Ecommerce SEO Case Study Product Page Organic Ranking Reversing a Negative Trend

Ecommerce SEO Case Study Video Transcription

Ecommerce SEO Case Study – Sales up, margin up. Tim Barrie from Holistic Web Presence here. I guess this is what every company wants is to see a result like this by working with an SEO company.

To that end, I put this together as a mini case study, and this particular client is a large 180 million dollar global company.

Sales up, Reversing a Negative Trend

We worked to help them get an increase in sales, and we got sales up by 11%, margin up by the highest gains ever seen almost 60%. In terms of the total web sales, we focused on the US-based e-commerce store, and we got an increase in terms of the amount of business the e-commerce store was doing for that company as well.

So what I’m going to talk about is, well, what exactly do these results mean and how did we do it and give you a really real-world example of that.

So, you can see, this is actually an extract from their financial statement and obviously, there’s stuff here that I can’t share the detail of it but what I want you to see is the nature of these numbers, and these are the two that I’m focusing on, which is January and February. And you can see how sales are up and the margin is up significantly over previous achievements. So you can see these numbers are really quite real.

So working with them at an SEO level, we got a significant increase, a positive trend upward in terms of revenue and margin.

How did we do it?

The first thing to understand is, just the nature of what SEO is all about, what organic ranking is all about, and it’s not obvious to everybody just what the difference is. If you get a jump in one position in the search results, it can make a huge amount of difference to the business overall especially if we’re talking about big numbers to start with.

So, for example, this is a chart created by another company here an analysis. You can search on this kind of thing: “conversion by organic ranking position” is what you would search on and you’ll see lots of examples of this and it’s pretty well known that if you rank in the top organic position of the number of people that search and then click on something, on average all things being equal, that position gains around just over 20% of all the clicks.

However, it drops off very rapidly, if you’re on position two, you’re going to get around half of that, and then it drops off quite a bit, and then it drops off more, and then it sort of levels out and goes right through. So, this would be page one stuff, position one through ten would be page one results. So, if you’re in position eight on page one, and you go up, you’re going to get a little bit of an improvement but if you will get position 3, 2, or 1. You can see a huge improvement in your overall sales, and this is just not often well understood. So, focusing on getting an improvement here, can dramatically change the business.

To be really clear about what we’re talking about here, here’s a typical search results page, and I put in just a random search, so this isn’t the key phrase associated with that particular company. I just want you to get a general idea of what this means. These are AdWords. So you can see the little ad symbol there. So, this is paid advertising and this is the top organic result.

What this previous slide is talking about here, from here to here, is a change from position two to position one. All things being equal in the search results. And there are a lot of other things that can be done to change the nature of search results but I just want you to understand that key difference.

The thing that pops up at this point that most people are going to ask is “What about the AdWords if we’ve got one of these positions. If we’ve got the number one position here in AdWords, wouldn’t that be even better than ranking in the number one position? So if we just go back to this, so we can go from 10% to 21% in the top organic position. Meaning, going from here to here, wouldn’t be going up here be even better? So the answer to that is “hell, no!

Organic vs. Paid Advertising

This is what organic vs paid actually looks like from a search point of view. And this is across all industries. What this is telling you is that the organic positions by far, get most of the clicks, so let’s just be clear about what this means. These are the paid positions. This position by far gets most of the clicks. People, when they search, have learned whether they think about it or not, to ignore these, because they know they are ads, and they’ll typically go straight to this position and click on that one. So, whoever is here, wins.

You still win if you’re here and you still win if you’re here but you’re not really winning when you’re down there, so you got to get into one of these three positions and you really want to be in this one.

So what’s the relative difference if we’re talking about, if you’re here in, say position three, or you’re in one of these positions? Is it better to be up here with AdWords and spend money on AdWords than being in position three? As you can see, it’s a tiny fraction that AdWords gets compared to the organic positions. Position 3 is getting 7%, how many clicks does the top position in AdWords get?  Here you go. 6% of people click on paid search. That’s any one of those paid search items, not necessarily the top one. 94% of people click on natural search or the organic rankings. So, no AdWords we’ve blown that one out of the water. AdWords is definitely not the place to be if, you can get into organic ranking if you can get in position 1,2, or 3 in the organic search results.

So that’s our goal with this company. That’s how we did it is we got them into the top positions in the organic search results. Let’s go into a bit more detail.

So, what’s our methodology? What did we do specifically? Well, let’s start with what was previously happening. The previous agency that worked with them, tended to produce an awesome report. There are a lot of companies out there that will be familiar with this, and it was a 22-page beautifully produced report with lots of graphs and all kinds of interesting statistics built into that report. But what they saw overtime was a decrease in sales and a decrease in ranking.

So, if that sounds familiar to you, you should talk to us. We see this a lot.

20% of Work Done Often Produces 80% of the Results

The key thing to understand here is that a small part of what most companies do tends to produce a lot of the results. But what they do is they run around doing lots and lots and lots of different things, which have minimal effect. What we do is the opposite of this. We focus on this 20% here.  What tends to go wrong is that people tend to ignore that 20% because it’s not sexy, it’s not interesting, it’s hard work, it’s boring, it takes time. But it’s the part that makes all the difference.

We Did the Boring Stuff

What did we do in this particular case? What we did is we focused on specific product pages that we knew if we focus on those and we got an improvement in their ranking, it would increase sales and improve the businesses revenue. We focused on the boring stuff, the title tags, the description tags, the page content, how many images were on the page, how well they are optimized, and it’s amazing how many people just ignore this piece and they ignore the image. They’ve got maybe one poorly optimized image on the page. We did inter-page linking, that doesn’t mean going off on buying links from other places. That means inter-page linking on the same site.

We improved the user experience on the site, improve how well that product page worked when somebody accessed it using a mobile device like a smartphone. The problem with doing this kind of stuff is it requires working creatively. So, what a lot of people don’t understand, this blue line is the title tag. If you change the way this is worded and it’s more interesting than the one above it, more people will click on it. It will rise to the top.

Your Title Tag is Everything

The biggest single ranking factor now isn’t whether you stuffed the page with keywords, it’s if more people click on your search result rather than somebody else’s. And you have the chance to manipulate that by being creative here. So, if you’re good at writing copy, if you’re great at phrasing things in a way that makes people want to click on this one, just fractionally more than this one, you can get a significant change in the rank results. This change, from position two to position one just by getting that right.

Ecommerce SEO Requires Talent and Creativity

Now, that requires a lot of thought and creativity, to figure out for every key phrase and every set of search results, you’ve got to think what you’re trying to rank for. You’ve got to look at these and figure out how can I beat the competitive title tags? These blue lines are the title tags, and that’s just one example of the kind of work that you need to do if you want to be ranking in the top position.

That’s just title tags. You have to do the same thing. With description tags. Rewriting the page content, building it out, making it more interesting, making it richer, providing product explanations, providing support material on the product, putting really good images of the individual products. Images that are just the individual products in situ with just a regular photograph or maybe people using them even or in the context that they would be used. There are lots of creative ways to improve the way the image is visualized. Inter-page links, that’s all about referring to the product on other pages on the website and creating links from other pages to give that page more authority.

How Many Clicks?

I’ll give you an example of a user experience. How many clicks does it take to get to the product? Every time you have an extra click to get to the product, you’re losing about 30% of your audience. You want to make it very easy to navigate to the product.

Nowadays, it’s startling just how many people are accessing and buying things online on their cellphone. There’s a general trend not to be using regular computers but just using the mobile platform. So, if you improve this user experience, you’ll get more sales. If you improve the user experience, Google’s algorithm will notice that there’s that improvement there and you will rank higher as a result of it. So this is all the hard work, the real work of SEO. Of increasing the visibility of individual products.

So, how would you get this nice positive trend? How do you get an increase in sales? Well, you’ve got work to do.

We get a happy client. When the clients are happy, and their sales are going up, they’ll increase the budget and we can then have more time to do more things to improve their website even further.

If you want results like the e-commerce SEO case study examples that I’ve just shown you, then call us at the Holistic Web Presence. It’s (801) 349-8226. We’d love to talk to you!