+332.01% Organic Traffic for Ecommerce Hair Products Brand

1. Improve site quality

The website had 5 main issues holding it back from reaching it's fullest potential:

1. Addressing a negative SEO attack by disavowing harmful backlinks and cleaning up the site’s backlink profile

2. Optimizing existing content to align with the user’s search intent for our target keywords

3. Creating comprehensive pillar content to target long-tail keywords for the blog

4. Resolving keyword cannibalization issues

5. Migrating the blog from a subdomain to a subfolder

Backlinks from other websites are one of the most powerful ranking factors in SEO.

They are however also one of the most exploited.

Competitors can build hundreds of poor-quality, spammy backlinks to your site, hoping to trigger a manual penalty from Google. This tactic, known as a negative SEO attack, requires vigilance.

While Google’s systems are generally good at identifying link spam, they are not infallible. Regularly analyzing your site’s link profile is crucial to maintaining its health, much like pruning a tree.

To detect a negative SEO attack, monitor your site’s link velocity – the frequency at which your site is being linked to. Tools like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer can help with this; simply enter your domain to get started.

Next you'll want to navigate to the Referring Domains Graph.

If you see a sudden spike in referring domains (like the one below), it’s likely that your site may have experienced a negative SEO attack.

Once you've identified a negative SEO attack, the next step is to audit your backlink profile to identify the spammy backlinks.

The most common types of link spam are comment spam and forum links. Competitors often post hundreds of comments with keyword-rich anchor texts on forums and low-quality websites, linking back to your site—this was the case with our client.

Once you’ve thoroughly audited your backlink profile and identified harmful domains, add them to your Disavow file and upload it to Google Search Console. This tells Google you do not want these backlinks and referring domains to count towards your SEO.

Optimizing content to address user intent

The client’s existing content, primarily focused on paid ads and social media marketing, lacked SEO optimization. Specifically, their collection and product pages did not address the user’s search intent for the main keywords we targeted.

Search intent ensures your content matches what users aim to achieve with their queries. There are four main types:

1. Informational – learning new information about a topic

2. Navigational – finding a specific website or page

3. Commercial Investigation – researching a product or service before buying

4. Transactional – buying or performing a conversion

To identify the search intent of a keyword, examine what Google rewards in the top 10 search results. For example, for "mens sweatshirts," Google shows eCommerce collection or product pages, indicating the intent to buy.

Our competitor analysis revealed that the client’s collection and product pages lacked the depth and information of top-ranking competitors. Product descriptions were not compelling, and collection pages lacked supplementary information.

We improved the collection pages by adding a summary of featured products at the top (above the fold) and usage information at the bottom (below the fold). This improved content alignment with user intent and boosted SEO performance.

2. Expand bottom of funnel

Google's ranking systems aim to present information from credible, trustworthy sources. This is because users are more likely to trust advice from an expert.

For instance, you'd prefer to get tax return advice from an experienced accountant rather than a finance student with little experience.

This principle is known as E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).

When building a website's E-E-A-T, the goal is to position your brand and website as the authoritative source within your niche. Users should see you as the go-to voice for reliable information.

To achieve this, we created additional long-form pillar content. This strategy expanded the site’s keyword visibility for long-tail keywords and established the client’s site as an authority in the hair and beauty industry.

Once we made sure the website had the right topic clusters, and the articles were informative and written by experts that know all about hair products, it was time to fix the keyword cannibalization.

3. Optimize bottom of funnel

If you have many pages that contain similar or duplicate content, they may struggle to rank to their potential due to keyword cannibalisation.

When multiple pages on your website are vying for the same term, this is what happens.

This is problematic since it implies that other unrelated URLs will prevent your website's vital pages from ranking as high.

Using Ahrefs' Organic keywords report is one method of identifying possible keyword cannibalization.

In Site Explorer, type in your domain, select Organic keywords, and then refine your search results by Position to display only search phrases for which you are ranking higher than the first page.

Go through each of the keywords by clicking on the graph icon on the right hand side. This will show you the ranking history of the keyword.

You should see a graph similar to the one above, where each line denotes a distinct URL that Google has ranked for the chosen term.

You can see that none of the pages have been able to rank on the first page of the search results as a result of Google's constant switching between several pages on this website for the phrase "aluminum tins."

Cannibalization can be fixed in a variety of ways, and each solution should be used individually. An internal link from the less relevant page (Page A) to the most relevant page (Page B), for instance, could occasionally be sufficient to convince Google that the primary page (Page B) is the one you should aim for.

In other situations, you might have to combine the information, make a completely new page, or use 301 redirects.