Case of promoting an online furniture store in the United States

Our SEO specialists have determined that it is strategically important to check if there are technical errors on the sites, to take care of the internal and external promotion of resources. On this basis, the following tactical tasks were set.

In the first weeks of work on the project, conducted thorough site research, namely:

•  website marketing audit;
•  website technical audit;
•  analysis of internal SEO characteristics of the site;
•  analysis of the external reference mass and the authority of the web resource;

Found a lot of problems on the technical side of the website:

•  site categories were duplicated under various URLs
•  many Page Titles and Meta Descriptions showed signs of re-optimization and were not unique, duplicated both within the site and on the Internet;
•  heading structure was not optimized either;
•  a third of product pages and most of the categories were without text descriptions.

The initial structure of the site was quite primitive for effective SEO. More than 20 new product subcategories have been added to the existing categories on the site.

To do this, had to change and optimize the structure of the site’s top and side menus, making it more convenient for both buyers and search engines.

Based on the analysis of the number of queries in the search engines for the products presented on the site, redesigned the hierarchy of product categories, as well as additionally visualized and optimized the most popular categories.

Understood that a clear and logical structure of resources would subsequently become the basis for its promotion on the Web. 

Depends on this:

• whether a potential buyer will be able to find the product he needs on your site, and not from a competitor;
• how the resource will be indexed by search engines.

A technical audit in general will help identify errors that prevent search engines from “seeing” the site.

Primary optimization of the online store and competitor analysis

Promotion of a store in the USA, in the field of furniture sales, posed a difficult task for our company. Firstly, there were several sites in this niche that represented the products of well-known brands, so it was inefficient to use only high-frequency queries. 

Secondly, positions in mid-and low-frequency keys were also taken by narrow-profile projects.

An analysis of the features of competitors’ sites made it possible to understand why users choose these resources, and what attracts them and makes them stay there.

Also, the analysis of competitor sites made it possible to determine which SEO areas should be given special attention at the initial stage.

And drawing up the most relevant semantic core of the site and subsequently expanding it made it possible to increase the number of visitors several times.

Auditing and link building strategy

This area of work remains relevant for sites that are more than two years old. 

As a rule, work is carried out in several directions:

• the quality of sites for placing links is evaluated. The key parameters are attendance, matching target audience and project topics, region;
• landing pages are selected;
• a list of natural anchors is compiled.

The link audit of the site, performed allowed us to decide on a further work plan for finding relevant sites, and also selected priority pages for building up the link mass.

Usability audit of an online store in the United States

Studying the behavior of users on our resources and comparing them with how they behaved on similar sites allowed us to see what prevents potential customers from making a purchase. It was important for us to find the barriers that reduce conversions and stand out from the competition.

Our previous work experience showed that if a user at least once faced the inconvenience of staying on the site, then he will not return to it. In addition, it is important to find out what the main traffic channels are, what devices potential customers come from, what pages they are more interested in.

Identified problems and weaknesses of the client’s website

Our resource health audit showed that while the content on the main landing pages was high quality, there was not much of it. Many pages were without descriptions, not all significant categories were clearly developed. The blog section was not maintained. 

As a result, the site was losing quite an impressive amount of traffic.

Technical errors

A long list of problems was drawn up that required immediate elimination, otherwise all subsequent work could become ineffective.

Among those errors were:

• missing directives in robots.txt;
• a lot of extra redirects;
• slash doubles;
• 404 errors;
• absence of Alt on images;
• a lot of pages with duplicate Titles;
• a large number of pages with duplicates of the Description;
• a lot of pages without H1;
• multiple errors in the structure of the headers;
• low website loading speed;
• the absence of many microdata elements.

All these drawbacks prevented search engines from indexing resources and displaying their content correctly.

Almost no link growth

The study of all incoming links to sites showed an almost complete lack of dynamics in this direction. For search engine algorithms, this is a bad indicator that has a negative impact on the ranking of resources.

Additionally, key landing pages were found to perform very poorly compared to their competitors.

Usability flaws

For US users, it is very important that the resource is user-friendly. We have found that many of the required categories were simply not on the sites. There was no information section where there would be recommendations on how to choose a product, what brand features, etc. Modern traffic channels were not used.

What has been done and what results have been achieved

Step 1. Technical resource errors fixed

The technical audit helped to identify the shortcomings that we corrected pointwise in the course of work. In particular, various inaccuracies in the composition of meta tags and the structure of headings have been fixed, redirects have been reconfigured, images have been optimized and Alt attributes have been clarified, as well as other errors that have been found. 

Additionally, it was recommended to regularly add micro-markup to sites when updating pages. The analysis of the meta tags of the competitors’ priority pages helped us a lot.

Step 2: Internal Content Optimized

Another area of work was to increase the amount of unique content on the site. This gave us the opportunity to increase the visibility of the resource by keyword. We have optimized content on priority pages. Next, we analyzed in detail the textual content of the resources of our closest competitors and, based on this, expanded the semantic core. This became the basis for the compilation of the new SD’s. (Specification document’s)

A deep analysis of the thematic niche gave us the opportunity to draw conclusions about how other companies achieve high positions in SERP. Based on this, we have compiled a list of our competitive advantages for users and tried to implement this when writing content.

Step 3. Implemented a strategy for increasing the link profile

Based on the data obtained from analytics and backlink analysis services, our link building SEO specialist developed a strategy for replacing the old spammy link mass with a new permanent, high-authority, more niche and regional link mass.

Within 2 months, we completely got rid of low-quality links, while not falling under the PS filters and maintaining a positive trend in the growth of the link mass. Also, crowd marketing was connected from visited forums, blogs to get high-quality non-anchor “dilution” entries in the anchor list.

The specifics of the thematic niche dictated to us the condition of using only “white” links, so trust and thematic sites were selected that had good traffic dynamics. This method showed slower dynamics compared to others, but working only with high-quality donors allowed us to increase traffic to selected pages. We have also developed proposals for development in this area.

Step 4. Improving Usability

A decision was made to attract additional traffic to start developing the info section, making cool user-friendly content. We also used Pinterest as an additional source of promotion during the work.

Our expert’s comment

“The main thing that we faced in the project was the fierce competition in the furniture niche in the USA. When you’re competing for top positions with giants like Walmart, it’s hard to get results quickly. And, of course, the amount of work is gigantic, since there are millions of pages on the site.

Required constant research niche and competitors. We tried to quickly implement technical changes, as technical SEO is one of the most important in e-commerce. We used White Hat Links, because in this niche almost everyone builds only white hat links. 

An important factor was writing content for both landing pages with categories, filters, and the Buying Guide – different collections with furniture styles”

Project outcomes

At the start, the client had 27186 clicks from the search on one resource per month, on the second – 38857. After 9 months of promoting the online store, the numbers became much higher and the conversion increased.

Dynamics by months:

The daily performance has also become much higher. On peak days, search traffic was about 7,000 people for one site, and about 10,000-11,000 people for both. At the same time, it should be taken into account that one of the sites sells seasonal goods, and traffic is less in autumn-winter than in spring-summer.

Dynamics by days:

As a result, we received a 5-fold increase in traffic in the first 6 months, and 10-fold after a year of cooperation. In direct proportion to the growth of visitors to the site from organic search, the audience of visitors from other free channels, referral, direct, also rose.

We set low forecast indicators, as the USA market is very stable and densely filled with different offers. In part, we were “helped” by the deplorable situation with the spread of Covid-19. At this time, e-commerce projects have been able to unfold. Only for this it was necessary to plan the strategy correctly. And we did.

The year of joint work was quite difficult, because we had to work in the uncertain conditions of the pandemic. But we were able to fix a lot of minor technical flaws, continue creating unique high-quality content, and improve other processes.

Now the number of purchases has increased according to the growth of visitors to the site. Thanks to the successful work of our SEO specialists, the cost per visitor from the search has decreased by 5 times, and the client has become a leader in online furniture sales in the United States.

Now we are on the same wave with the client, but his goals have changed. Now the task is to increase the traffic to half a million per month from organic, which our team continues to work hard on.