Growing Revenue by 40%: eCommerce Food Case Study

Disclaimer: As a white label SEO agency, we keep the names of the websites we work on confidential to respect our partners.

1. The site needed a full technical SEO audit as many crucial elements were either missing or not properly implemented.
2. The site also had usability issues such as hundreds of broken internal links and poor site speed performance
3. Apart from the product and collection pages, the site had a lack of a content strategy for the blog.

Technical SEO Auditing

Apart from adding new content and building backlinks, we also pay very close attention to a website’s technical SEO performance by carrying out a full technical analysis at the start of each campaign.

The aim of this audit is to uncover any technical drawbacks that may be preventing the client’s website from ranking to its potential.

Here are some of the most common types of technical SEO issues that we come across when auditing our clients’ websites:

• Crawlability Issues – these are related to Google being unable to access the right resources and involve elements such as the robots.txt and XML sitemap files. These are designed to help provide Google with instructions on which resources it should not (robots.txt) and should (sitemap) crawl. 
• Indexability Issues – these are related to Google indexing the wrong or irrelevant pages on your website. This requires going through the indexed pages and taking the necessary steps to ensure they are removed correctly.
• Performance Issues – these relate to factors such as a slow site speed which can hinder the user experience and cause visitors to leave your website. 
• Structural Issues – a poorly structured website can have many negative SEO ramifications. For example, a lack of internal linking makes it difficult for users and Google to navigate through your site and having a deep site architecture (where important pages are more than four clicks away from the homepage) can impact crawlability.

It’s important to regularly carry out a technical SEO audit of your website to ensure that all of the above issues are addressed and that you’re giving your site the best possible to climb the SERPs.

Improving Usability

Google also takes the user experience of your website into consideration when determining rankings by measuring metrics such as bounce rate. 

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who land on your site, but leave straight away. 

This is a signal to Google that the user didn’t have the best experience on your website as they may not have found what they’re looking for, or the page took too long to load.

The client’s website had two core usability issues: broken internal links and a slow site speed.

Broken links are a common problem for eCommerce websites that may clear out pages with sold out or discontinued products without fixing any internal links that lead to these pages from elsewhere on the site. 

This is an issue as it means that users who may be looking for a particular product will be disappointed to find that the page no longer exists (i.e. it returns a 404 error).

We crawled the client’s website in search of these broken links and manually removed them. Wherever possible, we resorted to replacing the links leading to broken pages with new ones that linked to relevant, working pages.

The second issue related to usability that we identified by running the site’s important pages through PageSpeed Insights, was a slow site speed.

To improve the page speed performance, we moved the site to Cloudfare’s CDN (content delivery network), which allowed for quicker connection time for users located further away from the client. We also took advantage of its optimisation tools which reduced the loading times for on-site content.

Content Strategy

Many eCommerce sites ignore topical relevance in favour of creating product-specific content as ultimately, it’s the product and category pages that drive the revenue for online businesses. 

However, creating supplementary content on your blog can not only help generate more keyword visibility for your website, it also allows you to target a new audience that you can guide towards your money pages by implementing internal linking.

We revamped the client’s wider content strategy by creating original content with informational content on the blog.

For example, one type of content that we identified was missing from our client’s site, was recipes. 

This provided a great opportunity for us to create a wide range of content to target additional recipe related keywords whilst showcasing the products that the client had to offer. For example, the client sold vegan premium dark chocolate, which we could use as a star ingredient for a vegan chocolate cake recipe.

Users would be encouraged to place an order for this chocolate via a call to action that included an internal link to the respective product page.

In doing so, we not only increased the site’s keyword visibility, but also increased the conversion rates by turning more visitors into paying customers.

The number of transactions on the client’s website increased by 93.20%, and revenue grew by 39.45%.