Our Client in a nutshell…
Our client has three high-end Italian furniture stores in the Miami area.
Half of our clients’ sales are to interior designers/architects and the other half is to homeowners in the Miami area.
Our clients’ target customer base is affluent, well-educated, multi-lingual, own multiple homes, and are usually 45+ years old.
Understanding our client’s customer base was very important. They wanted us to focus on growing their traffic with quality leads rather than quantity.
Our client’s unique market space was reflected in their organic traffic. They were averaging about 1000 clicks a month. While this is not a lot compared to other clients it is important to remember this clients business model. One new customer for them is worth tens of thousands of dollars.
Performing an SEO Sitewide Audit
After understanding the client’s business model and customer base, we conducted an audit on their site. The initial SEO audit is extensive as we needed to research the following:
1.Server health and security of the site
- Server issues can prevent spiders and inlinks from reaching our client’s site.
- Security issues will hurt our client’s rankings with the search engines.
2.Running a self crawl on the site
- Crawling our client’s site is designed to see all the response codes for the site, as well as checking the tags used on every page.
3.Checking the indexability of the site
- We want to make sure that the search engines will have no issues indexing any of our clients content
4.Checking the site architecture
- Having an optimized site architecture is important for the user experience. Additionally, it signals to the search engines the hierarchy of our pages importance.
5.Keyword Research
- This allowed us to understand what keywords we should target to best increase the client’s customer base. Additionally, it provided research for us so we could create quality landing pages/articles for the relevant keywords that we wanted to target.
6.The overall link profile
- The backlink profile of a site is a major factor in the authority it has with the search engines. The link audit allowed us to find potentially harmful links that could lead to penalties with the search engines.
The list above is a summary of our audit process. To see the extensive work that goes into every client’s audit click here.
Issues and Solutions
While we cannot share all the tricks of our trade, after all, we do have a competitive edge that we need to maintain, below is a partial list of issues that we discovered and the solutions we implemented.
1.Our first challenge was the client’s category pages for their different products. The layout of these pages was similar to most eCommerce sites. Each category page had images of the products which could be clicked on to take you to the product page. However, these pages did not stand out from their competition.
To improve the rankings of these category pages with the search engine we first researched the keywords that our pages were targeting. Based off of this research we came up with content to add to these category pages. The content was placed on the page in a way that did not interfere with the user shopping experience.
When we compared the results pre-optimization to post optimization we saw the following:
Example #1 (optimization on June 28th 2019)
Example #2 (optimization on September 24th 2019)
2.Our next step focused on finding new keyword opportunities for our client to expand their traffic. We analyzed our client’s competition to discover keyword opportunities that we weren’t taking advantage of. After we had a list of new keywords to target we created high-quality unique content to dominate the competition in those spaces. We were able to rank these new blog articles quickly thanks to our creation method and by acquiring valuable links for the articles.
Examples of the effectiveness of the article building strategies that we employ can be found below. The arrows in the graph point to the time when the new article was published and the clicks that we have gotten in that timeframe.
Article #1
Article Launch Date: 11/04/19
Clicks Since Launch: 48
Impressions Since Launch: 49800
Article #2
Article Launch Date: 12/19/19
Clicks Since Launch: 13
Impressions Since Launch: 6540
3.Our plan to increase our client’s backlink authority with the search engines was twofold. First, we examined the clients link profile and discovered that a lot of the links were low-quality links. These can be seen as spam and lead to penalties with Google. Therefore, we created a disavow file and uploaded it to Google. This lets the search engines know that we did not endorse those links.
Next, we worked on a link building campaign to gain high quality and relevant links for our client’s site. This process is an ongoing one as increasing the number of domains that link to our client helps the site’s overall rankings with the search engines.
Results
So what were the results?
We compared 3/18/19 – 12/31/19 to the same period in 2018 (as this is as far back in 2018 that we had data for). The results were as follows.
