+$37.3k Monthly Revenue in 6 Months for Ecommerce Startup

Growing a new brand’s organic search traffic is a journey that demands a strategic and systematic approach. It involves expanding content through a meticulous keyword selection process.

For our ecommerce start-up client, this method proved transformative. Initially struggling to gain online visibility in a niche overshadowed by an industry giant, our efforts led to a remarkable 796% increase in search traffic and a boost in monthly revenue from $3.2k to $40.5k within six months.

Here’s what we did to achieve this success:

- Executed a digital PR campaign: Built high-quality backlinks.

- Redesigned the blog section: Focused on enhancing user experience.

- Optimized page performance: Improved loading speeds by optimizing images.

In this case study, we’ll guide you through the comprehensive steps we took to reach these impressive results.

Before we dive in, it's important to note that our client is a nicotine alternative ecommerce brand that sells products designed to help smokers transition away from traditional cigarettes and replace them with a safer option. One of the things that make this company stand out from their competitors is the use of natural ingredients in place of tobacco.

1. Improve Site Quality

Before diving into the SEO challenges we needed to address for our client, it's crucial to understand the industry specifics. The tobacco alternative market is near-monopolized by a dominant competitor, making it extremely tough for our client to rank for high-volume keywords.

As a new entrant, our client lacked the domain and topical authority to compete effectively for major keywords. This necessitated a different approach for keyword selection.

Additionally, our client faced several obstacles that hampered their success, including:

- Unfocused blog content: The blog section lacked targeted content to boost SERP rankings.

- Weak backlink profile: There were insufficient quality backlinks supporting the site.

- Performance issues: Slow loading times and overall poor page performance.

With both content strategy and technical issues affecting brand visibility, we devised a comprehensive strategy to tackle these challenges.

Our Approach

Overcoming the competition's massive online presence and ensuring our client's content ranked highly on Google involved:

- Targeting informational search queries: We created content addressing questions about tobacco alternatives and quitting smoking aids.

- Enhancing blog content: We showcased the client’s products in blog posts through “related posts” sections, sidebars, and relevant internal links directing users to product pages.

- Executing a digital PR campaign: We focused on building high-quality backlinks from reputable outlets.

- Optimizing page performance: We improved loading speeds by targeting and optimizing large files that were slowing down the site.

Raising Brand Awareness and Improving Searchability

Elevating our client's brand awareness and making it easily searchable for potential customers was particularly challenging given the industry dynamics. This major hurdle guided our content strategy formulation.

The success of our campaign demonstrates that new brands can achieve SEO success even in highly competitive niches dominated by industry giants. If you’re facing similar challenges, applying elements of our process to your situation can be immensely beneficial.

Growing Keyword Visibility for Informational Keywords

With limited opportunities to compete for commercial and transactional keywords, we concentrated on informational queries to enhance our client’s keyword visibility. Our goal was to create content around questions about smoking, quitting the habit, and viable tobacco alternatives.

To achieve this, we identified popular question-based keywords and designed a content plan around them. If you're struggling to find these types of keywords for your own site, several tools can simplify this task. Here are two effective ones:

Ahrefs Keywords Explorer

The Keywords Explorer tool by Ahrefs is excellent for identifying question-based, informative terms. Here’s a step-by-step guide to get started:

1. Enter a Broad Seed Keyword: Type a general keyword related to your business and select the target country. For example, "backpacks" targeting the USA.

2. Navigate to Keywords Ideas: Scroll to “Keywords Ideas” and click “View all” under “Questions.”

3. Filter by Parent Topic: Group results by Parent Topic to simplify your content plan by pooling similar terms together.

4. Select a Parent Topic: Click on a parent topic to see all relevant question-based keywords. For instance, “when were backpacks invented” shows a 1.1K search volume with 6 relevant keywords.

5. Plan and Write: Use this information to craft an optimized blog post about the invention of backpacks.

By following these steps, you can effectively use Ahrefs Keywords Explorer to generate content ideas and improve your SEO strategy.

People Also Ask

If you're looking for free and easy content ideas, Google’s People Also Ask section is a goldmine. Here’s how to use it:

1. Enter a Seed Keyword: Type a keyword related to your niche, like "backpacks."

2. Expand a Question: Choose a question you find interesting and expand it. This will display the top-ranking result and reveal more questions. For example, expanding "Can you take a backpack on a plane?" brings up additional questions like "Can I bring 2 backpacks on a plane?"

3. Repeat for More Ideas: Continue this process to uncover numerous relevant questions, helping you generate a wealth of searchable blog content ideas.

By using People Also Ask, you can quickly and effectively gather topics to create engaging and relevant content for your blog.

Creating Content for Informational Keywords

As you prepare to write your first informational blog post, it's crucial to have a clear plan. Here are some key strategies to ensure your content is effective and engaging:

- Analyze your competitors: Examine the top-ranking pages for your target keywords. Understand their approach to the topic. This will provide valuable insights into how to structure and compose your article for optimal ranking.

- Provide precise answers to key questions: Aim for clarity and brevity to increase your chances of appearing in the featured snippet results.

- Demonstrate your expertise: Position yourself as a reliable authority in your field. Use external links to reputable, authoritative websites, include a comprehensive author bio with a professional headshot and credentials, and add a bibliography section.

- Incorporate internal links: Direct your readers to your product or service pages through your blog content. This strategy can help drive conversions.

2. Expand Bottom of Funnel

Next up, we needed to improve the UX on the blog and make sure that readers actually stayed around, clicked internal links or converted towards product pages.

Ensuring your blog is user-friendly, easily navigable, and consistently offering more related information is just as crucial as having top-notch content.

Let's walk you through some enhancements we made on a client's site, which you can also apply to boost your blog's user experience.

Add a “Related Posts” Section

Every piece of content you publish should feature a "Similar Articles" section at the end. This strategy encourages readers to stay on your site longer, increases views, and more. Here's a glimpse of what a typical "Similar Articles" section might look like:

Incorporating a "Related Posts" section on your blog brings numerous advantages, including:

• Lowering bounce rates

• Boosting page views

• Enhancing content discoverability

• Increasing the likelihood of social media shares

• Prolonging visitor duration on your site

There are tools like the free WordPress plugin Contextual Related Posts that can scan your blog for related posts based on the article's content, and then automatically add them to "Related Posts" However, we suggest manually reviewing these suggestions to ensure their relevance.

Use Your Sidebar Wisely

Adding sidebar content alongside your blog posts is an excellent strategy to maximize the available space on your webpage. By optimizing the sidebar, you can boost conversions, facilitate user interaction, promote social media sharing, and more.

Here are a few prime examples of impactful sidebar content:

• Downloadable resources

• Contact us buttons

• Subscription forms

• Social media icons

• Search functions

• Links to related articles

• Links to product pages

• Author profiles

• Client testimonials

A well-structured sidebar will let your blog posts go beyond their informational purpose and provide your readers with more ways to engage with your website.

Internal Linking

While the sidebar and "Related Posts" sections are powerful tools for weaving in more internal links into your blog, don't underestimate the potency of embedding relevant links directly into your article's body. This is a subtle yet effective way to guide readers towards your product or service pages without veering off-topic.

Hyperlinks that navigate readers to various pages on your site not only enhance user experience but also facilitate search engine crawlers in understanding your website's structure. Well-placed internal links can significantly boost visitor engagement with your core pages, thereby amplifying conversion opportunities.

As you incorporate internal links into your blog content, remember these best practices:

• Opt for descriptive, relevant anchor text

• Ensure links lead to pertinent pages

• Steer clear of excessive internal linking

• Link back to each fresh blog article from existing pages

• Strategically position your links so they seamlessly blend into the context of your blog post.

3. Optimize Bottom of Funnel

Now that the structure and UX of the blog had been tackled, it was time to work on a link building strategy.

Our customer's website had no search volumes for their products because they did not have much presence online. This is why we had to buy some PR backlinks so that it could have more domain authority which would make it capable of serving them well in the long run.

The main goal of digital PR is to connect with influencers who are already popular in a certain field, as well as newspapers and other media channels operating through the internet. This way, once they mention your brand on their websites then you are able to get more recognition amongst people from all walks of life. Links from this kind of activity help websites gain trust flow value since such platforms have wide audienceship base compared to just posting any article or blog on unknown site which lacks credibility within its own niche.

You can start your own Digital PR campaign right now. Unlike traditional methods, PR links call for a different approach when it comes to getting them. Below are tips to help you get started with your digital pr campaign.

- Define your targets: specify your target audience. Identify the social media platforms or individuals your clients follow frequently, sources delivering recent news about your business field most often, and influencers in your industry with massive followings on such platforms.

- Conduct thorough research: after you know who you’re aiming for, learn more about such platforms as their influence, level of user activity and amount of followers. Prowly can help you find the most suitable journalists and media.

- Tailor your content to suit authoritative outlets/individuals: Create content that appeal to your PR targets. This isn't the place for ordinary blog posts. Your content must be fascinating, different from others and should bring new ideas. Think about preparing industry reports, carrying out case studies, expert interviews as well as telling interesting stories about recent events.

To learn more about our link building services, feel free to schedule a call with our team.

Image Optimization

Images are a crucial part of any website, but especially online stores. 

Images on Ecommerce websites need to be of a high quality to showcase your products in fine detail. However, high-resolution pictures have a large file size that can slow down your site’s loading times and negatively impact the user experience.

Optimizing images to reduce their size and improve loading times can be achieved fairly easily. Here’s what we’ve done to help our client: 

• Image compression: compressing pictures reduces their size while preserving good image quality. It’s a really simple process you can use to radically improve page performance for free, with the help of tools like TinyPNG or Imagify.

• Lazy loading: this is a common SEO practice that keeps non-critical content, such as images, from loading up on the page until the viewer actually needs to interact with it. Essentially, this means that no images or videos will load up until the reader actually scrolls down to where they’re located on the page.This can greatly improve loading speeds by reducing data transfer between the web browser and host server.

Summary of Our Results

• Organic traffic experienced a 796.14% increase, growing from 1,839 sessions to 16,480.

• Monthly organic revenue saw a rise of 1,135%, escalating from $3,286.47 to $40,592.22.

• Visibility of keywords within Google's top 10 positions soared by 3564%, moving from 17 to 623 keywords.

• The site now ranks for 3,107 keywords within the top 100 positions, a significant leap from the previous 313.