Growing Organic Traffic by 173%: eCommerce Skincare Case Study

Disclaimer: As a white label SEO agency, we keep the names of the websites we work on confidential to respect our partners.

1. A deep site structure meant that many important pages struggled to get crawled and indexed by Google.
2. The site had a large backlink profile with lots of poor quality legacy backlinks hindering performance.
3. Product and collection pages lacked optimised content which halted conversions as users were not enticed to click through and place an order.

Implementing A Flat Site Structure

How your website is structured can significantly impact Google’s ability to crawl and index your content. 

Pages that are on a deeper level, being further away from the homepage, are less likely to be crawled and indexed by Google as they are perceived as not being “important” enough.

If Google’s crawlers can’t access your important pages, they won’t be indexed, and won’t be ranked.

Here’s what a deep site structure looks like:

We restructured the site so that it had a flatter architecture i.e. we made sure that the main pages on the site were no more than three clicks away from the homepage. 

Level 0 – Homepage

Level 1 – Pages linked directly from the homepage

Level 2 – Pages linked directly from Level 1

Here’s what a flat site structure looks like:

By switching to a flat site structure, the site’s most valuable pages (i.e. the product and collection pages) were more likely to be crawled and indexed.

Whether you’re building a new site from scratch or thinking about conducting a site migration, it’s important to make sure that your main content is easily accessible for both Google and your audience.

Backlink Auditing

A natural link profile usually has a healthy mix of exact match, partial match, branded and generic anchor text. However, our client had a cluttered backlink profile with many domains that were not only irrelevant but very low in quality. 

To combat this problem, incremental updates to the disavow files were made monthly on all variations of the client’s domain in Google Search Console. This helped us to exclude the toxic links Google associated with the client’s site.

The key identifiers that you should look at when auditing your backlinks profile are:

• The topical relevance of the referring domain – does it make sense for that website to link to yours?
• The anchor text used – are there any links with completely irrelevant or spammy anchors used to link to you?
• The number of backlinks from the same website – a website will generally only link to you once or twice, so if you spot domains that are linking to you hundreds or thousands of times, it’s likely due to link spam.
• The keyword visibility and organic traffic of the referring domain – a link from a website that’s ranking for lots of keywords is more valuable and powerful than one that only ranks for a few keywords.

You can find a full guide on how to identify the quality of backlinks here.

Product & Category Page Optimisation

Bringing visitors onto your product and category pages is meaningless if they don’t turn into paying customers. Therefore, you need to make sure that you’re adding valuable and relevant descriptions about your product offerings on these pages to convince users that they should place an order from your website instead of your competitors.

The client’s product and category pages were lacking well optimised content that addressed the user’s search intent. Following competitor research, we rewrote the descriptions that accompanied the categories and products to ensure that they were engaging, but also provided the user with key information to convince them to make a purchase.

Here are some tips on how to write product and category descriptions that convert:

• Write with your target audience in mind – identifying your ideal customer will make it much easier to write descriptions that are useful as you’ll be able to identify potential pain points and questions that users may have about your products. 
• Don’t write descriptions for search engines – Google’s recent Product Reviews update focuses on making sure that websites are providing “insightful” content about products. Whilst reviews aren’t the same as product descriptions, this information from Google sheds light on how the goal should always be to write content that users will find useful.
• Use high quality images (and videos) – Customers shopping online cannot physically touch the products they buy, so it’s important that you make the buying decision as easy as possible by providing as many high quality images and videos of your products in action as possible.

• Highlight key features & benefits – Make it as clear as possible what the key features of your products are and how they’ll benefit the user. For example, when writing about clothes, you should explain the fitting, the materials used, the colours that are available etc. You may also want to provide guides on how to style the item with other products that you offer.

• Don’t be afraid to showcase your personality – Your product and category descriptions are an opportunity to show users your brand’s personality. It’s your chance to tell a story about your brand and products in a way that will engage and entice users.

Check out our guide on how to write product descriptions that sell here.

In addition, the number of keywords that the client was ranking for within the top 10 pages of Google increased by 151% from 2,810 to 7,063 keywords.