Case Studies

E-Commerce Hair Products Case Study

Summary

Website Background: eCommerce Shopify client selling hair cutting products across the world.

Main Objective: improve the domain authority to match that of industry competitors and to increase traffic gained from Google organic search in order to place less reliance on more expensive paid advertising.

Results: In just over six months, the number of organic sessions grew from 4,037 to 8,022, this represents an increase of 98.70%. Likewise, the number of transactions and revenue grew by 53.57% and 44.09% since the start of the campaign.

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The Case Study

The Objective:  When the client onboarded with us, most of their traffic was coming from AdWords and social media marketing channels with a very small amount coming from organic search. The goal therefore, was to increase organic traffic to have it catch up with other forms of marketing.  Our objectives were to improve the domain authority to match that of industry competitors and to increase traffic gained from Google organic search in order to place less reliance on more expensive paid advertising. 

The Website:  This eCommerce Shopify client is a global leader in the hair cutting industry, selling a range of products including shears and accessories. Although the brand targets over ten markets in five languages, their core focus for this campaign was on the United States market.

The Challenge

  • Tackling a negative SEO attack on the site's backlink profile and disavowing harmful backlinks
  • Optimising existing content so that it addressed the user's search intent for the keywords that we were targeting
  • Targeting long tail keywords by creating long form pillar content for the blog
  • Fixing keyword cannibalisation issues . Addressing on site issues such as missing heading tags and image alt texts on core landing pages
  • Migrating the blog from a subdomain to subfolder

The Strategy

Number 1

Thorough Backlink Audit

The site had been the victim of a negative SEO attack. We audited the site's backlink profile with a fine comb to identify and disavow the harmful links. We identified that the anchor texts used for these spammy links were all targeted, keyword rich and that they were all comment spam. Having spotted the troublesome backlinks, we added them to the client's disavow file and uploaded it to Google Search Console.

Number 2

Optimizing Existing Content to Address User Intent

Although the site's collections and product pages had content, it wasn't quite optimized for the core keywords that they were targeting. When comparing its competitors, the client's collections pages were lacking in content. We expanded the content on these particular pages by adding a summary of the products that were featured at the top of the page. We also added additional information about how to use the products at the bottom of the page.

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Number 3

Target Long Tail Keywords by Creating Long Form Blog Content

We created additional long form, pillar content to further expand the site's keyword visibility and target long term keywords. This not only has the benefit of getting the site to rank for more keywords (and bring in more traffic), but it also helps build topical authority within Google's eyes and offers more opportunities for us to link towards the core product and collections pages via internal links.

Number 4

Fixing Keyword Cannibalization & On Page Optimization

We fixed keyword cannibalisation issues where Google was ranking multiple pages for the same keyword as well as added heading tags and image alt texts on core landing pages where they were missing. These steps helped Google get a better idea of which page is most relevant for the keyword we wanted to target and provide the search engine with more information about the layout (headings) and contents (image alt texts) of the pages.

Number 3

Blog Migration

We migrated the content on the client's blog from a subdomain (i.e. blog.yourdomain.com) to a subfolder (i.e. yourdomain.com/blog/). This is because although Google gives both methods an equal chance of ranking, it treats subdomains on a site as a distinct entity. This meant that the keywords that the blog ranked for and the backlinks it generated had no benefit to the client's main domain. Starting with the most important blog posts, we gradually changed the URL structure of the posts so that they followed the latter pattern. This helped build the root domain's authority, increased keyword visibility and in turn, organic traffic.

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The Results

The site's organic search traffic has grown by 98.71%

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The number of users increased from 3,198 to 6,611 The number of sessions increased from 4,037 to 8,022

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Likewise, in just over six months, the number of transactions has increased by 53.57% and revenue has increased by 44.09%.

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The client is now ranking for 1,104 keywords within the top 10 positions of the search results compared to 529 keywords at the start of the campaign. This represents an increase of 108.70%.

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