HOTH X Case Study: E-Commerce Client Boosts Keywords 764%
E-commerce retail orders experienced a 129% year-over-year growth last April in the United States and Canada. It’s safe to say that we’re entering a new era of e-commerce.
More customers are enjoying the ease and convenience of shopping online. This trend coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic has fueled tremendous growth in e-commerce operations.
If you’re running an online store or if you have plans to open one, you need to think seriously about your SEO. A good strategy could rank you on the first page of Google and bring thousands of new visitors to your site each day.
Keep reading below to learn how we helped an e-commerce store increase its ranking keywords by 764% and bring in around 10,000 monthly website visitors.
Background
A specialized e-commerce company reached out to us at the end of 2019 for assistance with their SEO. Their online store offers super-absorbent hair towels. The same material is also available for sale as headbands, pillowcases, and shower caps.
This client launched its website in 2015 and had achieved some moderate traffic gains before reaching out to The HOTH. The problem was they couldn’t surpass 3,000 monthly visitors.
More web traffic means more eyes on inventory. We knew this company wanted to increase its online sales. But, first we had to boost their SEO so more people were visiting their e-commerce store.
Our team started off by conducting a comprehensive SEO audit of their site. We do this for every client.
The SEO Audit
Before we could increase the number of visitors, we had to understand what was going on with their traffic, keywords, and backlinks.
The audit confirmed that the company’s traffic was flat. They would experience the occasional increase but it will drop shortly afterward. This seesaw trend had been happening for at least a year before they started working with us.
Web traffic hovered at about 2,000 visitors per month when they signed up with The HOTH in November 2019. Furthermore, they were only ranking for 1,650 keywords and their site had 170 referring domains (the number of external websites linking to them)
Want an easy way to audit your site? Try our FREE SEO Audit Tool to check if you’re optimized.
Our SEO team knew that in order to help this client we’d have to improve their search ranking by optimizing their keywords and gaining more backlinks. The first step was to determine our “easy win” keywords.
Finding “Easy Wins” Through Keyword Research
What are “easy win” keywords?
The HOTH defines these as keywords that a client is already ranking for in positions 4-30. With a few adjustments, these keywords can be incorporated onto the client’s website and boost their ranking. It’s a quick and easy way to help them right out of the gate.
We found that this client was ranking for nearly 6,000 “easy win” keywords in the United States alone. They also sold products to many customers in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
Once we identified all of these keywords, our next step was to find “easy win” keywords with a high search volume. For example, the keyword “hair bands” was in position seven yet had 14,000 searches per month.
Another example was “satin vs silk.” It was in position three and had a search volume of 4,400.
How do we get these keywords to start working for a client? After figuring out what they are, our writing team can incorporate these keywords into your web copy, blogs, or other ranked content.
Competitive Gap Analysis
It’s around this point in the process when we start crafting our SEO strategy.
As part of our marketing research, we’ll also run a competitive gap analysis. The purpose of this is to find out what the client’s main competitors are doing and what we can incorporate into our strategy.
The competitive gap analysis involves keywords. Not everything a competitor is doing would be relevant to our client, but we want to make sure that we aren’t missing any opportunities.
We learned that our client had 43 online competitors. Some of these competitors were very similar to them, while the rest may have offered a few comparable products in their inventory.
For this analysis, we looked at their No. 1 competitor. While they both shared approximately 800 keywords, the competitor ranked for an additional 3,638 unique keywords.
These are keywords that our client wasn’t ranking for. As a result, our SEO team sifted through this list and found keywords that could work for them.
The SEO Campaign
In the very beginning, this e-commerce client started using us for content syndication. A month later we convinced them to sign up for HOTH X, our fully-managed SEO service.
Clients who use HOTH X not only have access to all HOTH products for one price, but they also get to put their marketing on autopilot.
Our expert team takes care of everything so business owners can focus on developing their operations. Clients can be as hands-on or hands-off as they wish, and they receive regular analytics reports.
Without HOTH X, each SEO product is ordered a la carte, and clients won’t have immediate access to all of the tools they may need.
We conferred with the client and decided that it was best to focus on content and gaining more backlinks.
Here are the HOTH products we used for their campaign:
Our Link Outreach service allows a customer to insert a backlink into a blog published on a high-authority domain affiliated with The HOTH. The Boost product also helps to get more backlinks on high-authority websites. Links like these are tremendously important for ranking.
We helped beef up the client’s content with a number of SEO-optimized blogs through our Blogger product.
And, finally, our Syndication product is a great way to distribute valuable content to over 300+ high-authority news sites. Clients who take advantage of this product often receive media coverage that can be used as social proof on their websites.
The HOTH machine started churning throughout 2020 and we were excited to see the tremendous growth this e-commerce company experienced as a result of our strategy.
Results
First, let’s take a look at the client’s traffic. We explained above how they never seemed to gain traction. After working with The HOTH for a year their traffic jumped to around 10,000 visitors per month.
Our team was able to increase their traffic so dramatically by optimizing their keywords and producing more quality content.
As you can see below, we increased their number of organic keywords from 1,650 to 14,254 today. That’s a 764% increase in keywords!
Many of these new ranking keywords were some of the “easy wins” we incorporated into their strategy. Others were a result of our comprehensive SEO strategy. You can also see that their position 1-3 rankings more than doubled.
The last part of our strategy was getting more backlinks. That’s why we used HOTH Link Outreach and HOTH Boost throughout the campaign.
We stated earlier that the client had 170 referring domains when they started working with us. Over the next year the number of websites linking to our client ballooned and today they have approximately 400 referring domains.
Backlinks are arguably the most effective way to boost your SEO ranking.
We knew this campaign was effective once we saw the number of high-authority sites linking to our client.
Takeaway
Every client is different just like every SEO campaign. In this case, we coordinated with the client and determined that focusing on content and link building would be the best way to proceed.
Luckily, the client signed up for HOTH X, which gave their campaign manager access to all of our products at one time. If the client suddenly needed web copy or a press release, for instance, we’d be able to quickly access those services to keep their campaign on track.
It often takes more than one tool to get a company’s SEO up and running.
Do you have any specific questions about HOTH X or how we helped this e-commerce client? Book a call with us! We would love to chat about your business and goals.
