This case study focuses on the efforts to increase traffic to a newly launched ecommerce site for a company in California.
This skincare and clothing company launched its site in October 2021 and the SEO efforts started in February 2022.
The site was very new and no SEO work had been done before February 2022.
This proved challenging as SEO is a long-term marketing strategy thus tangible results are extremely hard to attain in short periods of time.
Moreover, ecommerce SEO is very complex as brands compete with giants like Amazon which often dominate the SERP.
Develop and implement an Off-Page SEO-based link-building strategy to increase the site's organic keyword rankings thus increasing its organic traffic.
The link-building campaign started in February 2021 and focused on link-building. The goal was to begin by building foundation links with branded and generic anchors and then move on to the more powerful types of links using exact match or long-form keywords as anchor text.
This case study was heavily focused on off-page SEO (i.e. optimizations outside of the website). In this case, the main efforts went to link building.
The backlinking strategy was as follows:
1. Build Pillow Links / Foundation Links
2. Create 3-4 guest posts/link insertions per month. Emphasizing branded link to the homepage as well as some generic anchor texts.
3. Targeting product pages with links using keyword-rich anchors.
4. Build more branded anchor text links to the homepage
The goal of foundation links, or pillow links, is to build a strong foundation for the more powerful links that will be built in the future.
Our goal is to diversify our anchor text rotation so we can be more aggressive with PBN links, Guest Posts, Press releases, and Niche Edits later on.
These links help both to diversity your link profile as well as your anchor text rotation.
Why are these links useful?
- To diversify your anchor text rotation
- Diversify your link portfolio
- Use them as a way to dilute your anchor text before you use more powerful links
- Increase the number of brand mentions you have online
You can learn more about foundation links in this video.
The anchor text chosed on the backlinks built is extremely important. Firtly becuase we want to diversify our anchor text rotation to not over optimise it (overoptimization can lead to a Google penalty), secondly because there's a time and a place to use certain achors.
We don't want to use our most valuable anchors (i.e. exact match, long tail) on foundation or "less powerful" links. We want to use them on the more powerful links like Niche Edits, Guest Posts, PBN links etc.
Think about your exact match and long term anchors as if they have a quota - you don't want to use all of that "quota" on lower-end less powerful links. You want to use it on the most powerful and expensive links you build.
It's important to note that on this case study in specific a lot of branded anchor links were built using powerful links (i.e. guest posts, niche edits).
The links built to the homepage were mainly with branded and generic anchors, while the links built to the product pages were done so with keyword rich anchors.
This means that on this specific link building strstegy the SEO expert was simultaneously building up the brand value (by building powerful branded links to the homepage) and aggressively ranking the product pages by using keyword rich anchors (i.e. exact match, long tail keywords)
The results are clear. In just 10 months the traffic went form nearly 0 to almost 300 per month.
For a new ecommerce store and in such a short period of time these are great results.
If you prefer to watch a video version of this case study you can do so below.
The video goes more in depth on what was done and why as well as covering the pros and cons of SEO vs Paid Advertisement.
These results were ahcieved by Liam, a verified Vettted SEO Expert. You can find his services on Vettted.
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