E-Commerce SEO (100 to 2300 Monthly Visitors)

eCommerce has become famous for its low barrier to entry, especially due to dropshipping.

While this is great news for entrepreneurs eager to quit their day jobs and sell products and services online, it’s a double-edged sword for serious online businesses. 

Why is that?

It’s because the eCommerce market is extremely oversaturated, with online stores covering every niche and industry imaginable. 

Think of any product under the sun, and there’s bound to be umpteen dropshipping stores selling it. 

eCommerce SEO is the solution to this conundrum, as improving visibility on search engines is the best way to differentiate your online store from the competition (and to outrank them). 

Doing SEO for eCommerce stores is one of our specialties, and it differs from conventional B2C SEO in many different ways, which you’ll soon see. 

In this eCommerce SEO case study, we’ll tell the story of how we achieved a 100% increase in organic traffic for an online store selling shoes and apparel. Their sales are now soaring along with their traffic, which is a huge win. 

Along the way, you’ll learn more about why eCommerce SEO is so important, the results we achieved for the client, and how we can replicate their success for your online store, so stay tuned! 

The Client: A Fashionable Online Shoe and Apparel Marketplace

Our client has a unique business model where independent vendors ship them merchandise to sell through their website. 

Anyone is free to ship items they want to sell, but our client has a very strict vetting process to ensure they only sell top-tier apparel and rare sneakers. 

It was a truly one-of-a-kind store that deserved way more online exposure than they were getting prior to contacting us. 

eCommerce is a fiercely competitive space, and it can be exceptionally difficult for online stores to build loyal followings (and rank high on search engines). 

While our client was generating some traffic through their internal content efforts (which were well implemented and thought-out), they knew they could do way better with a proper SEO strategy put together by experts. 

It’s no secret that SEO is a complicated practice that takes years to master, and it’s constantly evolving, which makes things even more difficult for newbies. 

SEO is also extremely time-consuming, and most online stores don’t have any time to spare since they’re busy maintaining their inventory and keeping their customers happy. 

Our client knew they needed help from true SEO experts, so they began doing some research online. 

Soon after, they came across our numerous five-star reviews and scheduled a consultation with one of our team members. 

Launching a HOTH X campaign 

During our consultation calls, we determine which of our SEO products the client needs to meet their primary goals. 

For example, if a client can’t figure out why their website isn’t appearing in Google’s index, one of our Technical SEO Audits is exactly what they need. Once our experts comb through their website, we’ll identify all technical issues impacting the site’s SEO performance (and provide a detailed report). 

Yet, if a client has more complex, long-term goals, we tend to recommend HOTH X, our managed SEO service. 

Each HOTH X client receives a dedicated campaign manager who puts together an in-depth SEO strategy containing one or more HOTH products. 

In the case of our eCommerce client, their goals were to:

1. Build topical authority on Google for classic sneakers and apparel 
2. Rank for valuable product keywords 
3. Increase their organic traffic as much as possible 
4. Build valuable backlinks pointing at their product and collection pages 

We knew that to achieve these goals, we’d need to employ an airtight SEO strategy carried out by a campaign manager, so HOTH X was the best choice. 

The client was on HOTH X for 7 short months, and we were able to meet every one of the goals listed above during that time. 

The kicker?

We only had to use one of our HOTH products, which was Link Outreach. 

Understanding the power of link outreach 

Why did we only use one HOTH product for the entire campaign?

If you remember, we said that the client already had an internal content strategy that was working quite well. 

Rather than step on their toes and ruin a good thing by using our in-house content creation team, we decided to supplement their existing content efforts with top-tier link-building instead. 

Additionally, eCommerce SEO tends to be about strengthening your brand more than targeting individual keywords through blog content. 

When it comes to building brand awareness and exposing your products to new audiences, nothing beats the authority that comes from valuable backlinks. 

In our first-hand experience, backlinks are often what move the SEO needle more than other ranking factors, which is why they’re so important. 

Consider that the top-ranking organic result on Google will have an average of 3.8x more backlinks than positions 2 – 10. 

Also, 95% of pages online have 0 backlinks pointing to them. This means that if you’re able to build backlinks to your content, you’ve already beat out the vast majority of the competition! 

Since backlinks serve as ‘credibility votes’ on Google, it’s massively important to build backlinks coming from relevant, high-quality websites, and that’s what our outreach service provided for our client.

The SEO Audit: Kicking Things Off Right 

The client began their journey on HOTH X in late November 2023 and concluded it in May 2024. 

As a standard practice, we always begin every campaign with a thorough SEO audit. 

What’s that?

An SEO audit is where we do an in-depth analysis of the client’s website to learn more about its current performance on search engines (and the strength of its user experience). 

This is an unskippable step because it establishes a strong foundation for the rest of the campaign. 

During the audit, we look at things like:

• On-page SEO factors like content quality, formatting, and metadata 
• Ensuring target keywords are in the right spots (title tag, meta description, image alt tags, H1 tag, first 100 words of the content, etc.)
• Technical SEO factors like page loading speed, indexing errors, and duplicate content 
• Internal linking structure, site architecture, and URL structure 

These are only a few of the SEO ranking factors we analyze during an audit, as the process is incredibly thorough. 

The reason why we leave no stone unturned during the audit is that leaving any of these issues unaddressed can negatively impact (or completely negate) our SEO efforts moving forward. 

That’s why it’s so crucial for us to go in and fix any major problems like poor loading speed or indexing errors. 

Finding easy-win keyword opportunities 

The audit phase also includes looking for easy-win keywords. 

We consider a keyword an ‘easy win’ whenever a website already ranks for it without doing any optimizations. 

There are some other qualifiers, including:

• Whether the keyword is relevant to the client’s target audience or not (irrelevant keywords aren’t worth it).
• How high the keyword currently ranks (we tend to target keywords ranking in positions 4 – 30 for easy wins). 

If a keyword meets our criteria, we’ll optimize the page ranking for it. 

In this client’s case, they were already ranking for thousands of relevant keywords due to their content efforts (and past SEO campaigns). 

That meant we had our work cut out for us when selecting easy-win opportunities, as we focused on the cream of the crop (i.e., keywords ranking near the top 10 and top 3). 

These keywords just need a little push to start ranking higher, and they can provide quick results via boosted rankings and traffic generation. 

Here’s a glimpse at some of the optimizations we made for the easy-win keywords we found for our client:

• Adding the keyword to the page’s title tag, meta description, H1 header, image alt tags, etc. 
• Ensuring the content is up to date and properly formatted (i.e., short paragraphs, subheadings, a CTA, etc.). 
• Building quick backlinks for a ranking boost (and adding internal links to authoritative pages to pass the link juice). 

Why easy-win keywords rock  

SEO isn’t something that starts working overnight. 

Trust us; we would love for our optimizations to take effect as soon as we make them, but that’s not how Google works. 

Instead, optimizations won’t impact your search rankings until Google recrawls and reindexes your content, which is a slow process. 

While Google reindexes super popular websites like Wikipedia almost every day, it takes a lot longer for their bots to reach more obscure, niche sites. 

Anyway, the reason why easy-win keywords are amazing is because the optimizations take effect pretty quickly. 

Why is that?

It’s because the content containing an easy-win keyword is already in Google’s index, meaning you won’t have to wait too long for Google to recrawl it. It takes a lot longer for brand-new pages to appear in Google’s index, so pages that are already ranking for keywords are extremely useful. 

Campaign Strategy: Building Topical Authority with Backlinks 

Once the audit was done and we reaped the rewards from easy-win keyword optimizations, it was time to move on to the main portion of our SEO strategy. 

Our primary goal was to build topical authority with Google for topics related to the client’s business. 

What’s topical authority?

It refers to a brand’s experience, expertise, and credibility on a specific topic. If Google views your brand as having topical authority on a subject, you’ll receive higher rankings for all related terms.

This is Google’s way of always connecting users with high-quality, accurate information online. 

Besides providing a pleasant user experience, having topical authority is an extremely powerful (and profitable) position to hold in your niche. 

We wanted to capitalize on this for our client. 

In particular, we wanted them to achieve topical authority for premium sneakers and apparel. 

The client had part of this covered since they were consistently publishing valuable content related to both topics. They were total subject matter experts on everything fashion, so the content they were producing was top-notch. 

Understanding E-E-A-T 

Google judges a website’s topical authority by using its E-E-A-T algorithm (which its human team of quality raters use). 

It stands for:

• Experience. Google wants to see first-hand experience from content creators to ensure they know what they’re talking about and aren’t reiterating things they heard elsewhere. 
• Expertise. You need to find ways to demonstrate your expertise in your content, such as sharing knowledge not commonly known about a subject. 
• Authoritativeness. Backlinks coming from respected websites demonstrate your content’s authority to Google. 
• Trustworthiness. You build trust by exhibiting experience, expertise, and authority. 

In this case, the client had the first two letters of the acronym knocked out. 

It was up to us to build authority and trust for their content in order to take their SEO to the next level. 

This meant supplementing their content efforts by building authority through backlinks. 

Link outreach was our weapon of choice this time around, and we focused on securing backlinks from prominent websites in the fashion industry. 

Bridging the link gap between competing sites  

Each month of the client’s campaign involved lots of orders for outreach, typically for guest posts. 

The client got to choose the authority level for the referring domain of each backlink, which varied each month. 

We measure a domain’s authority by checking its Domain Rating on Ahrefs. 

This is a score from 1 – 100 that represents the strength of a domain’s ranking power. Higher scores mean the backlink will have more of an impact on your search rankings. 

Yet, it’s crucial to balance quality with quantity when conducting a link-building campaign. 

There are times when link gaps exist, and they can make outranking competitors next to impossible without bridging them. 

A link gap occurs whenever a competitor has more backlinks than you do, making it extremely difficult to compete. 

We noticed a few competitors outranking our client who had more backlinks, and we knew we had to close the gap if we wanted our client’s website to reign at the top of the SERPs (search engine results pages). 

How did we know how many backlinks we needed to build?

It was easy once we plugged our client’s primary competitors into a backlink checker tool. This lets us know their total number of backlinks, which we then compared to our client’s website. 

Guest posts and relationship-building 

The primary tactic we used with our outreach was targeting guest posts on sites relevant to our client’s niche. 

Our go-to was to write informative 500-word guest posts on fashion blogs, news outlets, online publications, and social media platforms. 

Each post includes a link back to one of the client’s web pages, which not only provides a valuable backlink – but also exposes the client’s website to new audiences. 

As a result, guest posts are an effective way to A) build authoritative backlinks, and B) generate referral traffic from new audience members. 

Relationship building is another tactic we always employ when targeting backlinks.

This is because it’s always worth pursuing a relationship with a related website instead of treating outreach as a one-and-done deal. 

After all, why only target one backlink when you can form a relationship that leads to multiple backlinks down the line?

We form valuable relationships through link outreach by:

1. Personalizing each email. 
2. Engaging with outreach targets before bringing up backlinks (like by commenting on their posts). 
3. Bringing up common interests and goals. 
4. Mentioning why we’re fans of the website’s content (and mentioning specifics so they know we’re not making things up).  

The Results: 91,000 New Keyword Rankings, 100% Increase in Organic Traffic, Topical Authority Achieved on Google 

Overall, the campaign was a smashing success and led to a ton of organic traffic and sales for our client. 

Once the campaign started gaining momentum, they saw a 33.1k increase in their traffic in just 6 months. 

Here’s a look at the website’s organic traffic and keywords at the very start of the campaign:

And here’s what they looked like after:

As you can see, their organic traffic is currently skyrocketing, with an average of 81k visitors per month! 

Their product and collection pages are also ranking for thousands of keywords in the top 3, which have been raking in paying customers like crazy. 

Here’s a glimpse at some of the main keyword wins:

That’s a whole lot of 1s and 2s! 

This campaign is a testament to:

• The power of link-building + valuable content 
• How topical authority boosts rankings like nobody’s business 

To make things even better, the client’s traffic is still climbing as we speak. SEO has a compounding effect because once your content starts generating traffic, it tends not to let up for quite some time. 

Use eCommerce SEO to Build Topical Authority for Your Store 

While eCommerce is one of the most competitive industries in existence, SEO makes it bearable (and survivable) for new online stores. 

Do you need help drumming up business and brand awareness for your online store?

Then don’t wait to see the light as our client did and sign up for a HOTH X campaign. Our team will forge a successful SEO strategy for you similar to the one documented in this case study, so don’t wait to let us simplify your SEO success.