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E-Commerce SEO Project | How I Increased Monthly Traffic From 18K To 57K - Increased by 216.66%



Business Background

This business is primarily selling medicines and medical equipment online. They had a separate in-house team for web development and maintenance but they did not have an SEO Specialist. So I took this opportunity to provide them with my expertise as their SEO professional.

This website works on Woocommerce platform. 

The website is

https://www.mymed.lk

When I started this project, they had 18K monthly search traffic generally. In my experience, I felt that this site could get more traffic from Google and Bing. So I started working according to the process given below. From that, you will understand how I managed to get good results within 6 months of my project timeframe.



Phase Number 01 - Audit & Review

Technical Audit & Review

At the start of the project, I did a manual SEO audit for the website. During that audit, I checked the following points and I used web tools like Google Search Console, SEO Powersuite, and Screaming Frog to get all the technical information I needed.

Below are the aspects I have covered from the technical audit.

  • Identify crawl errors with a crawl report
  • Check HTTPS status codes
  • Check XML sitemap status
  • Check the site load time
  • Check mobile-friendliness of the site
  • Audit for keyword cannibalization
  • Check site’s robots.txt file
  • Perform Google and Bing site search
  • Check for broken links

ON-Page Audit & Review

I used the Moz PRO tool and Powersuite software to perform the on-page audit. From this audit, I found some errors. Those errors will be explained in the optimization step.

These are the aspects I checked in the ON-Page Audit

  • Title Tags
  • Meta Descriptions
  • Header Tags (h1, h2, h3)
  • Website Copy (Content)
  • Website Structure
  • Canonicalization
  • URL Structure
  • Image Optimization
  • Structured Data (Schema Markup - Rich Snippet)
  • Sitemap
  • Mobile Optimization



Content Audit & Review

From the content audit, I checked if there are any shortcomings in the following points.

  • Landing Page Content (including homepage)
  • Category Pages Content
  • Product Page Content
  • Use of Keywords in Content
  • FAQs

Website Design Audit & Review

In the Design Audit, I focused on the call-to-action methods of the website and page loading speed.

Backlink Profile Audit & Review

With the backlink profile audit, I reviewed the following aspects

  • Referring Domains
  • Categories of Referring Domains
  • Backlinks
  • Top Anchors
  • Link Attributes
  • TLD Distribution
  • Top Pages



Phase Number 02 - Do the Optimization

Fixing Technical Errors

According to the above Technical Audit done in Phase 01, I found lots of 4XX errors on the site. So I fixed all the errors that adversely affect the search rankings.

In addition, some of the main pages on the site did not use canonical URLs. Although I fixed the issues and published them in a Google-friendly way.

From the audit report generated from Screaming Frog software, it revealed to me that some category pages on the site could not be crawled by Google. All those found crawling issues were resolved and re-audited.

There were no issues affecting search rankings in other technical aspects.



ON - Page Optimization

After the On-Page Audit, I noticed that most of the pages on the website were not properly optimized for SEO meta titles and descriptions. So I did keyword research and mapped them into each page by writing optimized meta details.

The H1 / H2 headings on many pages were not optimized properly. So I rewrote and published them as SEO-Friendly content.

In addition, certain pages did not have a correct URL pattern. As a solution, I added the keywords to the URLs and designed them according to Google’s standards.

The other thing I noticed during the On-Page audit is that most of the products & category pages do not have structured data. As a result, they will miss the opportunity to appear on Google's Search Snippet. Therefore, I wrote the Structured Data correctly for the identified pages. For this process, I used Hall Analysis JSON-LD Schema Generator tool to complete this task. You can check the hall analysis tool from here

After the image audit, I realized that most images do not use ALT tags. Here I selected only the images that I thought were essential to use the ALT tags. I have applied ALT tags to the necessary places in a proper manner. but did not spend much time working with all images on the website as there are tons of images and my project timeframe was limited to 6 weeks. But I recommend you optimize the images as much as possible if you have time to work with them.



Content Optimization

After the content audit, I understood that many product and category pages do not have sufficient text content. The way the keywords were used in that content was weak. Therefore I listed them in a worksheet so that I can easily write content for each product and category page.

In the sheet, I have added 1-3 keywords within the content and wrote around 400 words per product page. You can grab my sample worksheet from here

I made an effort to optimize the "call for actions" that existed at the time in a better way.

Website Design Optimization

By doing a design audit, I realized that the current page speed is not up to Google standards. As a solution, I minified a few chosen scripts, and also removed some of the unwanted scripts. After that, the speed got much better than it used to be. From what I understood, the scripts take a huge part in controlling the loading speed.

In addition, I found that some pages were published unnecessarily with large images. So I've replaced them with properly resized images. It also helped to slow down the loading speed of the site.

In addition, I contacted their development team to let them know that there is a problem with alignment in the category section as well. They fixed it within 3 to 4 days after I notified them of the issue.


Backlinks

After I investigated the backlink profile, I found out that the site already gained some sort of powerful links but all of those links were earned 1 or 2 years ago. They haven’t done any link-building practices recently.

Then I felt that it would be better to get some guest post backlinks. I used the Key Search Tool to find relevant blogs for guest posts. After some research time, I selected 12 websites with domain authority between 40-50. Then I emailed each one of them to get quotes for our article publishing on their websites. The average cost to publish one article was around $200 - $350 and those 12 guest post articles were written by my team.

Result

It took me about 6 weeks to complete all the above work. After 2 weeks, we saw a positive change in the rankings like most of the metadata getting updated with google. The non-crawlable pages started to appear in search. After one month, the number of daily clicks increased from 750 to 1200. That number reached up to 1200-1500 in 5 months and ultimately reached 1800 to 2300 (My client was so happy ;) ) By the 6th month, the gap between impressions and clicks got narrower which is a good sign for better rankings. At the end of the 6th month, the average daily clicks were around 1900. It means the monthly search traffic volume reached a certain level of around 57000 (1900*30 = 57,000).



Conclusion

My final conclusion is that if you're running an e-commerce website, the first step is you need to take care of the content. That means all product/categories and all other main pages need to be filled up with SEO-optimized text content.

The next big thing is page loading time. There is a research study done by google that says 90% of the search consumers are not waiting more than 3 seconds to load a web page.

If your website does not load fast, then they are going to leave right away, and also it leads to an increase in your bounce rate. A high bounce rate is not a good sign for search rankings.



What about backlinks?

When it comes to the higher rankings, Backlinks still play a huge role. So you need to be consistent with it. In my past link building works, I understood that having a good domain authority helps us take the top position in SERP. So guest posting is a good way to fulfill that need. Having links from high authority websites will directly help increase your website’s DA. Make sure to always keep it with the website that is relevant to your business industry. My advice is “Do not get links from non-relevant sources”.

Have a good day

Pubudu Dissanayaka