B2Bs can benefit a great deal from efficient, effective and future-proof SEO. This case study discusses how our integrated SEO campaigns helped a struggling e-commerce business turn things around in a matter of weeks.

 

Overview Of The Client

A major advantage of running an end-to-end digital marketing agency is that we get to work with businesses of all sorts – from highly localised, brick-and-mortar service provider SMEs to e-commerce businesses that target nationwide customers.

The client in this particular case falls in the latter category.

When they approached us, they had a fairly successful, tried-and-tested business model. They also had a great set of loyal customers – a huge asset when it comes to boosting the revenue via social media advertising. Despite this, the company had seen a year-long drop in organic traffic and every good thing that comes with organic traffic – new leads, new customers and sales.

We took over the website when the client was facing many other challenges in terms of offline advertising, promotions and strong competition.

Looking back at the campaign, we’re extremely happy to report that we helped the client not only gain the lost ground, but also return to their #1 position in the niche.

 

Overview Of The Project

 

Where We Started

We’ve talked about the campaign background in the introduction.

It’s important to note here that this campaign had to be handled in a way that works with e-commerce businesses. Driving organic traffic was just one aspect of the eventual goal – more importantly, we had to ensure that we helped the client clock consistent sales every week. This isn’t an easy task, because making people buy things online hinges significantly on how smooth the UX is, among other factors.

Here’s where we started:

 

 

From September 2017 to May 2018, the organic traffic had dropped massively – by over 50%. This also meant that the client was constantly ceding important keywords to competitors. We took over the website in the first week of May, 2018.

 

August 2018 Update (3 Months On)

Given the systemic damage to organic traffic, we had to consider repurposing the basic skeleton of the website – from the conversion rate optimisation to technical SEO. This meant that the first month or so was spent towards ‘fixing’ the website, and bringing it up to the standard SEO code.

As expected, this period didn’t yield any significant traffic output. This can be seen in the image below.

 

 

During the first three months, despite no direct SEO contributions, we were able to reverse the downward trend successfully. The organic traffic, through these systemic fixes, went up by about 15% in the first 3 months.

 

November 2018 Update (6 Months On)

Given the online-only revenue model of the client, we had to be quick on our feet. We didn’t have the luxury of investing in elaborate content marketing efforts. So, we decided to amp up our link building campaigns, while keeping the content marketing goals limited to a manageable level.

 

This meant two things – all the pages started showing considerable organic traffic numbers as we closed in on the six-month mark.

 

By the time we completed six months with the client, the organic traffic had already reached a level at which the client could afford to re-start offline marketing and promotions. This was a huge milestone for us.

 

 

As can be seen, at the 6-month mark, the organic traffic had improved drastically, by over 43%. Improving the monthly visits from 23,000+ to 33,000+ within 6 months is a remarkable achievement, by all SEO standards.

 

February 2019 Update (9 Months On)

As per the initial discussion with the client, we had decided that we will hit the 40% organic traffic improvement milestone within 9 months. The fact that we already touched that number within 6 months gave us a great room to improve on our content marketing efforts during the next three months. We made positive revisions to our initial goals, raising the bar to 50% for the 9-month mark.

 

 

By the first week of February, 2019, the monthly organic traffic had improved tremendously. Standing at over 37,000, from 23,000+,our starting point. An overall 61% boost in the organic traffic meant that our full-scale SEO efforts were starting to pay off.

 

Overview Of The Link Building Campaign

Link building, as we noted earlier, was a huge part of this project.

Our measured link building approach combined heavy digital PR (along with social media promotions) and aggressive link building to product pages, category pages and lead-gen landing pages (including the home page) worked incredibly well.

Here are some numbers that speak volumes about this progress.

 

Referring Domains

When we got started with this project (May, 2018), the number of referring domains was pretty much stagnant at around 230.

This, clearly, wasn’t enough, for the kind of business the client was trying to set up.

Over the next 12 months, we undertook highly-targeted and specific link building campaigns that enabled us to reach out to popular blogs, niche reviewers, national and international media and relevant publications for backlinks.

 

 

As a result, by the time we were about to complete 12 full months of link building, we had managed to lift the number of referring domains to 373 – a 63% improvement.

Many of these domains were high authority domains, and backlinks from their pages had an indirect, positive impact on the concurrent organic traffic numbers.

 

Number Of Backlinks

For the month of May 2018, the total number of live backlinks to the client’s website stood at around 15,000. Our link building campaign was based around the idea that for the kind of traffic we were aiming for, this number had to go up drastically, or we had little chance of beating the competition.

 

 

By May 2019 (one full year into the campaign), we had improved the number of backlinks to the client’s website by 400% (from around 15,000 in May 2018 to 60,000+ in May 2019).

 

These links were divided across a variety of domain authority levels, anchor texts and relevancy factors, giving the client’s website a fully organic, 100% natural and perfectly diversified link profile.

 

Tracking The Revenue Changes

While drawing up the campaign, the client wanted to track the changes in revenue generated over the course of the campaign. This isn’t the best way of calculating the ROIs of digital marketing/SEO campaigns, but it does give a good enough idea of the overall performance.

While we don’t have the privilege of disclosing the end-to-end revenue stats, here’s a peek into the three-month window (August 2018 to October 2018).

 

 

By adding approximately £14,000 per month through sales within the first six months of the campaign, we ensured that the campaign was on track to hit the 10x ROI target at the 12-month mark.

 

Keywords

Since this was a hyper-niche business, the number of keywords the website would rank for was always going to be limited.

Therefore, we decided to focus on LSI and long-tail keywords that we drew from a comprehensive competitor SEO.

Here’s how we helped the client recover lost SERP ranks across the first 12-months of the campaign.

 

 

Back in May 2018, when we took over, the website ranked for close to 900 keywords on the first page of search results (#1 to #10 positions). Upon completing year-long SEO, link building and content marketing campaigns, we managed to rank the website for over 1,300 keywords (#1 to #10 positions). Of these, nearly 33% were #1 rankings for ‘money keywords’.

 

As Things Stand Today – May 2019

Over the last one year, we have delivered an exceptional and cost-effective performance for the client, as reflected in the below traffic analysis.

 

 

A close to 100% increase in monthly organic traffic (from 23,000 in May 2018 to 40,000+ in May 2019) has allowed the client to fully leverage their e-commerce website as a sales machine.

 

To know more about how our end-to-end digital marketing services can help your business grow organically, write to us here, or click the button below to receive a free proposal.