Case Study: An SEO Strategy That Tripled Revenue in 9 Months

Topical authority has been all the rage and has been the go-to strategy for SEOs over the past few years. The idea here is to write everything about your industry as you can, and Google should see you as the go-to source and rank you.

But, is there a more effective method that can help achieve this authority status, but also going to make you the most revenue?

What if there’s a way that instead of writing two hundred pages covering every single topic within your niche that you can think of, you just need to focus your effort on the hundred most impactful pieces of content that your target audience will find most helpful?

By doing just this, my team at The Search Initiative grew our client’s organic traffic by 115% from 12.8k to 27.6k engaged sessions since the start of the campaign.

We also increased monthly revenue by 198% from $10.2k/month to $30.6k/month.

In this case study, you’ll learn how to:

If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, I cover some of the key insights in this video.

First though, here’s some background about the site we worked on and the main challenges that we overcame during the campaign.

The Challenge

The client specializes in providing commercial plant supplies to businesses across the United States.

Recent Google updates have made it more and more difficult for doing content site SEO (i.e. affiliate marketing and display ads) right now. Because of this, there’s been a surge in eCommerce SEO which I hope to give you a crash course on through this case study.

But before that, check this video to learn the true situation of what’s going on with Google SEO.

The goal in this case, was to improve and diversify the client’s visibility in the SERPs by capturing users at each stage of the buying funnel (i.e. micro-moments) – this included optimizing for informational keywords on the blog to product-specific keywords for category and product pages.

Although the client already had a range of categories and subcategories within the online store, navigating the products was difficult for users due to a lack of filtering options.

To solve this, we implemented faceted navigation, which helped users discover what they’re looking for in less time and allowed the client to rank for relevant long-tail keyword variations for their product range. (You’ll learn exactly how to do this soon).

Let’s face it, out of these two results, one of which has implemented structured data and the other hasn’t, which are you more likely to click on? The one that has lots of useful information such as reviews, price and availability, right?

Find out how you can overcome these challenges for your website by following the steps below.

Optimizing for Micro-Moments

With this surge in eCommerce, it’s important that you capture the crucial moments where you can put yourself in front of your target audience in the SERPs.

These “micro-moments” are when potential buyers are looking for more information (e.g. “best running shoes”) or make a purchase (e.g. “Nike Air Max).

The question is, can your SEO strategy capture their attention and guide them towards your products? The right SEO approach is your key to converting these micro-moments into sales.

What are Micro-Moments?

Micro-moments are the key moments in a buyer’s journey when they turn to their devices (and Google) to answer a question or perform some sort of action.

For eCommerce websites (but also any other site), these moments are crucial as you’ll want to capture the users at these moments due to their high intent for finding solutions to their queries.

During these brief windows of opportunity, is where you can grab your potential customers’ attention away from your competitors.

The four main types of micro-moments are as follows:

1. I-want-to-know moments – a person has a question or needs information to make a decision. They’ll typically turn to search engines to find answers e.g. “best bike for beginners”.
2. I-want-to-go moments – triggered by a desire to find a local business. People will often use their smartphones to search for stores, restaurants, or services nearby e.g. “bike shops near me”
3. I-want-to-do moments – a person seeks instructions or guidance on how to complete a task e.g. “how to change a bicycle tire”.
4. I-want-to-buy moments – a person is ready to make a purchase and has completed the journey e.g. “bmx bike 20 inch”

Why are Micro-Moments Important for eCommerce SEO?

Micro-moments are crucial for eCommerce SEO for a few key reasons:

In essence, micro-moments help you bridge the gap between user intent and your product offerings. By optimizing your SEO for these crucial moments, you can significantly boost your website’s and business’ success.

How to Capture Micro-Moments for eCommerce

Read on to find out what you need to know and do in order to maximize your eCommerce SEO efforts by capturing micro-moments.

Understand Your Customers

You need to be able to identify and understand your customers’ journey by identifying key pain points and critical decision-making moments that they will face. Doing so, will allow you to formulate content strategies that position you as the go-to choice for your target audience.

There are several ways that you can find out their potential pain points:

Scroll down and navigate to the Questions section, click View all.

This shows you all keywords that are phrased as questions that are relevant to your seed query. You can see there are a number of keywords that can be grouped together via the Parent Terms filter.

Expand the items to reveal even more questions.

These will highlight any potential issues that customers face with your products that you can then craft content around and address on your website.

In addition, UGC builds trust and authenticity, influencing and driving purchase decisions during micro-moments for prospective customers.

Add content that addresses these key questions and pain points within your product/category pages, or as blog posts/FAQ pages.

Create Content That Addresses Each Micro-moment

The one and only way to ensure that you capture your target audience at each micro-moment, is by understanding their intention.

Let’s go through the intent and content types that suit each of the four micro-moments for eCommerce SEO.

Personalize the Shopping Experience

Utilize user actions and behavior to personalize their experience on your website. Doing so is a great way to capture their attention and lead them towards placing an order.

Here are some examples of how you can do this:

For example, Zara displays product items that users may find interesting after viewing a product.

The example below shows products that “complete the look”.

This enhances their shopping experience as it saves time browsing products and allows them to quickly add these related items to the cart.

An over complicated checkout process can discourage users from completing the final step in their order process and prevent them from returning to your site ever again.

Including the following can help alleviate this:

For example, Nike makes the checkout process less overwhelming by expanding and collapsing sections of the checkout process.

Optimize Your Website for Mobile

In the age of smartphones, where most browsing and purchasing happens on mobile devices, a mobile-first approach is no longer a suggestion – it’s a necessity for eCommerce success.

This is backed by data from Statista, which shows that 54.67% of all global searches are now made on mobile devices.

Implement Responsive Web Design

Your website should adapt seamlessly to any screen size, from smartphones to tablets and desktops.

A responsive design ensures everything – text, images, buttons – adjusts automatically to fit the user’s device, offering an optimal user experience.

Prioritize Speed and Performance

Mobile users are impatient.

Their need to access information quickly and effortlessly directly influences their decisions during micro-moments.

A slow-loading website is a conversion killer.

Here are some ways to optimize speed:

Also implement lazy-loading, which is where only certain parts of a webpage, especially images, are loaded until they are needed, instead of loading everything at once.

Here’s a simple example:

Original Code

function calculateArea(width, height) {
// Calculate and return the area
const area = width * height;
return area;
}

// Example usage
const rectangleWidth = 10;
const rectangleHeight = 5;
const totalArea = calculateArea(rectangleWidth, rectangleHeight);
console.log("The area of the rectangle is:", totalArea);

Minified Code

function calculateArea(w,h){return w*h}
// Example usage (same as above)

A great tool worth investing in that compresses and lazy loads images, takes care of minification and offers additional page performance optimization is NitroPack.

Simplify Navigation

Complex menus and dropdowns are a nightmare on mobile screens.

Opt for a clean, intuitive navigation bar with easily identifiable icons and categories.

Consider using hamburger menus (three horizontal lines) for secondary navigation options.

Prepare for Seasonality

Targeting seasonal keywords (i.e. queries that experience a boost in popularity and search demand during specific times of the year) is another way to capture users who are ready to take some sort of action.

For example, if you run an eCommerce website that sells flowers, you’ll want to make sure that you have content that targets individuals looking to purchase Valentine’s Day flowers for their loved ones well before the day arrives.

If you’re looking for some inspiration to find seasonal keywords, just ask ChatGPT to get you started.

Here’s the prompt we used: “Can you suggest some seasonal keyword examples for [type of website / niche]”

Then, use Google Trends data to show you the seasonality of all of these keywords.

Enter your keyword and select the target location.

Set the time frame to at least the last 5 years so that you can get a good idea of the seasonality for the keyword.

In the above example, you can see that search demand shoots up every June, which indicates that you need to ensure that your page for “Father Day gifts” is created, optimized and ready well in advance of June.

Switch the time frame to Past 12 Months to pinpoint exactly when the search interest starts to rise.

In this case, it’s around the end of April / start of May – so in reality, you’d need to have your page content published and your page crawled and indexed before this.

Adopting these tactics will ensure that your website is ready to cater to users at each type of micro-moment.

Implementing Faceted Navigation for Improved UX

Finding the right product within an eCommerce website can be difficult, especially considering some sites have hundreds of categories and subcategories for thousands of products.

But it’s not just eCommerce websites that can use this, there are many other types of websites that use faceted navigation to improve the user experience: