lastly, we identified free product listing services online to help increase traffic and backlinks to the site.

Execution

For each site’s SEO, we rewrote the on-page copy for each product description, replacing the manufacturer’s descriptions with custom, keyword-rich copy. We also integrated our established keywords into the site’s backend coding as well, making sure that everything was buttoned up: H1 tags, H2 tags, meta descriptions, and meta keywords. For each site’s SEM, we established Google AdWords accounts and used competitive analysis to determine cost-effective keywords that also identified the customer at the purchasing end of the buying cycle. These keywords were constantly reviewed and updated based on efficacy, cost-per-click (CPC), click-through-rate (CTR), and Alpine Shop’s inventory.

Results/Evaluation

Our search engine optimization strategy placed AlpineSportinggoods.com and Volklsale.com on the first page of Google for over 121,000 searches during this year’s ski season. Our search engine marketing strategy had a CTR of between 6% and 9%, well above the industry standard of 2%. Overall, Traffic to AlpineSportingGoods.com has increased 40.34% compared to the pre-optimization baseline and traffic to VolklSale.com has resulted in brisk sales.