It’s all about marketing, of which a facet is advertising. Marketing specialists will tell you that marketing is all about the four P’s: Product, Place, Price, and Promotion.

They must have figured all of this out long before the internet because there’s more to marketing than this. There’s the aspect of marketing that gets you in front of your customers so they know you exist in the first place. If we had to pick a “P,” it would be “promotion,” but that doesn’t quite complete the picture.

Advertising, when adapted to digital marketing standards, is part of promotion. Pay-per-click advertising falls under this umbrella. Pay-per-click, which hinges on PPC ads and thus is more commonly known as PPC, is a big component of digital marketing, but not the entire picture.

Traditional forms of “promotion” like this are expensive, despite the fact that they are effective. Interestingly enough, digital marketing is not entirely about paid search advertising, anyway.

There’s another way to get in front of your customers. A long-term, effective, scalable solution that builds on the initial investment: eCommerce SEO.

What is eCommerce SEO?

Ah, eCommerce SEO. It’s oft-referenced but perhaps not as well understood as it could (or should) be. At its most basic, eCommerce SEO is just SEO geared towards eCommerce.

So, then, what is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is a large (surprisingly large) collection of best practices that alert search engines to your website as an authority for a given number of queries, subjects, or keywords.

SEO stands in stark contrast to eCommerce PPC and associated PPC management services because PPC entails paid ads, whereas SEO initiatives are largely decentralized. Without getting too lost in the details of comparison, PPC takes the form of placed ads whereas the collection of practices that can be classified as SEO do not start or end in one given place.

Because of the vast nature of SEO best practices, it is much slower to generate results than paid search advertising. Oftentimes, it takes weeks or months for an SEO project to generate appreciable gains for your keywords rankings, authority, or traffic increases to your eCommerce website.

Hold on – eCommerce SEO can take a long time, even when it is well organized by an experienced eCommerce SEO expert? Why, then, would anyone want to pursue SEO services when the process is so complex and takes so long to generate results?

Why is eCommerce SEO Valuable?

Ask any eCommerce Ecommerce SEO Expert, and they’ll tell you: despite the fact that SEO takes a bit of time to generate higher rankings and organic traffic to your online store, the results build upon themselves and linger long after your stop pursuing SEO services or best practices. You can’t say the same for PPC services. Usually, when a Google AdWords campaign ends, traffic and sales fall off, too. It’s the same for other paid search campaigns as well.

Despite the fact that it takes longer to see results from the changes or content publication you make today when pursuing SEO best practices, the results will continue to compound after you stop.

Here’s the other thing. The cost of paid search does not diminish over time. You will continue to pay for clicks for as long as the campaign is active. It’s a lot harder to measure the cost of the results associated with SEO services, but at a certain point, they become much more cost-effective.

This makes eCommerce SEO a long-term game. Not only should you be able to afford to take some time to see the results pouring in, but you should gear your processes around it. Not every business can afford to pay for a lengthy, competitive PPC campaign; but every business is involved with customer engagement and has content on its website. Also, by its very definition, every eCommerce business has a website.

How you go about setting up the structure of the website, what content and images you use, how you build your site structure, and much more can and will all impact your SEO value. It’s just a matter of whether you are engaging in the right processes from the start.

Ultimately, eCommerce SEO is such a big deal because it is one of the most cost-effective and without a doubt one of the most sustainable avenues for building your online business. It is also, without a doubt, one of the most consequential pieces of the digital marketing puzzle.

Leveraging SEO best practices to your advantage will have long-standing benefits for your eCommerce business, including but not limited to higher organic traffic figures, more new users, and if all of your other ducks are in a row, higher conversion rates and sales figures.

So, How Can You Improve Your SEO?

Believe it or not, it’s not rocket science. There are a lot of things you can do to improve the overall SEO value of your eCommerce website. You just need to know where to look and how to make the changes.

Here’s the basic process that everyone follows – even eCommerce experts – when they’re making it a priority to improve the SEO value of a website.

It All Starts with Keyword Research

The basis of all successful SEO campaigns is keyword research. It sounds simple, but it’s really much more complex than just making assumptions about what keywords you should or should not target in all of your following initiatives.

For example, let’s say that your hypothetical business sells shoes. You would think that “shoes” is a great keyword to target, because, well, obviously your business sells shoes.

However, keyword research goes a lot deeper than this; it takes into account customer behavior and the surrounding climate of the industry. Yes, your business sells shoes, but so do all of your direct competitors. That means that “shoes” is theoretically a good keyword to target, but it’s undifferentiated, unlike your business.

All businesses have core value propositions without which they don’t have a competitive edge. Your business doesn’t just sell shoes. Something else sets it apart. It could be the style of shoes that your business sells, how or where your shoes are made, or the types of services your business offers.

Does your business sell boots? What kind of boots does it sell? Does it specialize in selling dress boots like Chukka boots or Chelsea boots? Perhaps your organization sells tactical boots, logger boots, or work boots.

If the latter is the case, a keyword like “work boots wedge sole” might make more sense for your organization to target. This keyword is more specific than “shoes” and despite the fact that fewer people are searching for it than “shoes,” you have a better chance to go after it to increase your ranking for it. Once you have built up additional authority, you can go after higher-volume, more competitive, generic search terms like “shoes” or “boots” as keywords.

This concept of keyword research brings up another interesting point that will influence the efficiency of search for the right target keywords, which is the difference between long-tail and short-tail keywords.

The Difference Between Long-Tail and Short-Tail Keywords

You want to go after the most lucrative set of keywords that you possibly can, but not every keyword is relevant to your business, your industry, or even to your customers. You can rank for a lot of keywords, but at a certain point, there are going to be diminishing returns. It’s better to settle on a well-selected group of highly targeted keywords and go for those. If you’re successful in your efforts, you can expand your focus keyword list to include more entries. By the same token, you can stop focusing on keywords that aren’t giving you good traction or those with dropping search volume.

In your search for the ideal keyword list, you’re going to come across what is known as long-tail and short-tail keywords. Short-tail keywords are less specific than long-tail keywords and are usually only one or two words long. In the example offered above, “shoe” and “boot” can be considered short-tail keywords.

The thing about short-tail keywords is that everyone wants to rank for them because they tend to have a huge search volume. The shopping process often begins with a short-tail keyword and gets more refined. However, because they are so competitive, it’s very hard to come into ranking for them, although this does depend on the industry, the number of competitors, and the keywords individual search volumes. Something else to note is that although short-tail keywords have high search volume because they are non-specific, conversion rates associated with them are lower than with long-tail keywords.

So, then, what are long-tail keywords? Long-tail keywords are longer, more descriptive variants of short-tail keywords. For example, “boots” is a short-tail keyword, but “wedge-soled work boots” can be considered a long-tail keyword.

A long-tail keyword doesn’t need to be a single concept, like an item. It can be a query or a process. For example, “wedge-soled work boots for civil engineering” is a long-tail keyword, albeit longer-tailed than the former example.

In contrast to short-tail keywords, long-tail keywords typically have a much lower search volume. The flipside is that the conversion rates and the interest associated with long-tail keywords are much higher than with short-tail keywords. There’s a tradeoff here.

It’s easier to come into ranking for long-tail keywords because there is less competition for them, and because they are so specific, the users searching for them are more likely to convert. The problem is that, since there are fewer overall searches for long-tail keywords, it’s rarely lucrative to target only them.

Instead, the best course of action is to target a healthy balance of long and short-tail keywords. That way you can appeal to a large number of different searches while at the same time providing the specific results relevant to those searching for associated long-tail variants. For example, you might target both “boots” and “wedge-soled work boots” because some of the users searching only for “boots” are actually looking for the long-tail solution.

So you know you need to target a balance; but how do you find it?

Volume, Competition, Search Intent

It’s not enough to know that you need to target a balance of long and short-tail keywords. You need to consider volume, competition, and search intent as well. This is where your critical thinking skills come into play.

There are some paid tools that you can use to see what the actual search volume is for keywords, as well as the competitiveness of any given query, term, or keyword. For search intent, you’ll need to put on your thinking cap.

Volume is how many searches are actually entered for a given keyword. As volume increases, competitiveness usually increases, which means it’s usually harder to rank for high-volume keywords than lower-volume keywords. Again, though, a lot of the money is in the high-volume keywords.

What you do need to know is that when you rank for high-volume, high-competition keywords, it’s very lucrative. However, ranking for them is difficult and you must balance how aggressive your tactics are with the desired outcome.

As for search intent, this has to do with what customers are looking for when they enter a search term or a keyword. To make an illustration of this we need to use a keyword that, with no added context, is ambiguous. We’ll use “cable.”

Can you tell if the person searching for “cable” is looking for cable or internet services? Probably not, since it’s 2021, but you still can’t be sure. Is the search intent to find electrical cable? Load-bearing cables? Google has to do its best to link up this ambiguous keyword with the best results, based on what other people entering the same word have clicked on or found.

That’s only one type of search intent. Sometimes, a search for “shoes” might be associated with intent to purchase a pair of sneakers. It also might be associated with an intent to figure out how to waterproof sneakers. It’s not probable, but you can’t be sure.

The reason for mentioning this is that you should avoid the temptation to target a keyword that looks like a low-hanging fruit if you have no reasonable justification to assume relevant search intent for your business.

To make a glaringly obvious example, you might be able to find a keyword like “rubber rain boots” with relatively low competition and high search volume. You could take efforts to come into ranking for that keyword, but if your website only sells work boots, what would be the point? Your website would rank for searches for “rubber rain boots,” but would end in frustration for customers looking for something else.

The point here is to balance long and short-tail keywords while accounting for volume, competition, and search intent. They need to be relevant to your business.

So, how do you choose them?

How to Choose?

Now you have some insight into what might make a good keyword for you to target in your SEO objectives to accomplish your goals. But just how do you choose a set of keywords? You are the expert in your industry, but guessing will only get you so far.

We’ve already shown how “shoes” is a relevant keyword to a seller of footwear, and that only took light guesswork to come up with. The thing is, a guess is still only a guess until you pair it up with the right critical thinking.

There are paid tools that you can use to help you perform your keyword research, but Google itself gives you some free tools that you can use on your own. Just visit good and come up with a keyword that you think is relevant to your business.

Let’s start with “shoes” and assume that your hypothetical business sells them, just to illustrate a point. Google has an autofill feature that will fill in relevant keywords, but long and short-tail, based on what you enter.

Just look what pops up when you type in “shoes.” Based on the location and other relevant search information, Google has connected this query for shoes with other relevant search terms like “shoes for women,” “shoes for men,” “shoes for sale,” and “shoes stores.”

These, however, are still not very well-targeted keywords. It might be valuable for your business to rank for them, but they’re likely to be competitive. Let’s consider that your online shoe outlet is a specialist provider of athletic shoes. We’ll see what Google has to pitch to us for “running shoes.”

Typing “shoes running” into Google as a variant of the keyword, we have a much more interesting and targeted set of keywords to choose from, as you can see below.

Google’s autofill doesn’t give you important insights into the actual search volume or competition of keywords like “shoes running best” and “shoes running Nike,” as well as valuable long-tail keywords like “shoes running vs. training.” Even though you can’t see how many searches there are for these keywords, you can assume that enough users are searching for them for Google to gamble on their relevance to you based on your input of “shoes running.” That means an appreciable number of searches for “shoes running” end up being “shoes running Nike.” That tells you a lot of search intent as well as volume. One, people are looking for running shoes, and two, a lot of them are hoping to find Nike shoes.

It’s a labor-intensive process with a lot of guess and check, and going about it this way isn’t particularly precise, which is why so many businesses work with SEO agencies and other providers of eCommerce SEO services. Without the help of a reliable analytical tool like SEMRush or the input and frame of reference of an SEO company, developing a solid keyword list is difficult. It’s the foundation of a successful SEO strategy, so it needs to be done right.

On-Page Optimization: Optimizing Site Structure

At any rate, once you’re confident that you’ve compiled a practical and effective keyword list, you can begin with technical and on-page SEO efforts.

The first and often the most basic things you can do to improve your SEO value involve some of the following.

• URL Structure:

Believe it or not, URL structure is a ranking signal and it can affect your website’s rankings, depending on whether or not it is optimized. Some platforms give you more control over altering URL structure than others, but once you’ve selected a list of keywords and the target pages associated with them, you can alter the URLs associated with important category and content pages accordingly. Just make sure not to stuff your URLs – one target keyword per URL is a good idea, and shorter is better.

The URL above actually extends so far that getting an image of it that could actually be seen required cropping it. The URL is ambiguous at best and downright confusing. It is not evident where it goes and not only contains no keywords, it contains no discernible words at all. If your web pages have URLs like this, they could use some work.

• Page Titles

Page titles are an important ranking factor that search engines are looking out for. While you can theoretically assign more than one target keyword to a given page (so that the page will rank for more than one keyword) you should focus on one rather than stuffing the title. Another thing to remember is that bounce rate is also a ranking signal. Do not give your page titles nonsense title tags, because if users find them and then ultimately are frustrated and leave because the page was irrelevant to the title tag, that’s not good for your business.

• Image Alt Text

Image alt text (also known as alternative text) is a text alternative to images that search engines can assess while crawling a page. A lot of alt text is randomly generated numbers and letters created when you insert or upload an image. This is useful for the computer or the software to categorize and file the image, but utterly useless for SEO.

A lot of businesses simply don’t take advantage of the fact that you can use custom written alt text to improve a website’s SEO value. All you need to do is align the alt text with the keyword or keywords for which you want the page containing the image to rank. For example, if you uploaded a picture of boots to a page that you wanted to rank for “steel toe work boots,” you might want to insert the latter keyword into the alt text of the image in question.

• Meta Descriptions

In addition to the page titles which are metadata and important ranking signals, meta descriptions are another important category of metadata that will impact the ranking of your website.

When you customize your meta descriptions, you have a unique opportunity to positively impact not only your SEO value but also your UX. Write meaningful meta descriptions that succinctly inform the user about the page they are about to visit. Sew target keywords relevant to the page into the meta description without stuffing them, and you’ll increase your SEO value while at the same time potentially diminishing your bounce rate, another ranking signal.

• Site Security

Some users may not take notice of the difference between the HTTP and the HTTPS in your address, but it is a ranking signal, nonetheless, and an easy one to account for.

The purchase and implementation of an SSL certificate is valuable for many other reasons in addition to the fact that it will give you a slight SEO boost. For one, it will improve the user experience because your site will seem more trustworthy, and it will also make your site more secure and help prevent outside access to data that travels to and from your website.

• Page Speed

Page speed is another ranking signal, and slow websites have two distinct problems that can affect your SEO value. For one, as a ranking signal, Google will evaluate your website on its speed without any help.

In addition, users are intolerant of slow loading speeds, typically bouncing in under three seconds if the page fails to load. This will raise your bounce rate, which is a ranking signal; this “splash effect” due to low page speed will negatively impact your SEO value.

To make your website faster, optimize your images with smaller files where possible, cut back on the number of redirects on your website, and use compression software if you can, although there are many other ways to boost your page speed.

• Mobile Friendliness

Google made an announcement in 2019 that it would switch to mobile-first indexing, meaning that websites that lacked a mobile-friendly responsive design would suffer.

While some eCommerce platforms like BigCommerce have themes that are mobile-friendly or have responsive designs, providing a truly mobile-optimized design is critical not only for SEO purposes but also for UX. A design or a theme that is not responsive will quickly frustrate mobile shoppers, who make up an increasingly large portion of the eCommerce population.

In other words, mobile design is critical to eCommerce SEO success.

Onsite Optimization: Content Publication

In addition to the more technical aspects of SEO mentioned above, a lot of the value from the keywords you uncovered during keyword research can be extracted in the form of content publication. Here are some of the steps you can take to optimize your website’s content to appeal to both users and search engines.

• Removal of Duplicate Content

The most straightforward way you can bump up the SEO value of your website is to remove duplicate content. Wherever duplicate content appears and a search engine takes note of it, either or both of two things may occur. First, the website on which the content first appears will be given precedence over the website with the duplicate content. Secondly, the website with duplicate content may even be assigned a penalty.

Removing duplicate content should be easy since you should be able to identify where you got it from in the first place. It’s common on eCommerce websites in the form of manufacturer descriptions and other such snippets that eCommerce merchants sometimes copy and paste. However, copying and pasting is bad in SEO; you want to write your own original content.

• Category page content

One area of your website where you can provide value to your customers and sew in keyword-rich content to appeal to search engines (in one fell swoop) is on your category pages. Oftentimes, users will get to a category page while navigating through your website, before they get to a product page. This makes them a critical juncture down the sales funnel.

Provide original information on the category of products. Offer users insight into use, tips, and tricks. Catch their attention with humor. Give them a reason to want to learn more. After all, you sell these products, so you are the authority!

This will benefit the UX of your website and it will also tip off search engines that your website is an authority in your industry and should be ranked accordingly.

• Product page content

If category pages are valuable because they represent a vital stepping stone in the purchasing process of the customer experience, then the product page is the kingpin. It is at that point that a customer is typically going to make a decision to purchase or not.

To buy or not to buy, that is the question; Whether ‘tis nobler to infuse your product pages with optimized content and so take the reins of SEO within your grasp or allow chance rankings to befall you.

Just like you can optimize category pages, you can optimize your product pages, and it is vital to do so. Provide rich, keyword-optimized descriptions of provides. Discuss uses and complementary products. Think about what you would want to know about this product if you were a customer and then provide the information.

Customers will notice, and with the right balance of keywords, search engines will too. Bare product pages are a big SEO red-flag.

• Onsite blogs with optimized for keyword density and internal linking structure

As valuable as product and category page content is, your blog is the space where you can really provide information to your readers and capture the attention of search engines. Also, since you can vary the length of a blog according to your intended purposes, you’re less likely to get a penalty for keyword stuffing, which is including too many keywords in too short a piece of content.

Look through your keyword selection and write blogs regarding those keywords, varying the length. Remember, what one reader appreciates another might not. Think about how your products have been received by customers and what they use them for. Discuss little-known features of your products or make potential matches for supporting products. Write a blog on common hacks for your products. Keep it creative, infuse them with keywords and the SEO results will follow.

On The Importance of Backlinks and Link Building

Another critical component to eCommerce SEO is the process of link building and link strategy. There are three basic types of links. There are outbound links, which take readers away from your website to other websites. You should use these sparingly because although they can improve UX, they will show Google that you’re directing traffic to another source of authority.

Then there are internal links, which are links between pages on your website, and inbound links, which are called backlinks when you’re referring to the fact that the traffic originates on another website and is directed back to your website.

Internal linking and backlink strategy are crucial to SEO. Whenever you’re producing content for your website, if the content refers to valuable information that can be found elsewhere on your website, provide a link to that page.

As for backlinking, the strategy is a little bit trickier. You can’t just create backlinks to your website. You either need to work with an eCommerce SEO company that has an established network for generating and trading backlinks, or you have to trade for them yourself. Some online businesses and bloggers still engage in old-fashioned link-trading, where they will offer backlinks in exchange for writing about a product or some other type of service.

You can work with the best SEO experts to help generate backlinks for you, but one way or the other, if you aren’t securing them, you aren’t doing all you can do to improve your SEO.

See It in Action

The areas covered in this article are some of the most important aspects you can cover in your eCommerce SEO strategy, but there’s much more you can do if you want to get down to a much more granular level.

If you want to see specific examples of how we’ve used our proprietary SEO process to generate magnificent results for eCommerce clients in a huge range of industries, just take a look at our eCommerce case studies. In addition to our design, development, and migration case studies, there are many that focus on SEO campaigns we’ve executed for key clients and highlight the huge results generated from our activities.

Put 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency’s Process to Work for Your Business

There’s a lot of information here; hence the old saying, “if it was easy, everyone would do it.” True, there are a lot of changes you can make to your website to benefit its overall SEO value, but there’s a reason SEO specialists get big results.

We see what works and what doesn’t work. We build backlinks. We perform in-depth keyword research and industry analysis before we go so far as writing half a piece of optimized category page content. We overhaul your website to optimize many of the facets we addressed in this article and more.

Higher traffic and sales are right around the corner, and it all starts with an SEO project with 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency. Call us up at 888-982-8269 or get in touch with us at info@1digitalagency.com to learn more about how eCommerce SEO can take your business to new heights.

The post eCommerce SEO: A Beginner’s Guide appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

Additionally, there are some businesses with big ambitions for growth that are working in restricted paid-search environments. For some online businesses, PPC is not an option simply because Google has restricted their industry. Whether for better or for worse, this limits the digital marketing initiatives of players in a large range of industries.

For Cyclone Pods, there were a few things desirable about pursuing eCommerce SEO, provided the process was carefully laid out and efficiently executed.

Cyclone Pods, which is a specialty supplier of premium, nicotine-free vape juices, and associated devices, had sight set on growth. Despite the fact that Cyclone Pods products are geared towards users attempting to dissociate from nicotine, they still work in a PPC-restricted industry. That takes paid-search off the table for digital marketing projects.

Still, that didn’t discourage the ambition of the team at Cyclone Pods. They knew they wanted to bring in more traffic and generate higher sales, and they knew that with the right SEO agency partner, it could be done. Furthermore, since Cyclone Pods is built on Shopify, finding the agency with the best Shopify SEO services was paramount to success.

An Uncustomarily Large Project

There’s something else about Cyclone Pods. Unlike some online businesses with hundreds or thousands of products and services, Cyclone Pods only offers a few different devices and flavored juices. Their value proposition is rock-solid, but their assortment of products is still small compared to some other businesses in the vape industry.

Others in Cyclone Pods’ shoes might settle for a small campaign targeting 12 or even 25 keywords, but his ambitions were larger than that. They didn’t shy from the prize. They knew that Cyclone Pods had a unique positioning and a suite of products that, though small in number, was huge in potential.

Still, They didn’t choose 1Digital^® Agency for a 50 keyword campaign. They didn’t even shoot for a 75 keyword campaign, which would be sizable in scope even by the standards of eCommerce businesses selling hundreds of products. They opted for a 120 keyword campaign. Others might call it overkill, but the results 1Digital^® Agency secured for Cyclone Pods deliver a different testimony.

Preliminary Work

With such an objectively large campaign targeted scores of keywords and only so many different product variations to work with, 1Digital^® Agency’s specialists had their work cut out for them. As we do with all of our SEO projects, we started with keyword research to identify the most lucrative collection of keywords for Cyclone Pods to target.

This took into account competitive efforts as well as an analysis of the general industry landscape. Armed with a comprehensive list of relevant keywords with high search volume and aligned with customer search intent, our specialists lined up target pages and optimized them with new meta titles, header tags, and URLs where necessary.

We scanned their website for duplicate content, and finding none, audited their existing backlinks, disavowing the toxic links we uncovered; audited their website for broken links that would hurt their SEO. We checked their Google Search Console to ensure there were no crawler errors so that Google could access and crawl their pages for indexing.

With much of our preliminary work set up to deliver great results, we began optimizing CyclonePods.com with keyword enriched, optimized content, including a range of blog publications and category page content to stimulate UX and attract Google’s attention.

Content Publication and Link Building

A key component of our SEO process is content publication and link building. Using our comprehensive list of keywords uncovered during the research and planning phase of the project, we published new content to key target pages to increase their rankings for competitive keywords and phrases.

In addition to boosting their rankings for specified target pages, our content creators began routinely publishing to their blog, creating a variety of long and short-form content, keyword and link optimized to attract Google’s attention and recognition.

The content creation portion of our eCommerce SEO services entails thorough research into the target audience to uncover their needs and desires; what they’re looking for and why. This enables our content creators to craft blog content that is enriching, full of useful information, and most important, optimized for search engines.

Keyword Movement

It’s customary for the results of search engine optimization projects to take a while to build up and start rolling in, but Cyclone Pods was uniquely positioned for success. With such a large campaign targeting so many keywords and with so much room for keyword movement, their results began to mount fairly rapidly.

Their campaign with 1Digital^® Agency began in October 2020, and by January there were significantly noticeable results across the board. However, positive keyword movements became noticeable only a few short weeks after their campaign began.

The image below shows their keyword movements from the start of their campaign till the end of January 2020. It shows keywords for which they are not ranked, as well as keywords for which they rank in the top 30, top 20, and so on and so forth as indicated, to the keywords for which they rank in the top spot organically.

As you can see, at the beginning of the campaign, there were a large number of keywords for which they did not rank at all; the percentage of keywords for which they did not rank sharply declined, by about 33% within the first month of the campaign. It also continued a steady downward trend that is still ongoing.

At the same time, Cyclone Pods experienced sharp increases in organic keyword rankings in the top 30, 20, and 10 spots. Even their top 5 and top-spot rankings began a slow, but steady upward climb right from the beginning of the campaign.

For more perspective on the significant shifts for some of their top keyword movements, consult the following graphic (to the left) that shows some of their biggest moves. While we can’t divulge the keywords we’re targeting, you can see that there have been impressive improvements for many targeted keywords

All of these movements are for keywords that have come into ranking in the top 10 spots. Though this only reflects a small portion of keywords targeted for Cyclone Pods, as you can see from the image, there are a significant number of keywords ranking in the top 10 alone. Many of them rank not only in the top 10, but are actually in the first position. Additionally, you can see that some of these keywords ascended the ranks by leaps and bounds, improving positions by 31, 36, 40, even 54 positions to land within the top 10. One of the keywords highlighted here, which is now organically ranking in the 5th position, climbed 64 spots to land there. That is an impressive movement by any estimation.

Real Results

Keyword movement is crucial to the health of an SEO campaign and impactful, consistent positive movements will lend some insight into the health and efficacy of a project. That much is obvious with Cyclone Pods; their keyword movements have been on an upward trend for months and continue to rise.

However, some of the most basic goals of SEO for eCommerce websites are actually to bring more customers into an online store by capitalizing on those higher organic rankings. In Cyclone Pods’ case, traffic needed only a short while to get ahead of steam and really ramp up.

To give some general insight into the way traffic boomed as our project got rolling, consider the following image which shows organic traffic to Cyclone Pods’ eCommerce site from the beginning of their campaign in October 2020 through to the end of January 2021. The increases in organic traffic to their website appears even more dramatic when overlaid by organic traffic figures from the corresponding previous period, from June 2020 through the end of September 2020.

It is apparent that the volume of organic traffic flowing into their site, barring some aberrant spikes, was fairly consistent through the preceding period (June 2020 to the beginning of the campaign). In fact, traffic followed the same steady course during the first two or so months of the campaign with 1Digital^® Agency. However, in the background, keywords and website ranking were steadily growing.

Right around the end of December 2020, less than 3 months into the campaign, their organic traffic sharply increased. This was no random spike in traffic, as you can see that the trend continued in force and has maintained its course to the time of this publication, February 2021, at which point Cyclone Pods’ campaign is still ongoing.

In the image above you can see a more quantitative take on increases in traffic to their website. This data corresponds to the two superposed periods addressed by the first image showing organic traffic. During this period, organic traffic (users and new users) sessions, number of sessions, and pageviews all increased. New organic used to CyclonePods.com increased by nearly 30% during this time, along with a similar increase in pageviews.

Organic traffic to their website increased, along with sessions. Still, the icing on the cake is the figures that all eCommerce businesses are really holding out for – figures associated with sales. Money is the bottom line in all industries, and Cyclone Pods profited greatly during the period since they began their SEO project with 1Digital^® Agency, as compared to the previous period.

The little snippet above is concise, but it shows you what you need to know. Compared to the period immediately before starting their SEO campaign with us, Cyclone Pods’ overall eCommerce conversion rate saw only a modest jump. However, transactions and revenue both saw significant jumps.

During this time, their transactions grew by over 33% whereas their revenue grew by just a hair less. In any industry, in any economic climate, a growth of more than 32% in transactions and revenue figures is momentous; for an eCommerce client working in a PPC-restricted industry, targeting a huge number of keywords, the results are nothing short of impressive.

For Cyclone Pods, however, this is just the beginning. They look forward to many more months of spectacular growth in traffic and sales resulting from their SEO projects with 1Digital^® Agency, and we look forward to delivering them.

Are you impressed by these results? It’s a little hard not to be, especially considering these are all organic increases resulting from sustainable SEO best-practices as executed by the leading eCommerce SEO company in the business.

If you’re wondering how to generate such gains for your business, but aren’t sure which SEO strategies to pursue, how to avoid keyword stuffing, or even what keywords to use, that’s understandable. There is quite a difference between black-hat and white-hat SEO, and we practically wrote the book.

Call us today at 888-982-8269 if you want to get started with a campaign of your own to generate higher website rankings, organic traffic, and revenue figures. They’re within reach, especially when you work with the Shopify SEO experts at 1Digital^® Agency.

In the meanwhile, if you need more proof, it’s only a few clicks away. Visit our collection of eCommerce case studies that you can filter by platform and service. You might be surprised to see just how many eCommerce merchants are dealing with the same challenges as you – and we’ve helped them all.

Download PDF

The post Give Smoke and Mirrors the Slip with Shopify SEO appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

They say that there are no second chances at a first impression and that rule holds for eCommerce design. The layout of an online store can tell the visitor a lot about the business in question. For businesses that want to stand out from their competitors, having a custom designed eCommerce store is a great way to ensure that visitors will be interested in exploring their brand.

1Digital^® offers a wide range of eCommerce web design services. They can help modify existing templates to better fit a brand’s image or create entirely custom designs that will match the exact look and feel a business wants. Their team includes experts in designing for all of the major eCommerce platforms including BigCommerce and Shopify. Their online portfolio offers a glimpse of the design projects in their repertoire.

For businesses interested in eCommerce Design work, 1Digital^® offers a free brand appraisal where their designers will take a look at your website and objectively assess its design. These appraisals not only offer valuable insight into how users perceive an eCommerce website but are also designed to serve as the groundwork for any design projects 1Digital^® undertakes.

In addition to the design services they offer, 1Digital^® also specializes in eCommerce website development. The development of custom features like improved menus and search functions often goes hand in hand with design. Their custom design process involves several steps, including review and revisions so clients can make sure that the final results are a perfect fit for their brand. Upon completion of a project, 1Digital^® offers convenient retainer packages so businesses can rest assured that any small design, development, or bug fixes will be handled by the same team of professionals who designed their store.

Any eCommerce businesses interested in custom design services should pay 1Digital^® Agency a visit. On their website, you can see detailed information on the types of design and development features they have produced for their clients. Their team of designers is always happy to put together a free brand appraisal for potential clients and discuss the services they offer. If you have an eCommerce business that is in need of a redesign, call 215-809-1567 or send an email to info@1DigitalAgency.com to speak with one of their design experts.

The post 1Digital® Agency Offers Amazing eCommerce Design Services appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

With growing sales and operations through 2020, Stover & Company knew that something would have to give soon. For years, their online store had been hosted on Magento, an eCommerce platform that is extremely robust and allows for limitless customization. However, with an open-source platform like Magento, that capability comes at a price.

With Magento, users need to provide their own hosting infrastructure and security and need to devote an uncommon measure of resources to development and support. Sure, the code is out there for anyone to inspect, but without a pool of dedicated developers, keeping up with a Magento website is a true labor of love.

Stover & Company had those resources, business was growing, and they wanted to allocate them to business development as well as a website that better reflected their growing capabilities and was easier to manage.

Unfortunately, despite Magento’s glaring capabilities, it was too resource-intensive to maintain. Stover & Company needed to move to a platform that could offer similar customization and would be easier to keep up with, and for that, they chose the BigCommerce platform.

Ideally, they’d want to get their website up and running on a newly designed BigCommerce store without any disruptions, which is quite a task for an established online store with a huge volume of sales and customer accounts. What they needed was help moving from their old store on Magento to their new store on BigCommerce with no hiccups.

Lucky for Stover & Company, 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency has experience in that arena.

Making the Move

Stover & Company was operating a large, complex eCommerce website on Magento. To say it was full of data, product and account information and a variety of content would be an understatement. To make matters more complex, being an established business with a powerful online presence, Stover & Company had appreciable traffic to their online store that they couldn’t risk compromising – as in other businesses, web traffic to an online store is dearly earned and brings in revenue.

1Digital^Ⓡ’s specialists conducted a complex and thorough data migration for Stover & Company’s website, carefully transferring each item of valuable data to the correct location in their new BigCommerce store.

The scope of their eCommerce migration consisted of over 150 categories, 900 products, 15,000 customer accounts, and nearly 33,000 orders. Special steps had to be taken with each category to ensure the timely and accurate migration of the data.

For example, in order to protect the SEO value of Stover’s category structure, we had to take care to transfer not only the categories and descriptions themselves but also to move over the category metadata, including titles, descriptions, and keywords. We then did the same thing with their product information, taking care to preserve the fidelity of names, prices, images, descriptions, and options.

We also uncovered group products in Stover’s Magento store, which required careful configuration before being transferred. In order to be compatible with BigCommerce, we had to convert them into simple products and manually sync them to the BigCommerce store before combining them with BigCommerce’s product options.

Our process for migrating Stover’s customer and order information was every ounce as thorough. We took care to meticulously migrate names, addresses, email, and phone numbers, even sending each customer account an email informing them that they would need to change their account password since we would not be able to migrate the original, encrypted passwords.

No Traffic Left Behind

When executing a migration, especially for a well-established business with a successful online presence like Stover & Company, taking steps to ensure that no traffic is lost is critical. As a part of the migration process, we followed two particularly important protocols to ensure Stover & Company would not lose any traffic as a result.

For one thing, we scrupulously compiled all of Stover’s Magento URLs and created standard 301 redirects to all of the BigCommerce URLs that would correspond to them. This is a crucial step to ensure that Google knows where to send traffic when a user searches for a URL that may no longer exist. When done properly, it can completely prevent any loss of traffic that would otherwise result from a poorly planned migration.

In addition, after the migration, we monitored their Google Search Console for any potential shifts in traffic, as well as allocated a period of support to it in case any issues would arise or be uncovered. Needless to say, the migration and ensuing redesign and development projects were successful in tandem, and the company not only saw no loss of traffic but a boom in traffic to their online store.

Advanced Design and Development for Better Branding and More

Stover & Company wanted two things in particular from their new BigCommerce website. They wanted it to put forth a more professional, capable, front, and they wanted it to be better equipped to handle an influx of online orders as they planned for growth. For that, they’d need the help of an experienced BigCommerce partner. In conjunction with their migration, our designers and developers were busy at work creating a brand new BigCommerce website for Stover & Company that offered the same functionality as before, and more, for a significantly improved customer experience.

While our BigCommerce web design specialists updated the overall appearance of the entire website as can be seen from the image below, they also designed and developed some new features for their website to boost engagement, improve UX, and put forth a more professional front.

One of the big-ticket items that we created for Stover & Company was an advanced mega menu. Enhanced navigation is well known as a critical component of the customer experience, and this mega menu was reorganized to facilitate a customer’s search and pushed their highest selling category (chocolates) to the top, as you can see below. This new mega menu also featured updated imagery and eye-catching colors to hold attention and sync up better with the color scheme of the overall website.

Moreover, this advanced mega menu contained several different features and effects. You can see at the top of their homepage the way the menu displays; it expands with a second display of subcategories when the user clicks on “Shop by Category.” A third display of subcategories will appear when the user clicks on the category of interest. This is a significant experience-booster for Stover & Company’s users, as the company offers such a diverse collection of different bakery supplies.

As an additional positive effect on the navigational hierarchy of the client’s website, we also created subcategory landing pages. For example, if a user selects “Chocolate & Caramel” through the mega menu and then selects “Compound Chocolates” as a subcategory, the page to which the customer will be directed displays a variety of different subcategories within the original subcategory.

This facilitates a customer’s search, for example, for “Dark Compound Chocolates” or “Flavored Wafers,” which otherwise would be lumped together blindly into one collection. This neat and comprehensive compartmentalization of Stover’s products created a much better searching and shopping experience.

In accordance with the wishes of the client, we also created a Quick Order page to enable customers to complete large, complex purchases as easy as possible. Since many of Stover’s clients are also large businesses, many of them return frequently to make the same or similar large purchases. Streamlining this process, at least for these accounts, was a highly valuable initiative that we designed and executed for them.

In addition to redesigning their homepage, mega menu, subcategory pages, and more, we also created a few additional items that advertised their capabilities and customer service. For example, we created a new banner for the homepage highlighting some of the selling points of their business, such as their warehousing capabilities.

In addition, we created special badges for some of their product pages, such as what you can see in the image below. This particular product page, for one of their most popular products, shows the user that the product is in stock and also gives the option to add cold packing to the order, advertising the robust capabilities of the client and boosting confidence in their operations in specific and their brand in general.

1Digital^Ⓡ also completed several additional critical development items for Stover & Company, including business critical integrations and configurations. For example, our BigCommerce developers implemented ShipperHQ and configured it to their new BigCommerce store. As large businesses often rely on the operational efficiencies afforded by the shipping-based economy of apps like this, ensuring it was installed and configured correctly was critical.

The advanced mega menu described above was not the only item in the project that helped to foster a streamlined and effective navigational process for the client’s users. Our team also integrated and configured Nextopia into their new BigCommerce store so that they could afford their customers additional powerful site search features as a part of the navigational hierarchy.

To ensure the highest level of security possible for their online store, we also made sure that a new EV SSL was issued for their new online store, and then installed and configured properly on the Stover & Company BigCommerce website. We also added a few complimentary development items as a part of their larger project, including a new Favicon for their website and a reorder button for customer accounts, to improve customer engagement and retention.

Growing Organic Traffic with SEO

Stover & Company has been growing and planning for growth; in addition to setting aside funds for migrating to a more capable and freshly designed and developed website, they set aside some investment for digital marketing. Knowing that SEO is a long term gain that affords many business steady growth over time, they chose to partner with 1Digital^Ⓡ for BigCommerce SEO services for a particularly large SEO campaign targeting 120 keywords.

As with all of our comprehensive SEO projects, we conducted thorough keyword research and analyses before even beginning with onsite optimization and content publication. We began by identifying a large collection of carefully chosen keywords that were relevant to their industry, according to their product selection and customer searches.

We also conducted a competition analysis and initial benchmark to show the client where they stood in relation to key competitors and current rankings. Once we had identified key areas for improvement and keywords to pursue, we were ready to begin with our onsite optimization processes. Simultaneously, our content creators began suffusing their website with original content and building links to their website through the publication of offsite content.

As with our other SEO projects, regardless of the size, we audited Stover’s URL structure in order to uncover utilized keywords and room for improvement. We also conducted a site speed optimization discovery touching on numerous items that affect site speed so that they could be rectified and addressed.

As an additional component of onsite optimization, we audited the site for toxic backlinks and broken links and removed or disavowed them wherever found. As this was a brand new BigCommerce store, we were able to optimize title tags and metadata like meta descriptions, to ensure that pages were properly cached and that onsite content was visible both to site visitors and to Google so that it could be crawled and indexed.

In addition to this, our professional content creators undertook the process of creating a variety of onsite content to enrich Stover’s website and make it more attractive to search engines. We created a variety of long and short form content, including category page content and several different types of blog content, carrying both in length and keyword density.

In tandem with these other processes, our specialists also pursue an aggressive backlinking strategy to boost authority. Targeting a broad sweep of keywords, many of which were shared with onsite content, we created a variety of offsite posts and items that were distributed across a number of third-party sites containing backlinks to stovercompany.com.

We Can Tie It Together for Your Business

These are the types of multifaceted digital marketing projects and results we can accomplish for your business, whether you operate in a similar sphere as Stover & Company or in an entirely different industry. Our collection of eCommerce case studies is a sturdy testament to that claim.

Without lauding ourselves too immodestly, we welcome you to check the case studies link above. There, you can see some of our case studies and filter them by project and even platform. If you’re interested, you can also see our SEO by industry page, where you can find some of the industries we serve.

Our talented team of eCommerce web design and development professionals, much like our experienced team of digital marketing eCommerce SEO and PPC specialists, only wait for a call from you to get started achieving similar results for your online business. Whether you need a full-scale redesign or want to see how SEO can work to grow your business in the long game and connect better with your customers with targeted content, it all starts with a call. Contact us at 888-982-8269 or info@1digitalagency.com today.

Download PDF

The post Scaling with Migration and Advanced Development appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

Paravel needed a lot of basic eCommerce functionality to make it possible to run practical operations through its online store. Originally, they were built on an open-source platform called Spree, which has a lot of adherents and supporters because of the very fact that it is an open-source platform.

Spree, like other open-source platforms such as Magento, is extremely customizable. It can also be integrated with a very large number of third-party plugins and apps, it is highly scalable, and it exhibits a level of UI-intuition that makes developing a mobile-friendly interface easier.

While this is just a quick snapshot of the various functional features of Spree, some of them come at the same high cost as other open-source platforms. They may be nearly limitless in functionality, but they require a lot of development time and even more experience to accomplish. Without extensive coding experience or a background in development, platforms like Spree can quickly exhaust resources.

Paravel needed that one-of-a-kind shopping experience, but they also needed an out-of-the-box solution that offered a lot to their eCommerce merchants. The trouble for them was how could they get their already meticulously designed and developed eCommerce store from Spree to a more capable platform?

A Thorough Migration Process

After communication with our sales team, Paravel decided that a move to Shopify Plus was the answer – with a few stipulations. Among other things, Paravel did not want to experience any negative effects from the migration and they wanted their new store to offer all of the functionality of their Spree store and then some. To do so, Paravel needed more than a Shopify Plus partner – they needed a Shopify Plus expert.

While Spree offered nearly limitless options for customization, Shopify Plus, as a hosted eCommerce SaaS platform, could offer them so much more. With the help of a development team like 1Digital^Ⓡ, Shopify Plus could offer them all of the customizations that Spree offered and more. Shopify Plus also offered heightened security features, guaranteed uptime, fast site speed, similar compatibility with third-party apps and plugins, acceptance of a number of payment options, immense scalability, and much more. Paravel was, at this point, tasked with moving their existing Spree store, and it’s design and functionality, to Shopify Plus.

For some, the process of a website migration is harrowing, but we knew otherwise. With hundreds of successful migrations in the rearview and a team of developers to back our efforts, we knew it could be done with no trouble whatsoever. It just would take a thorough process.

The process was intensive, but nothing 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency couldn’t execute with flying colors. The project required the migration of 32 product fields (including names, descriptions, images, prices, and more) as well as more than 4,000 customer accounts and orders each. To do this, we set up a temporary Linux server and wrote a custom script to draw and categorize this information from the Spree inventory of their original site.

To move it over, we created another custom script to connect to the Shopify API before properly importing all of the relevant fields. During the process and afterward, data was checked in order to ensure that it was landing correctly in the new store, so that not only would nothing be lost, but it would all populate where it was supposed to go.

Our thorough process prevented the loss of data, but what about the loss of traffic? If there’s one thing that turns off eCommerce clients from the prospect of a replatforming (even if it will come with huge benefits), it’s the fear of losing traffic or domain authority.

Luckily, our migration process prevents damage to SEO as meticulously as it prevents data loss. With Paravel, as we have done with every migration project, we collected all of the URLs associated with their website and then set up 301 redirects to the associated URLs on the new Shopify website. Unsurprisingly, Paravel suffered no loss in traffic or fluctuation in ranking after the migration was complete.

Support – Just in Case

Migrating to Shopify went along without a hiccup, and Paravel was well on its way to a new Shopify Plus store with enhanced functionality and a better user experience, but just to be safe, we included a free 30-day support period with the migration project. Any Shopify migration agency with a proven process should do so; it’s just part and parcel of a successful migration strategy.

The length of free support periods vary according to the scope of the project, but in the case of Paravel’s migration, we allotted 30 days. This gave them a full month’s time to investigate their new website and address any migration bugs that might pop up – which we would fix, free of charge.

Even after, we allowed them to remain on retainer, asking no deposit of them; simply billing for any changes that they would log after the free website support period ended. Little things like these go a long way towards ensuring good customer service, and we aim to ensure that migrations go smoothly, even when everything is checked, double-checked, and checked again.

A Newly Developed Website

But it wasn’t over with a migration. Paravel had criteria for the move associated with the customer experience that the new site would offer, and to ensure that, we had to develop a brand new Shopify Plus website for them.

As part of their project, 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency’s developers crafted a brand new homepage for them that was better brand integrated and helped to position their products in a more desirable light. It featured updated product and background imagery that better aligned with the interests and perceptions of their target market. Consider the sleek, sophisticated impression of the new homepage, below, with a still of the old homepage beneath it.

For visitors to their homepage, the new layout is immediately striking not only for the superior aesthetics of its imagery but for the most concerted effort it makes to place the value of Paravel’s products front and center. You will also note that there is a menu at the top of the new homepage layout that was lacking in the previous design; the way to access their products previously was by scrolling down the page to where there was a button labeled “shop the collection”. The new page features much better site navigation features, as you can see above.

Scrolling down the homepage, visitors can see reviews via a sliding banner, learn more about popular product categories, and even see how customers are using the products via social media, as you can see in some of the screenshots below.

In addition to the homepage, 1Digital^Ⓡ crafted a new category page template along with an “Our Story” page for Paravel, on top of several other system pages. Among those pages that were developed were their cart and checkout pages, login pages, gift certificate pages, and “Thank You” pages. Finally, we customized a number of content pages including their “FAQ” and “Terms” pages.

The importance of a high-quality responsive website design is critical to eCommerce nowadays, and 1Digital^Ⓡ developers were careful to prepare an updated responsive website for Paravel as part of the project. In the interest of Paravel’s user experience, the new responsive design by 1Digital^Ⓡ automatically adapts to smaller screens, resizing and reformatting text accordingly.

Advanced Development – Category Page Functionality

When 1Digital^Ⓡ developers transferred over all of the information associated with Paravel’s product categories, we also added in some new functionality for them to pass along to their customers thus improving customer experience.

We installed a Metafield Editor into their category page template so that Paravel could make quick changes to some of the badges that appeared on their category page display. This allowed them to edit custom fields so that promotions associated with “new,” “bestseller,” or “featured” products could be more prominently displayed.

This seemingly simple feature gives a lot of power back to Paravel’s admins to make quick and easy changes to the display of their website without working with a developer. A man can be given a fish or taught the art, and we provided detailed instructions to Paravel on how to use and manage the app so that they would easily be able to make changes even after the project had closed.

Similarly, 1Digital^Ⓡ developers created Product Swatches and Quick View functionality on Paravel’s collections pages. We created a custom script for their Shopify Plus collections page that was able to fetch and display the desired information.

The script for these swatches also ensured that when a customer clicked on the swatch associated with the color of interest, the product image would be displayed in that color. In addition, it would display the applicable pricing associated with the change as well as any options for “personalization,” or, if necessary, an “out of stock” message.

Advanced Development – Product Page Functionality

Paravel places a huge emphasis on customer experience, and as such, they required a great deal of additional functionality out of their product page template, including added abilities to help personalize the shopping experience.

Therefore, as part of the advanced development aspect of the project, 1Digital^Ⓡ helped create a new and better set of features to personalize the shopping experience on their website, specifically on their product page.

We configured their product page template so that it displayed similarly to their old Spree store. We then created a stick “add to cart” bar that would remain at the bottom of the product page display. That was the easy part.

We also developed a tool for their product page template that would allow shoppers to personalize their shopper experience and make it more realistic. In addition to offering their customers the ability to see what a given bag (or other product) would look like using the swatch functionality described above, Paravel also gives its customers the ability to personalize their products.

Paravel was interested in the conversion-boosting features of a realistic tool that would allow its customers to actually see what their products would look like once personalized, so we created a tool enabling them to do so.

The tool we built for Paravel displayed a popup with the words “Personalize” when a customer visited the product page We then created a tool that would enable the customer to personalize the product according to the style and color of the lettering that would appear as a monogram with their initials.

This tool displays as a widget on the product page after the customer clicks on “Personalize” and is very easy to manipulate and customize according to their preferences. In order to ensure that the product would display the personalization properly, we had to create a custom script that would accurately display the letters that the customer had entered, in the style they selected, over the right area of the product, as can be seen in the image below. As a final level of functionality, we created a “Nylon Template” that would enable Paravel’s customers to customize their products with embroidered letters instead of hand-painted letters or Appliqué.

There were a few more customizations we created for Paravel’s product pages, including the implementation of four tabs from the product pages on their old Spree store via HTML coding. We also recreated the “Choose Your Own Adventure” functionality from Paravel’s Spree store, which enables customers to further personalize Paravel’s products with Applique and hand-painted designs, on top of a few other customizations to preserve the integrity of the original functionality that appeared on their Spree store.

Integration with Critical Apps

To secure the functionality of their new Shopify Plus store and ensure a smooth, enjoyable user experience, 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency had to integrate Paravel’s new store with its business-critical apps.

Among other things, Paravel’s customers relied on reviews and testimonials that Paravel was able to draw and display via YotPo, which we ensured was seamlessly integrated for them. Paravel also relied heavily on the use of Zaius for customer engagement and CRM, so we performed that integration as well as the aforementioned.

On top of these, Paravel makes use of the functionality afforded not only by RJ Metrics but also by Talkable. These apps provide valuable data to Paravel’s admins and allow for secure referral marketing programs.

1Digital^Ⓡ Agency integrated all of these apps with Paravel’s new store in addition to  coding and developing their new Shopify Plus website. We concluded this project, comprehensive in scope, entailing a migration and advanced custom development, with no hang-ups. That is to say, the client experienced no undue interruptions in business, no loss in traffic, and moved onto a newly developed store with advanced custom functionality without so much as a hiccup. To do that takes experience and thorough processes, both of which 1Digital^Ⓡ integrates into our workflow.

The Complete Solution

Some providers tune their services to one or two highly specialized services, but we know that the problems faced by eCommerce merchants are diverse. If we were only able to offer development services, we wouldn’t have been able to migrate Paravel from Spree to Shopify Plus, which is one of the leading eCommerce platforms for online merchants. Similarly, if we limited ourselves to performing migrations, we wouldn’t have been able to customize their new store the way they wanted.

Shopify Plus design and development services, even when paired with our migration services, are only a small snapshot of what 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency offers. On top of our Shopify custom design services, we also offer comprehensive digital marketing campaigns including highly competitive, thoroughly researched, and targeted SEO and PPC campaigns.

This success story hinges on the fact that we were able to migrate Paravel off of Spree and onto a newly developed Shopify Plus store with advanced functionality. Many of our other eCommerce case studies focus on other eCommerce platforms like BigCommerce design and development, similar Magento services, and digital marketing campaigns. Take a look through our repertoire, and if you want to see how we can solve the problems that face your online business, give us a call at 888-982-8269.

Download PDF

The post How Advanced Shopify Custom Development Creates a Better User Experience appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

In 2019, after having grown exponentially since its inception, XLFeet accepted the fact that their online store platform, Volusion, could not offer them the functionality they needed at the optimal performance level that was required. So, they decided to migrate to another online store platform that was able to offer them the customization and functionality they needed: Magento.

This migration, however, almost cost them their business. The development company that XLFeet hired for this migration fell short of expectation. After the platform migration was complete, XLFeet realized that the 301-redirects that were needed to keep their site performing seamlessly had not been properly implemented. The detailed and thorough performance that was needed for XLFeet to thrive through this migration was seriously lacking.

As a result, XLFeet saw a massive drop in traffic to their site. Their new goal was to restore that traffic. So, Adrian Coulter, CEO and founder of XLFeet, started looking for an SEO company to help with this. When he started googling SEO companies, he was looking for an agency that was not only ranking highly in his search results but one that also had a visually appealing website. That’s when Adrian found 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency.

What drew Adrian to ultimately join forces with 1Digital^Ⓡ was the fact that we were not only familiar with Magento, but we had also done a lot of work on other Magento websites. As he dug deeper into 1Digital^Ⓡ, he found that our SEO process was more thorough, detailed, and granular than other SEO companies he came across. “I liked the organization of your process and how detailed it got. [Another company I looked at] was not anywhere in the universe of being as detailed as you guys were,” Adrian said.

The Process

There are a lot of things that go into an SEO campaign. The SEO process at 1Digital^Ⓡ starts with discovery, project setup, and keyword selection. After this initial stage, it moves into on-page optimization, content creation, and reporting. The process for XLFeet began with keyword research and a full site audit to find any duplicate content, toxic backlinks, broken links, and any other issues. Throughout the campaign, we monitor any onsite and offsite issues, optimize meta titles with target keywords, and follow a content creation plan that allows us to build high-quality backlinks and improve on-page SEO.

When we bring any client on-board, we not only give them access to their own private workspace in our CRM where they have access to see the daily, weekly, and monthly work that goes into the campaign, but we also give them credentials to a proprietary dashboard that tracks keyword rankings and pulls from Google Analytics and Google Search Console. The on-boarding set-up for XLFeet was no different.

Within the first month of SEO with XLFeet, SEO experts at 1Digital^Ⓡ narrowed down a list of keywords to start targeting in this campaign, disavowed all toxic links that came up in the initial technical SEO audit, optimized meta titles for all target pages, and revitalized and optimized the on-page SEO content on those same target pages.

3 Months In

After that significant dip in traffic, the main goal for XLFeet was to bring those numbers back up. To do that, XLFeet needed to improve their keyword rankings and link building. To get them started, we put XLFeet on a 50 keyword SEO campaign. Because their rankings were already relatively strong, we decided to target those keywords that were already ranking in the top few pages to bring them into top position rankings on the first page of Google.

Three months into an SEO campaign with 1Digital^Ⓡ, XLFeet improved in rankings for 37 of their 50 target keywords.

• 
• One of the metrics we track in our proprietary SEO dashboard is the Average Ranking Position Trend. This tells us where xlfeet.com is ranking based on the keywords we are targeting and tracking in our dashboard. Three months into the campaign, XLFeet went from an average ranking of 10 to an average ranking of 7. This means that the keywords being targeted were starting to gain traction and beat competitor rankings in just three months.

So, keyword rankings improved, but what about traffic? What about sales?

If we take a look at the first three months of the campaign and compare the first month and a half to the second month and a half, we see that organic search traffic alone increased over 14%. This increase in traffic and target keyword strategy resulted in a 22% increase in organic search conversion rate, a 43% increase in transactions, and a 45% increase in revenue!

This image below shows the traffic comparing the first half of the campaign to the second.

If we take a look at user behavior for the same time period, we see that many of the target pages in the XLFeet SEO campaign increased in both acquisition and conversion within the first 3 months.

In the image below, one of the pages being targeted saw a 21% increase in organic sessions but over a 200% increase in organic transactions and a 179% increase in conversion rate.

One keyword being targeted in this SEO campaign increased in rankings and is currently ranking on the first page of Google search results, second only to Amazon. Within the first three months of this campaign, the target page for this keyword saw a steady incline in sessions until a sudden jump only 2 months into the campaign.

Within the first three months, users coming to xlfeet.com on a daily basis via organic search doubled.

6 Months In

Six months into the campaign, organic search traffic was steadily increasing. There was still a long way to go to get the traffic back up to where it was before the migration occurred, but XLFeet was heading in the right direction. If we look at months 4-6 of the campaign and compare them with months 1-3, we see organic search traffic increase around 7% but we see much higher increases in conversions. eCommerce conversion rate from organic search increased by almost 43% and transactions doubled!

COVID-19

Not even halfway into 2020, the entire world experienced, first-hand, the effects of a fast-spreading pandemic: COVID-19. This pandemic started to really hit the United States in mid-March and, almost overnight, the effects of this pandemic could be seen internet-wide. While some industries thrived, others started to see their traffic and sales head down a steep decline.

While more and more people were stocking up on essentials, fewer purchases were being made in industries that weren’t considered essential. XLFeet saw this reflected via their business almost immediately. “In the week surrounding St. Patrick’s Day, it was the worst week in the history of my company,” Adrian said.

Traffic and conversions for xlfeet.com dipped right around mid-March and stayed relatively low for about a month until around mid-April when things started to pick back up again. In light of this crisis, Adrian said, “Just, accidentally, being a footwear company where 95% of our business happens online, we’re really, really fortunate.”

Where They Are Now

Currently, XLFeet is continuing to climb in organic metrics and overall growth. Throughout the course of the campaign, organic search has been bringing in the most traffic and the most transactions.

The image below shows users and transactions for each channel over the course of 10 months.

Due to their current status, XLFeet is starting to expand into strategic social media growth to broaden their reach and supercharge their online business.

“This is exciting,” Adrian said. “When I first brought you guys on board…the future was very uncertain and even though we’re in the midst of this crisis here, things are now more certain than ever for us and you guys played a huge role in that.”

Today, XLFeet is making around 70% of the revenue they were making before the migration pitfall with half the traffic they had. “Things are looking better than ever,” Adrian said.

For a company that sells big shoes to big men, you wouldn’t expect there to be a lot of competition for an SEO campaign to be warranted. But SEO isn’t just for businesses with a lot of competition. To gain any sort of traction online, you need to first be visible to your target audience, and SEO is an essential part of getting there. Whether you’re a supplier of books or a specialty supplier of extra-large shoes for men, SEO is important to getting you in front of the right audience that will convert.

To learn more about what SEO can do for you, visit our eCommerce SEO page or read our case studies for insight into what makes an SEO campaign effective and see how SEO experts can transform your online business with strategic SEO strategies. Give us a call at 888-982-8269 to get started or to speak with an SEO professional today!

Download PDF

The post XL Feet: Stepping Into A Fitting SEO Strategy appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

Animal Essentials was founded by Greg Tilford, a world-renowned holistic veterinary educator. Greg has been making herbal mixtures helping people find the best supplements for their beloved pets since 1995. After years of traveling the world and creating unique herbal formulations for practitioners, Greg moved to the eCommerce market in order to connect more pet owners with herbal pet supplements.

The goal of the Animal Essentials team has always been connecting pet owners with the resources they need to keep their companion animals happy and healthy. This process not only includes offering high-quality pet supplements but also means connecting owners with holistic veterinary resources.

Now, in order to expand its online presence, Animal Essentials has partnered with the team at 1DigitalⓇ Agency. Their 25 target keyword national SEO campaign includes the creation of informative blog content and off-site blog content to create beneficial backlinks. The 1DigitalⓇ team will also be optimizing and creating new category web page content to help improve their site’s overall SEO value.

Digital marketing campaigns like this are 1DigitalⓇ Agency’s specialty. Search engine optimization has been their focus since they first opened their doors in 2012 and their team continues to produce amazing results. They have helped businesses like Animal Essentials raise their organic rankings and their domain authority through a combination of onsite optimization and expertly written content.

The entire 1DigitalⓇ team is dedicated to seeing their clients achieve amazing results. Every member of their team comes from an eCommerce background and partnering with them puts those collective decades of experience at your disposal. For Animal Essentials, this means having a team of writers and SEO specialists dedicated to helping their business grow its domain authority. Working with 1Digital also means having a relationship with an agency that can offer so much more.

No matter what digital services your business needs, 1DigitalⓇ Agency can help. In addition to digital marketing services, they also offer design, development, migration, and support services to businesses on any eCommerce platform. Every job their team works on is completed with SEO and digital marketing in mind so you can be confident that your migration or redesign will allow your marketing efforts to continue to perform.

You can reach out to 1Digital’sⓇ team of eCommerce experts by calling 215-809-1567 or sending an email to info@1digitalagency.com. If you are looking for marketing services like SEO, their team will put together a free audit so you can see where your website stands and plan the most effective strategy for your business. If you want to look before you leap, check out their website to see all of the successful projects they have completed for their clients.

The post Animal Essentials Chooses 1Digital for Their SEO appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

In short, they absolutely matter. Keywords serve as the foundation of your SEO campaign. They are your road map to achieving more success as a business. The keywords you choose to target are either going to lead you down the path to success or failure.

SEO keywords can range from short-tail to long-tail keywords that are used throughout website copy with the goal of bringing in relevant organic traffic directly from search engines. We have all been in a situation where we’ve encountered a problem and need to find a solution. What do you do? You probably go to Google to search for the answer. If the answer involves buying a product, you’ll probably take a look at top search results and make a purchase based on what you find. And that’s where you want your business to be – on the first page, at the top of search engine results.

So the selection of keywords is a big part of an SEO campaign, but why? To reach the desired audience.

When people search for a specific term or keyword, they might be searching for it from the literal sense as well as the implicit clues that can be beneath the surface. For example, let’s say that someone is searching for “best baby cribs 2019”. In the literal sense, this keyword is designed to locate what has been reviewed as the best and to find lists of the best cribs and articles that were published in 2019. But beneath the surface, the implicit information that needs to be considered is that people searching this term are looking for reasons why a certain crib is listed as the best. They are likely first-time parents and are doing research with the intention of buying something later and that there may be other items that they are looking for while putting together a nursery.

Keywords also act as personas in the sense that you are looking for your target audience. The keyword you target on a specific page may be the primary target, but it should also set you up to connect with your audience on a bunch of related searches.

With the knowledge of the importance of keywords to SEO, your selection needs to be educated and informed. You can consider a lot of options and try to find the best target keywords based on your audience, or you can choose a digital agency that can help you find the best opportunities to improve your rankings.

Let’s face it, there are a lot of similar companies to yours that will be in competition for search rankings. That’s why 1Digital Agency uses a process that begins with extensive keyword research. Using keyword research tools and putting together a full SEO audit are a few of the things that can help you identify the best relevant keywords for your campaign.

When it comes to SEO keywords and campaigns, it’s important to remember that this is a marathon and not a sprint. An SEO campaign requires time and patience to see results. What 1Digital will do is identify the opportunities where you may be able to see some increases early in the campaign and improve your rankings. As you improve the overall domain authority by creating content that offers something to the reader and shows your relevance and expertise on topics to search engines, you can slowly start to consider more specific keywords that may have greater competition. So, you may start with more long-tail keywords that offer greater opportunity and allows you to form a content strategy that reaches potential customers and shows them how much you know about the industry before you get to head terms that are more direct.

If you have struggled with search engine optimization on your own and need help forming the proper SEO keywords for your campaign, look no further than 1Digital Agency as your guide to building a successful campaign. Since our inception in 2012, we have worked with hundreds of clients to build SEO campaigns that are detailed and use a proven strategy to help clients reach their goals, improve their organic traffic and build better domain authority.

Get the process started today by signing up for a free, comprehensive SEO audit that allows us to identify the areas where improvement is needed for your website and the opportunities to build up your search rankings with specific keywords. Give us a call at 215-809-1567 or send an email to info@1digitalagency.com to get started today.

The post The Importance of Keywords In SEO appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

Every second counts when it comes to your business, so you want your website to be running at the highest speed possible to help save you from losing potential customers. If you notice even the slightest delay in page speed, then you have to be concerned that it could be costing you hard-earned customers. With that in mind, here are the top 5 ways to improve your page speed and keep your website moving quickly.

Analyze Page Speed

The first step to improving your loading times is analyzing it and discovering the problem. You can run a test that can break down the load times of all elements of your webpage and determine what is taking the longest to load. A tool that performs a website speed test, such as WebPageTest, can show you where these delays are coming from and help show the gap between when the page begins to render and when it completely loads. By simply gaining an understanding of the areas where your page speed suffers, you can take a more specific approach to find the problem areas and the solutions to have faster loading times.

Optimize Images

One of the more common reasons for delays in loading time and page speed can be large image files. Many of the product images you want are high-quality, but too much size can create a lot of loading speed issues. Using a free image re-sizer, you can bring large files down to an appropriate size. Find out the maximum allowed image size for your website. Save your images as that size and even use an 80 percent quality version that can reduce the file size even more and make your images more optimized for faster page load times.

Remove Unneeded Plugins

There are some plugins that provide value, like the Google Analytics plugin that can provide you with valuable information about your website visitors. That said, some plugins can really slow down your website speed. Check your HTML code to see that you even need to include a lot of plugins and remove the ones that are not essential. This can improve your website speed and loading times and create for a faster and better experience.

Remove Unnecessary Coding

Before your page is viewable, your CCS file needs to load. If you have built on the same code for a long time, it may have unnecessary coding that can make the file larger and need more time to load. If this delays the visibility of your website, you run the risk of losing people before they even reach your website. You should review the case and look for any hidden elements that are not in use or use an online tool that can analyze CSS and remove the extra spaces. By just removing some of the unnecessary clutter, you can give your pages a noticeable boost.

Cache Your Pages

Caching your pages means that you can reduce the number of requests that are made to the server. When you do this, your page speed can increase greatly. Websites that use this method are often successful during times of higher traffic when many users are trying to use your website at the same time. By making sure you cache your pages, you ensure that you are prepared for a rush of users and can make it easier for returning visitors to get onto the page quickly and easily.

Is page speed something with which you have experienced problems? A custom development project can help to improve your website speed and loading times for the better and make for better customer experience.

Customer experience is an essential part of the buyer’s journey. If buying a product online is still going to take an hour, there are people who are going to leave and look for another source to get the item they were looking for. You can see better performance from your website from new website visitors to potentially a higher number of conversions just by offering your customers great user experience.

Get the custom development project you need to get your website into top shape, loading fast, and providing smooth operation so your visitors are impressed with how quickly they can get to the pages they want to see.

With the help of 1Digital Agency and our expert web developers, page speed can certainly be addressed with the right custom development project. With an improved site speed, you can see better search engine results and SEO performance. You can keep customers impressed with how your website operates, leading to lower bounce rates because customers will want to be on your website.

Let us know what you are looking to improve with your website and page speed by contacting us by calling 215-809-1567 or sending an email to info@1digitalagency.com to learn more about what services we provide. Our goal is to help you achieve your goals and grow your online business.

The post 5 Ways to Improve Page Speed appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

When 1Digital Agency designed Unicycle.com’s new website they had been the foremost name in online unicycle sales for 20 years. People in-the-know already turned to them for unicycles and parts, but they had never done any professional eCommerce digital marketing outreach. Like a lot of eCommerce merchants, they tried their hand at a Google marketing campaign using what they could glean from the resources available to them. “We took lessons and a seminar,” said Amy Drummond, President of Unicycle.com. “I never had time to figure it out. The lessons made me realize just how much work it is.” When 1Digital finished up launching the brand new website, we asked Amy if she would want our help getting her digital marketing on the right path. With the strength of the Unicycle.com domain, all it took was a little professional set up and management to get marketing working for them. In the last 4 months, the results have been nothing short of phenomenal!

Google Pay Per Click Marketing

“Usually we try to get a lot of feedback from the client upfront,” Bobby P, PPC manager at 1Digital, told me. “The problem was, that Unicycle didn’t have a lot of history with PPC.” Whenever 1Digital starts a new Pay Per Click campaign we look back into the historical data. The more data we have the more of a head start we can get. We can see what products worked in the past. We can see what times of day or devices to bid on. Most importantly, it gives us a goal. A number to beat so we know we’re giving the client an improvement on what they could get simply managing the account themselves. For Unicycle, we didn’t have this historical data to go off of. “They had turned a Google campaign on in the past, but it was on autopilot,” Bobby said. “The tracking wasn’t set up and the budget was low. Essentially, we were looking at a campaign rebuild, and rebuilds always take time.”

The first thing we do, whenever we rebuild any new eCommerce digital marketing campaign is we take a look at the site and make sure that if we bring traffic back to a site it can actually turn that traffic into sales. Now, we had just rebuilt the Unicycle.com site from the ground up so we knew they had things on the site well in hand. For anyone considering eCommerce digital marketing who hasn’t just had their site redone by 1Digital Agency, here are a few of the things that we look out for:

Once the site is ship-shape, we need to start collecting the data we didn’t start with. 1Digital PPC campaigns are often kept at a low budget for the first month or so in order to collect data that can be used to make decisions about the shape of the campaign. At first, we need to try things out and see what works and what doesn’t. The bids that do see Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) we push farther, while the bids that don’t perform get pulled. Bobby advises patience for the first few months with a rebuilding PPC campaign. “The first month is all collecting data, and the second month is evaluating if those moves we made were the right moves. A rebuild should expect a 4-5 month timeline to start seeing the campaign take off.”

Fortunately for Unicycle, their campaign took off much more quickly than that. In the four months that we’ve been optimizing the Unicycle.com PPC campaign, they have already increased their advertising budget twice because of the return on ad spend that they’ve been seeing generated by the campaign. As of April 2020, the campaign is sitting at an average ROAS of over 1500%, meaning that for every one dollar spent on the campaign, fifteen dollars is coming back in transaction value.

This is an average figure for all the different ad groups we run. When setting up an eCommerce PPC campaign it’s advisable to break your strategy down into component ad groups so that you can change up your bidding strategy slightly depending on the type of product or search term you’re bidding on. You can see that some ad groups, pictured below, are showing a return of twenty-five or thirty dollars to one.

Unicycle already had a strong brand name, and industry-leading quality. They put themselves in a position to have these kinds of results through years of building their business. When it comes to eCommerce digital marketing, sometimes all it takes is a few adjustments from someone who knows what they are looking at to unlock all-new revenue streams.

eCommerce SEO Marketing

SEO marketing for Unicycle followed a very similar trajectory. When we took the campaign, nothing had been done on the site previously in the way of professional SEO work. “We never had anyone work with us on SEO before,” Amy said. “We weren’t sure what, if anything, needed to be done. You don’t know what you don’t know.” In fact, Unicycle was doing very well already in the absence of professional SEO work. They had many first page and first position rankings due to the longevity of their domain building its authority over the last two decades. We knew that we could parlay this authority and simply give it more direction, to capture keywords for Unicycle that they had their eye on ranking for.

First, we want to educate anyone new to SEO about how a campaign with 1Digital Agency works. We like to have our clients as involved with their SEO work as possible, so they know what’s being done and can provide us valuable insight as experts in their own industry. The first thing we’ll do is select a keyword list. The bigger the keyword list, the more work to target each keyword, the bigger and more aggressive the campaign is. Based on that keyword list we then choose pages on the site which will be our targets. These are the pages we select to push up the rankings for the relevant keywords. This is almost always a category page. SEO work takes time to build. So while individual products may come and go as availability changes, it’s a safe bet to increase page authority for a category. Once the pages are chosen we begin to optimize. We set headings, title tags, meta titles, etc. for the keywords we want that page to rank for. This stage also includes fixing technical errors that exist on the site that Google may frown upon. Then we begin to create content and backlinks. The bulk of an SEO campaign is showing Google that you are a reliable publisher of content, and that other sites reference your expertise in the content they create. After all, Google is a search engine. The best way to get in their good graces is to show that you can provide their users with the information that they are searching for.

Though that might seem like a lot, we try to make it easy for merchants new to SEO to get on board. “I would say it was a very easy process,” Amy told me. “Whenever content came in we tried to make the time to check it. I love having our meetings, I love that you guys are great at communicating.”

For Unicycle, we wanted to go after a suite of keywords they didn’t already have. Amy mentioned that their sales of Penny Farthing bicycles, bikes with one large wheel up front and one small wheel in the back, had been slower than they would like. We took a look and found that for keywords related to Penny Farthing, Unicycle was consistently ranking outside page one of Google. So we set our sights on it. We devoted a good portion of our keyword list to Penny Farthing related terms and optimized their Panny Farthing category to rank better.

As you can see above, thanks to a few months of concentrated SEO work, the Penny Farthings Category Page is now second only to the home page for bringing organic search visitors into the Unicycle.com website. The transactions brought in from organic search users landing on that category page has increased by 137% in the past 2 months.

Overall, organic traffic to the Unicycle site has increased by 43% in the last two months (as compared to the previous two) and revenue from organic search traffic has more than tripled! It increased by 264% in the last two months. As with PPC, Unicycle had a strong domain coming into this campaign. All it took was a few professional touches to give that authority a direction and put it to use where it could be most effective.

Starting a New eCommerce Digital Marketing Campaign

If you’ve been handling your own digital marketing in the past you may not be unlocking your site’s full potential. Help from professionals, who study these things for a living, can make improvements to your strategy that you simply would have no way of identifying without a certain level of expertise.

When I asked Amy about her experience with a digital marketing campaign so far she told me, “It’s been great! Because of the great job that you guys have done with the SEO and the PPC people are finding us. Most of our sales are coming from people who have never purchased from us before.” And she continued with her advice for anyone in eCommerce who had never tried a digital marketing campaign before. “I would say all in all it’s totally worth the money. It’s absolutely worth it to have someone professional running it for you. We’re all so busy running our companies. It’ so great to have someone who can do all the things I knew needed doing, but couldn’t do myself.”

If you’re interested in seeing what a laser targeted digital marketing campaign could unlock in your site please give the eCommerce digital marketing professionals a call at 1Digital Agency. We look at each site individually and determine the best way forward for each client, based on where they are and where they want to go. Let us take a look at your strengths and weaknesses and help make your site what it ought to be.

Download PDF

The post Unlocking a Site’s Potential with eCommerce Digital Marketing appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.