Sortmund sells clothes and accessories for uniformed services. When they contacted us, their online store had been already optimized for search engines, yet it had problems with getting visible by Google bots. They needed us to design a new SEO strategy to significantly increase the search visibility.
The client strived to drive more organic traffic in order to grow more revenue. That’s why they asked us to help them strengthen the target keywords positions, thereby making the product pages appear higher on SERP. Seeing Sortmund on top, the searchers looking for clothes and accessories for uniformed services would be more likely to click on the client’s store, rather than on other online stores offering similar items.
Does it make sense to work on a website that already performs pretty well and has satisfactory SERP ranks? To me, there is always room for improvement. Therefore, my team and I eagerly developed an SEO strategy for an online store that was ranked TOP10. We strengthened the target keyword positions, used a few technical SEO tricks, and there we are – TOP3!
The very first thing we occupied our hands with was dealing with the insufficient amount of content published on the category pages.
There wasn’t any text published on Sortmund category pages, which we saw as a huge SEO-potential to use. Our copywriting team handled preparing the keyword-rich pieces of content for each category page.
Here’s an example of such a piece of content:
Although the menu doesn’t seem to be a strategic website element for the shoppers, it does have a big impact on SEO. That’s why we made the menu structure modification our second priority.
One of the first things that struck our eyes while evaluating the website was the improper menu structure. The category names this element was made up of didn’t feature any target keywords. To illustrate, here is one of the former category name:
Police → badges
which we changed into this:
police badges
Below there is an example of how the category names were displayed in search results before we started optimizing the website:
After filling the category names with the proper keywords, the H1 and title tags were corrected automatically. This way the Sortmund category pages were more descriptive, and therefore more attractive for the target audience.
This way the users knew that by clicking on the result they would be taken to the online store – Sortmund – that offered the very items they were looking for.
Since meta descriptions have less impact on SEO than the two above-mentioned elements, we left them for last.
The meta descriptions were generated automatically. They consisted of category names and category paths.
We had to rewrite them since such meta descriptions are barely enticing for the searchers. Apart from introducing modifications manually, we also implemented some global changes.
For example, for the non-optimized meta descriptions, we defined a pattern to replace the category names with a more descriptive pieces of information, just like here:
Here is the pattern we designed for product meta descriptions:
From the very beginning, we were strengthening the domain ranks by building referral links for our client. We left the backlinks in catalogs, blogs and Q&A sites. The backlinks were placed on quality websites that revolved around the topic of uniform services.
This is the link profile before starting the off-site strategy for Sortmund:
Here is the link profile after over a year of the continuous link building process:
RESULT 1 Increase in website visibility in search engines
RESULT 2 Constant increase in organic traffic
Organic traffic in 2019 vs. 2018 – 34% increase
RESULT 3 27% increase in revenue generated by organic traffic (2019 vs. 2018)
RESULT 4 Stronger keyword positions
