Growing an eCommerce Coffee Brand’s Monthly Visitors by 1,758%

The client had a relatively well-optimised website and a growing link profile, but the main issue that was holding the site back was the amount of topically duplicated content. This meant that there were multiple URLs on the site that focused on the same topics.

Therefore, the key issues that we focused on were:

• Consolidating duplicate content
• Restructuring the URLs to reflect the customer journey
• Fixing keyword cannibalisation

In addition to the duplicate content, there was also little emphasis on what Google should rank on certain core landing pages. As far as user experience and the customer journey was concerned, this was a problem as if users cannot find their way around the website then how will the search engines?

As a result of this, there was serious potential for keyword cannibalisation (which is where multiple pages compete for the same keyword) through the lack of a site structure.

Content Consolidation

To address the duplicate content issues, we grouped over 100 blog posts and identified areas where we could consolidate the content so that we could rid the site of its duplicated pages.

We achieved this by adding a 301 redirect from the duplicated pages to a single “canonical” page of the same topic.

Navigational Restructuring

We amended the customer journey so that the designing and purchasing of the products was far more streamlined and straightforward for the user. 

This involved creating new product categories that were organised under a broader category page which we added as part of the main navigation on the homepage.

For example:

https://example.com/

          https://example.com/main-category/

                    https://example.com/sub-category-1/

                              https://example.com/product-1/

                              https://example.com/product-2/

                              https://example.com/product-3/

                    https://example.com/sub-category-2/

                              https://example.com/product-1/

                              https://example.com/product-2/

                              https://example.com/product-3/

This new site structure helps guide the use through to the products that they are looking to purchase.

Technical and On-Site Maintenance

The site also had several technical issues that needed to be improved upon. During the campaign we:

• Fixed internal 301 redirects – along with the restructuring of the category pages, we fixed internal redirects on the website so that pages that were no longer needed (and were consolidated) were redirected to the new, more relevant URL. This way, we could still pass any PageRank from the old URLs to the new URL.
• Fixed broken 404 errors – pages that return a 404 not found error code hinder the user experience. We therefore fixed any broken 404 errors on the site so that they were either removed, or redirected to a more relevant web page.

• Optimised page titles – we ensured the page titles on the core landing pages of the site were optimised with the core keyword that we wanted to target.
• Optimised headings – we ensured the headings on the core landing pages of the site were optimised with the core keyword that we wanted to target.
• Internal Linking to product and category pages – internal linking is a powerful way to guide visitors through to your core money pages. We did just that by adding links to the product and category pages on the 100+ blog articles that we consolidated.

With optimized on-page content and engaging user features such as interactive tables and accessible unit conversions, the pages soared to the top and are now bringing in10x as much traffic as when they were first published.

Page improvements on the blog like this are now contributing to the overall growth of the website.

In addition to this, the number of organic keywords that the site is ranking for increased from around 200 in April 2019 to in excess of 2,500 in April 2021.

Finally, since making all of the above changes to the site, the site’s organic traffic naturally saw a drastic increase. 

In the space of a year, the number of organic sessions rose from 299 between March 21, 2020 – April 19, 2020 to 5,557 sessions during the same period in 2021.

This represents a staggering 1,758% increase in organic sessions.