E-Commerce SEO Case Study

Want to boost site traffic and sales for your ecommerce business? SEO is the way to go.

A Canadian woodworking and lumber business recently partnered with Hexapoint to improve its online presence and increase sales. It sells lumber and woodworking tools Canada-wide; the owners realized that they could boost online sales by improving its search engine rankings.

Why SEO Is Essential for E-Commerce Businesses

Our friends at Backlinko gathered together some incredible statistics on e-commerce SEO:

• 44% of people start their online shopping journey on Google
• 37.5% of all traffic to ecommerce sites comes from search engines
• 23.6% of ecommerce purchases are directly linked to organic traffic

Without ranking well on Google, ecommerce stores are leaving money on the table—money their competitors will be more than eager to scoop up. Someone needs to rank 1 for commercial keywords—it should be your business. The woodworking business we partnered with has certainly seen a massive difference.

Our Results: A Massive Increase in Traffic for Keywords With Commercial Intent

Over the course of a little less than two years with Hexapoint (20 months total), our ecommerce client saw:

• A massive 277.60% increase in sessions (visits to its website)
• A 149.48% increase in impressions (the number of times its website appeared in search results)
• A 49.98% increase in clicks (the number of times its URL was clicked from the search results page)

This increase was largely due to our strategy of targeting high-volume commercial keywords—keywords that tend to lead to higher conversion rates. We targeted keywords with search volumes in the thousands—here are some of our results:

Exotic Wood

Started at position 53 and reached rank #1. From there, we maintained rank #2 for multiple months. Again, this term has high commercial intent, with 5400 searches/month.

These results aren’t flukes—we dramatically increased this Canadian ecommerce company’s online profile, reaching rank #1 for a number of high-value, high-volume keywords:

Step 2: Technical Optimizations

Once we determined which improvements we could implement, we dove right in. We used several different strategies to:

• Dramatically improve site speed
• Optimize all images
• Ensure that all pages were properly indexed
• Fixed broken links, missing pages, and other crawl errors

With our technical work completed, we could begin to focus on improving existing content.

Step 3: Improving Product Pages and Existing Content

Ecommerce pages gain most of their traction through optimized product pages—these are the pages on which users can add products to their carts. Product pages contain both the bulk of an ecommerce site’s content and act as money pages—as such, they need to be optimized in ways that are quite different from local SEO.

Here are some of the steps we took to optimize the existing product pages:

• Added optimized meta descriptions to each product page
• Optimized headings for each page
• Added org and product schema
• Added rel=canonical tags where appropriate

The goal here was to ensure that it was easy to differentiate between product pages—both on the site and within Google’s search engine results pages.

Step 4: Adding Content to Product Pages and Building New Content

Using content gap tools, NLP tools, keyword research, and many other tools, we identified weak points in the site’s existing content. We shored up the content by:

• Adding FAQs to its product pages
• Adding thorough product descriptions and blurbs to its product pages
• Building evergreen blogs on general lumber and woodworking topics to attract clicks year-round

By focusing on developing content for each product page and focusing in particular on products with high monthly search volumes, we ensured that our technically optimized pages could now rank for the keywords we were targeting.

Step 5: Improving Off-page SEO

With high-quality, evergreen content in place, our outreach team developed a strategy to build a number of links from sites with excellent domain authority. We did this by:

• Finding high-quality linking opportunities with high-authority sites in the industry
• Building content on the site and encourage backlinks from it
• Crafting and sending high-quality outreach emails and follow-ups to prompt these sites to work with us

This strategy allowed us to earn several high-quality backlinks, helping us improve the site’s ranking.

Step 6: Adding Reviews and Schema

We continued our optimization by adding reviews to every product page, including schema, to ensure that those reviews could appear in Google Rich Results. Many of these product pages now have dozens of positive reviews; this has led to much higher conversion rates.