It can be expensive and it involves no small commitment in time or resources, but then again, organic marketing, like SEO, often returns the biggest gains, not only in terms of actual dollar value, but also in customer loyalty.

Naturally, some of our businesses are in these restricted spheres. 

Fortunately for them, we have a proven history of making things work, especially with SEO. 

The Challenges of Digital Marketing for PPC-Restricted Businesses

For our clients that are in PPC-restricted industries, the main challenge is that platforms like Google and Facebook won’t allow them to pay to advertise. 

That shuts doors not only for them but also for us. After all, we do also offer PPC management services. 

It also tends to make these industries extremely competitive with respect to SEO. 

The reason for this is that all of the other contenders must also engage in SEO (and organic social media marketing) in order to survive.

Since one of the cornerstones of SEO is content, the challenge becomes even bigger. To write for these clients, we need to become industry experts ourselves. 

More often than not, this requires close collaboration, and coordination, with the client in order to determine a cogent content schedule.

That way we can move in lockstep. As you’re about to see, it works. 

Select Findings

A picture tells a story. They also say a picture tells a thousand words. So, I combed through Google Search Console and Google Analytics to find real data that illustrates the performance of our SEO services for some of our clients in PPC-restricted industries. 

The data you’re about to see covers 4 separate clients, each of them in slightly different industries. All are PPC-restricted.

Let’s take a look at blog growth for one of our clients that has been around several years. 

Growth has been slow but steady. If you’re wondering, we were starting out with absolutely nothing. The blog was bare when we started the campaign and had 0 visits. We were working with plenty of days at the beginning that had no visits, but as you can see we’ve picked it up. 

Growth has been particularly strong in the last year, and domain authority and sessions are both growing. In this particular case, remember – we’re not in this to grow our clients’ blogs, but to get them visits to their product and category pages in order to increase conversions. Blog growth only sweetens the deal and serves as a validator, for us. 

Here’s overall traffic to the same client’s website, basically from the start of the campaign to the present time: 

You don’t even need to see actual numbers to see how strong growth has been. It’s up almost double, on average, since the campaign began. 

Let’s take a look at blog growth of another client’s blog.

The situation is the same as it was for the last client. We were working with nothing at the outset but have seen huge gains in the last year. Blog growth and time on page are very strong (nearly 3 minutes time on page is impressive in its own right) and the fact that there’s even a little bit of page value is even more impressive. We do eCommerce SEO, remember, and the fact that people are reading our blogs and then buying from our client’s website is extremely gratifying for us (and them). 

Here’s traffic to the same client’s website, showing growth during the first half and latter half of the current campaign by breaking it up into roughly two components. 

Again, you don’t really need numbers to see how dramatic growth has been. Still, figures tell a pretty powerful story. Pageviews are up almost double. Page value has more than doubled since we started the campaign. I won’t belabor this. The image and the figures tell you as much as I possibly could.

As impressive as these metrics are, sometimes it’s visibility and clicks that show how effective our efforts are. 

Check out these results through Google Search Console for another client. 

The weird spike in the middle makes it a little hard to see just how dramatic the positive movements were for this client, but the metrical increases are clear. 

Clicks increased by almost 5,000 during the second half of the period, and impressions nearly doubled. Nearly twice as many searchers saw our client’s website in the organic search results as had seen it during the immediately preceding period. 

These results tell an even more pointed story, for a different client, and the image is far more compelling. 

Clicks, impressions, average position, and even click-through rate all increased for this client during this period. Impressions didn’t quite double but increased substantially, and the same could be said for clicks. 

What’s really impressive about this is that, as impressions increase, click-through rate usually drops. It’s very hard to get both more impressions and a higher share of clicks from them, but we did. This is likely due to the fact that we were targeting highly relevant keywords for this client. 

That doesn’t just mean more people saw our client’s listings; it means more of the people that saw them were looking for what they sell, and clicked. 

The Proof Is In the…Results

These figures span a period of more than 3 years – in two cases nearly 4 – and for 4 separate clients with unique models. 

All of them operate in PPC-restricted industries, and for all of them, the keys to growth have been in a strategic partnership that entailed the delivery of highly targeted, highly, effective SEO services. The rest of our case studies tell similar tales. 

If you’re reading this and are responsible for the success of an eCommerce business in a restricted vertical, an SEO strategy might just be the missing piece.

The post SEO Case Study: Tracking Long-Term Growth of PPC-Restricted Clients appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

“More sales.” 

That is the ultimate bottom line, isn’t it? Yet various marketing channels, such as eCommerce SEO and B2B social media marketing strategies don’t just “deliver” increases in sales. 

They increase authority, credibility, reputability, brand exposure, organic rankings, and follower count, which in turn translate into more sales, in the long term. 

That is, in a perfect world, and assuming targeting and messaging have been properly researched, refined, and delivered. 

This is not the only thing that eCommerce SEO and B2B social media marketing strategies have in common, by the way. 

They also don’t work overnight. 

One of our clients, which serves municipalities, contractors, and forestry, landscaping, and construction businesses with skid steer, excavator, and tractor attachments, learned that lesson firsthand. 

Addressing The Myth of “Virality”

We’ve all heard about how social media marketing is instantaneous. At least, we’ve all heard about how social media has deleterious effects on our attention spans because it delivers instant gratification. 

We’ve also heard that social media marketing can make something explode overnight. 

There’s a glaring flaw here, though. This isn’t about social media marketing; just about social media in general. 

Businesses don’t flourish because of a video of a guy setting his kitchen on fire that accidentally took off. 

Frankly, no successful business strategy is, can be, or even should be predicated on virality. 

Virality is fickle, unpredictable, and most disturbingly, unreplicable. No business can succeed without a long-term vision. And virality is the actual antithetical incarnation of vision. 

This notion that social media makes things explode overnight is a dangerous disease for business owners. It sets false expectations that B2B social media marketing strategies should by right immediately take off. 

This is dangerous, because not only is the expectation unreasonable, but it is also unrealistic, and unattainable, and what’s worse, if a business experiences some degree of virality at the outset of a campaign, the natural conclusion is a terrible recession. 

That is, virality is not sustainable. 

This was a bit of a roadblock for the client mentioned previously, who had big hopes for social media marketing. 

It ended up turning out quite well – but it took a little bit of time and a whole lot of patience.

Challenges Associated with the Campaign; What Our Goals Were 

As stated, this client sells attachments for, and equipment associated with skid steers, excavators, and tractors. This client’s customer base is largely comprised of other business owners, such as landscapers, contractors, agricultural companies, construction and demolition companies, and municipalities. 

Operating in the business-to-business sector is challenging enough in its own right, but our social media marketing audit of this client’s competitors showed that their successes on their social platforms was likely attributable to their large following. 

Therefore, one of the prime goals of our B2B social media marketing campaign for this client, especially in the short term, was to accumulate a larger following among users in their target market. 

Early in the campaign, our social media strategists and content creators focused on improving visibility and authority on this client’s social media platforms, on Pinterest and Instagram, but chiefly through Facebook. 

Consisting posting, focusing on the variety and versatility of the client’s products, as well as on their key selling points – they are made in America with American steel and do not use cheap foreign parts or raw materials – helped to gain followers and improve interactions and brand visibility.

But, as is often the case at the outset of B2B social media marketing campaigns, spend was not being substantiated with conversions, at least not from the client’s perspective. 

Conversion Concerns: How We Turned It Around 

Early in the campaign, between May and July 2022, the several paid and organic campaigns, though they were improving brand awareness, encouraging customer engagement, and gaining followers, were not generating any conversions. 

Our dual approach of paid and organic marketing involved the creation of campaigns for prospecting and retargeting, and further segmented the audiences based on interest and location. We created multiple ad formats and performed A/B testing to continuously refine formats, creatives, and copy. 

Our project managers knew that part of the slow start to the campaign had to do with low spend so we collaborated with the client to triple spend. The client, though hesitant, agreed. 

Fortunately, after a few more months, we began to see consistent results, proving that our project managers’ assumptions – namely, that we needed more time and more spend – were accurate. 

Our average ROAS (return on ad spend) for this client steadily grew to 10x, which you can see in the figure below. 

It would be accurate to say that growth was slow but steady and that B2B social media marketing, like SEO, takes time, but it pays off in the end. In this case, the tale is told in concrete dollar values and ROAS.

We experienced similar gains in our organic strategy for this client, although it also took time. 

Since organic social media marketing works a little differently from paid channels, our primary goals revolved around aligning brand messaging and promoting the company’s core values and unique value propositions to increase visibility among their target audience, so as to increase engagement and followers. 

Our chief tactic in pursuing this strategy was to highlight the benefits of the client’s products; that is, how they can save users time, money, and effort, rather than simply enumerating product specifications. By addressing these potential pain points, we increased the appeal of our client’s products in the eyes of users. 

We also increased exposure by posting positive client reviews, which helped address client hesitation and improved the brand’s reputation. 

Serving this client a B2B social media marketing strategy, we knew that there were many in their target market that might not have a present need but who might also eventually become customers if presented with the proper circumstances.

Therefore, the main goal of the organic portion of the campaign was to favorably brand the company in the eyes of social media users and to amass the widest follower base possible. It continues to be our goal. 

Like the paid portion of the campaign, growth started slow, but as you can see from the data below, growth has been very positive. 

The data speaks for itself. New profile and page visits grew substantially, by more than 300%, from October 2022 to March 2023, and new likes grew well. Both started slow but really started to pick up starting in 2023. 

This is due in part to our consistency of posting, paired with the relevance of the content of our posts to the target audience of this client. The frequency of posting played no small hand here. 

As you can see from the graph above, we posted more frequently for this client than the majority of their competitors. It took time, but the results have responded in kind, and favorably. 

In addition to making follower base growth a goal, we also doubled down on nurturing existing followers. In partnership with the company’s owner, we developed a campaign message, “You can rely on us because we want you to win,” while continuing to focus on the value and quality provided by the company’s products.

Together, these tactics ultimately enabled us to triple their Facebook follower base.  

The Lesson: Patience Pays 

All told, we were able to turn around this client’s paid campaigns and ramp up the initial slow growth in interactions and follower growth that the campaign’s organic channels experienced early on. 

A key takeaway here is that as important as our consistency, target audience profiling, and brand messaging were, one of the most important aspects of success in social media marketing is patience. 

Like most if not all digital marketing strategies, success doesn’t come overnight and only arises from hard work and patience. 

It’s something our SEO and social media strategists know well, and a lesson learned for this client which comes with a desirable result: revenue and follower growth are still on a positive trajectory. 

The post B2B Social Media Marketing Strategy, Like SEO, Takes Time appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

To them, carbon fiber and the finished products that can be made with it constitute a passion. They deliver exceptionally high quality, low tolerance carbon fiber products, made with UV-resistant resin, suitable for a wide range of applications in engineering and manufacturing.

It only takes a five-minute stint going through their “About Us,” and “Resources” pages to see how seriously they take their business. It would almost make sense to assume that with such a unique business model, they face little enough competition that they wouldn’t need to invest heavily in organic digital marketing strategies, such as eCommerce SEO. One might almost correctly assume that marketing “does itself.”

Well, yes and no. It’s not necessarily wrong to assume that a niche market will be faced with a lower volume of competition than those dealing in broader consumer markets, but the competition that is present is often much fiercer. It’s also often the case that businesses operating in specialty markets serve loyal fanbases that are very well educated on their products and processes and not as easy to sway.

So, while the overall competitive landscape might be different, that doesn’t mean the challenge isn’t there. There might be fewer rungs in the ladder to the top, but it’s harder to reach each one.

This is one of the areas in which an organic digital marketing strategy, search engine optimization specifically, can be executed to great effect. Because much of the results attributable to a successful eCommerce SEO campaign are the result of content production, the best results go to the most conscientious researchers and content producers.

This is an area in which we knew we could deliver for Protech Composites. Here’s how we did it.

Keyword Research: Less Can Be More

Our seasoned SEO project managers knew they were working in a specialized industry from the start. Sometimes we suggest highly aggressive campaigns for clients that are positioned advantageously for rapid growth, but that’s not always the best path forward.

Sometimes, less can be more. To be specific, that means that optimizing a campaign for a few select, highly targeted keywords can make more sense than simply going after as many reasonable keywords as possible. The former is calculated, the latter is a tactic of brute force.

We took the former approach, working with Protech Composites to determine a carefully curated list of 25 target keywords that we would use to line the foundation of our keyword strategy, and which would underscore all of our pursuant optimizations.

The keywords selected are proprietary to the strategy, but our project managers took great pains to ensure that they represented a delicate balance on the following points of search volume, competitive density and difficulty, and carefully aligned search intent. There are many keywords that are in some way or other relevant to the carbon fiber industry, but not all of them are directly relevant to Protech Composites or its customers..

First Steps

Once we settled on a cohort of target keywords, there were a few things that our technical team needed to accomplish before the efforts of our content production team would really start to take effect.

First, our technical team conducted a thorough SEO audit of ProtechComposites.com. The initial audit revealed quite a few promising signs that would bode well for our SEO campaign. First, there were no crawler errors detected. The initial audit also concluded that Protech’s website had no broken links or toxic backlinks.

Some other features were already found to have been in an SEO-friendly state. For example, Protech’s URLs and images were already optimized, along with certain metadata.

Google Analytics (GA) and Google Search Console (GSC) had already been set up, so our technical team created a proprietary dashboard for the client, optimized 20 target pages, and began running ongoing scans in order to be ahead of technical or crawler errors.

With the canvas prepared, our content and technical teams began optimizing content and sewing the seeds of link-building strategy to increase domain authority and organic rankings.

The Role of Content in eCommerce SEO

Content plays a key role in the optimization of eCommerce websites, both for SEO and other organic marketing efforts like content marketing and social media marketing. One of the great things about optimized content is that there are multiple different forms of it. There are also multiple ranking factors associated with it, and it can be used for a wide range of purposes.

To be specific, our content producers put Protech Composites on a schedule that included the delivery of a variety of different blog posts and offsite guest posts, in addition to optimized category and product descriptions.

By regularly delivering optimized on-page content (blog posts and product or service descriptions) we were able to accomplish a few goals. One is that we showed Google that Protech Composites was active in publishing keyword-optimized content, both long and short form, on a regular basis. This alerted Google that Protech Composites was an authority in its industry and should be recognized by allotting higher organic rankings to it for keywords and search terms present in our optimized content and for which potential customers were searching.

Our on-page content also gave our technical team the ability to improve the internal linking structure of Protech Composites’ website, which improves both user experience through improved navigability as well as the technical SEO aspect of site structure.

On the same topic, our content production team also began regularly distributing content (in the form of offsite posts) to third-party websites for the purpose of generating backlinks to ProtechComposites.com.

Digital Marketing By the Numbers: Keyword Movements and Organic Traffic Increases

The unique thing about the SEO campaign for Protech Composite’s eCommerce site is that it started to produce positive shifts in organic keyword standings after only a few months. We typically tell our clients not to expect significant results for at least six months, since eCommerce SEO is a long-term digital marketing strategy and the efforts compound on themselves.

In this case, however, our project managers started to note positive movement within only a few months after the beginning of the project. At the right, you can see some of the keyword movements that occurred only recently, in January of 2022. Positive shifts began much earlier, but the current standings reflect some of our progress to date.

As you can see, the target keywords we’ve selected have a healthy range of search volumes, ranging from less than 100 to over 1,000 per month. Protech Composites ranks for many of them on page one or two, but as you can see, movements are still positive, up a few positions for each keyword.

This on its own bodes well for an eCommerce SEO campaign. It corresponds to higher impressions, but that doesn’t necessarily guarantee higher traffic or conversions. Luckily, in both cases, Protech has seen positive trends, even though the campaign has only been ongoing for a few months.

The image below shows a few organic metrics corresponding to the period from October 2021 to January 2022, as compared to the previous period. Notably, organic pageviews are up, as is the session duration, significantly. Despite modest growth in sessions, the average time on page’s substantial increase is an indication that our targeting techniques have been working.

The following image presents a more compelling picture. It also shows organic metrics for all pages for the same period. This time, however, the jump is more noticeable. Three metrics, in particular, being the conversion rate, transactions, and revenue were all up considerably. Conversion rate and transactions both grew by more than 10%, with revenue more than doubling.

We can hardly take credit for the big jump in revenue, but the fact that conversions and transactions both grew noticeably is also an indication that we were attracting the right audience. Despite the mild boost to organic traffic, our efforts were successful in attracting traffic with the most intent to purchase – a claim that can be underscored by Protech’s growing conversion rate.

Finally, to illustrate the success of our joint efforts so far, we need to point your attention in the direction of some organic figures associated with content pages on Protech Composites’ website. The following figures apply to organic users during the same period but only to their content pages.

As you can see below, growth in page views and time on page was also modest. The bounce rate even increased a little, which is actually to be expected when encountering a jump in traffic. What’s telling is the impressive increase in page value, up more than 74%, almost double, from the previous period.

This is, once again, a strong cue that our targeting is working. Even with mild growth in traffic figures, users were increasingly navigating through content pages and converting at a higher percentage of the time than they had been previously. In other words, more qualified traffic was landing on ProtechComposites.com, and the proof is in the pudding. Conversions and transactions are both up.

Ramp Up Your Organic Digital Marketing Efforts

Those of you reading this who operate your own businesses in competitive, niche industries: these are results you too can replicate.

Contact our eCommerce SEO experts to learn more about how you can optimize the pages on your site, generate backlinks, and attract more qualified organic traffic to your eCommerce store. We’ll build a custom SEO project for your company that will optimize your website to attract new business.

We’ll even get you started with other supporting organic and paid marketing efforts, such as content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and PPC management, taking advantage of a balance of digital channels to expand your customer base. Consult our collection of eCommerce case studies to learn more or contact us today at 888-982-8269 or at Info@1DigitalAgency.com to get started.

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An eCommerce PPC advertising campaign can, of course, also generate revenue for an online business. When managed skillfully by a team of eCommerce PPC management professionals, a PPC strategy can generate significant increases in revenue, especially during short, highly competitive periods of time.

The latter is the main reason that most online businesses allocate some of their marketing budgets to paid search campaigns – it all comes down to money – and PPC services can reap big gains.

The thing is, not only is there more than one type of paid search ad, there are multiple platforms offering paid search strategies. Top contenders include Google (via Google AdWords), Bing (through Microsoft Advertising), and social media platforms, such as Facebook (through Facebook Ads Manager). A business can profit significantly by utilizing the paid search capabilities of only one platform, such as Google AdWords. However, a unified eCommerce PPC management strategy directing efforts on more than one campaign, on more than one platform, will produce the greatest results.

An eCommerce PPC Agency Sets the Stage

Our client, Lady Black Tie, specializes in offering fashion-forward formalwear to savvy shoppers around the country. Demand for their products has grown so steadily over time that they grew from a regional supplier to a nationwide brand that is well-respected for their unique products.

Business for Lady Black Tie is also highly seasonal; many of their customers are bridesmaids gearing up for wedding season, or young ladies prepared for Prom, Homecoming, and other formal festivities. As a result, customer search queries change throughout the year, as does demand for certain styles of fashion.

Lady Black Tie has some entrepreneurial savants behind the scenes, responsible for a successful business model and insightful marketing techniques. They sell high-quality products, have developed a loyal following on social media, and use historical sales data to guide their promotions.

The company had already established a strong brand and positioning in the market, even going far enough to establish the foundation for a successful paid search campaign.

Success via Traditional Paid Search Strategies

At the point that Lady Black Tie partnered with us for eCommerce PPC management services, they were already running a successful Google Shopping campaign. Due to the highly visual nature of their products and the client’s original, aesthetically stimulating product photography, their shopping campaign was already progressing profitably. This is not a case wherein a client came to 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency looking for a fix; it is a case of us taking a good thing and making it better.

1Digital^Ⓡ Agency’s PPC experts took over management of Lady Black Tie’s Google Shopping campaign and expanded their Google PPC campaigns with Search and Display ads. When we assumed management of the PPC campaign, it was right around the Prom season in April of 2021.

We updated targeting associated with the campaign towards girls in the proper age bracket and leveraged tools on the client website to manage in and out-of-stock alerts. In conjunction with our optimizations of the PPC campaign, we configured In-Stock Notify to send out alerts to interested shoppers when items of interest were back in stock; that way, visitors that might not have converted through the ad the first time around due to out-of-stock notices would return to complete the purchase. The client had a banner season, with significant gains.

The data above corresponds to the performance of the client’s Google Ad campaigns during April 2021, as compared to the previous period. As you can see, revenue, transactions and the overall eCommerce conversion rates jumped significantly. Transactions and revenue in particular experienced significant gains, more than doubling performance from the previous period. Session durations also increased significantly while the bounce rate decreased.

While this client has produced a variety of visual content, including photography and videos, our eCommerce PPC experts assembled and configured the ads, updating our targeting across Google Search, Shopping, and Display channels to let the visual presentation of these ads work their magic. We adjusted targeting continuously to give a boost to ROI and cut back on the overall cost associated with the campaigns.

When prom season was over we retooled the Google PPC Ads campaigns to focus more on the late Spring and early Summer wedding season. We shifted the budget and messaging of the ads to target brides and bridesmaids; adjusting messaging to advertise the fact that Lady Black Tie makes it possible for all bridesmaids to get on the same order.

Big Gains with Facebook Ad Services

Lady Black Tie, with its loyal social media following, already had been running a successful Facebook Ads campaign; again, the instance was one of us taking the reins and improving on a good thing while uniting our paid search advertising.

Lady Black Tie has a large, loyal cohort of followers on its social platforms and works with a professional modeling agency to produce photography and videos to promote its products. Our PPC experts took those raw materials and converted them into Facebook Video and Carousel Ads that answer a lot of customer queries before they even have a chance to ask them.

Our Facebook Ads display Lady Black Tie’s products in a favorable yet realistic light, addressing customer concerns about how the dress will lay and flow, as well as giving a subjective impression of its character. The appealing nature of the ads piqued user interest; our placement and targeting help to seal the deal.

Facebook Ads Manager allows for some of the most useful targeting in all of paid search marketing, which we have been able to use to great effect to streamline their Facebook Ads for heightened levels of conversion and profitability.

We’ve placed a special emphasis on age-based and marital-status-based targeting. Facebook also allows for more precise targeting based on interest and intent to partake in upcoming events. By targeting users that are slated to attend upcoming weddings and formal engagements, we’ve been able to precisely position Lady Black Tie’s ads for success.

Our PPC project managers also keep close tabs on user behavior across platforms while gauging the health of our clients’ paid search campaigns. We’ve noticed that the average session duration for users across all of Lady Black Tie’s platforms is uncustomarily high – close to ten minutes – signifying a high degree of engagement and interest. Interested customers visitors and consume content for prolonged periods of time, belying their interest.

As we optimized their campaigns, we were careful to be succinct with messaging; although Lady Black Tie enjoys a committed, loyal following, the highly visual nature of their products requires that the ads be visually heavy and light on text. Our ads used minimal text, perhaps graced by an emoji, letting the pictorial or video content do the heavy lifting.

Many of the seasonal optimizations and changes in messaging that we conducted for Lady Black Tie’s Google ads were also reflected in their Facebook ads. We changed messaging during the Spring and Summer to pivot with changing consumer preferences, keying in on different seasonal buying patterns, such as Prom, weddings, and now that we are entering the Fall, Homecoming. Our responsive approach to changing the messaging of their social media ads is one of the keys to the ongoing success of their campaigns.

While some eCommerce PPC management service providers might be satisfied to set the course for a paid search campaign and let the results roll in however they might, our PPC specialists are constantly vigilant, at the helm of our clients’ PPC campaigns, and always on the lookout for creative optimizations.

Whether that involves an adjustment to ad copy, an optimization to a landing page, or a shift in targeting to improve lagging click-through rates and conversions, our PPC experts are looking out for it. For more real-life success stories, please visit our collection of eCommerce case studies.

It’s the type of vigilance that makes all of our digital marketing services, from eCommerce SEO (search engine optimization) to social media management, so effective. Our eCommerce PPC agency is committed to continuous improvement of our processes just as we are committed to continuous improvement to our client’s PPC campaigns.

To learn more about our digital marketing services, which include eCommerce PPC, SEO, social media management, and email marketing, get in touch with one of our digital marketing experts at 888-982-8269 or at info@1DigitalAgency.com.

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The post Success Via a Unified eCommerce PPC Management Strategy appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

Stortz, like so many other businesses, has been profoundly impacted by the drastic shift in consumer behavior that has sent so many shoppers flooding into the digital marketplace. Industries that might have been considered as staples of brick and mortar are becoming increasingly buoyed by online sales. Stortz is no exception.

These factors no doubt influenced Stortz’ decision to partner with 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency for a variety of eCommerce web design and development items beginning in September 2020. With more and more customers entering the virtual doors, offering a quality online shopping experience has taken on a role of central importance.

Originally, Stortz’ partnership with 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency centered around our abilities as an eCommerce design agency. The client website is built on WordPress using WooCommerce, and our website design team’s experience with these platforms brought Stortz.com into the new age. We redesigned their homepage with an updated mega menu, new category blocks with enhanced imagery and a featured products section, all of which were intended to provide the website with an updated appeal to improve the user experience (UX) and boost conversions.

Making Ongoing eCommerce Web Design Improvements

Both our client, John Stortz & Son, and their customers benefited from these preliminary eCommerce design and website development improvements, but Stortz.com kept 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency on as a strategic partner with a retainer agreement.

In the months that followed the original redesign of their homepage, it wasn’t long before the team at John Stortz & Son started noticing additional improvements that could be made to their eCommerce web design. In addition to making sundry improvements to their homepage banners, and mega menu, the client realized that there were improvements to be had with respect to the checkout experience.

According to Statista, nearly 90% of online shopping carts are abandoned before they can be converted into a sale. If you are to trust their figures, an average of 88% of all online shopping carts are ultimately abandoned. The features affecting these statistics are many, but invariably they stem from customer expectations.

Either the customer gets waylaid by hidden fees, frustrated because there are too many steps in the checkout process, or doesn’t know how to proceed. Whatever the case, the end result for the business in question is unpleasant; they lose out on a sale.

Stortz.com’s checkout process (an integral feature of their eCommerce web design) gave no overt preliminary cause for concern, except for the fact that the cart itself, the collection of information and payment, and the confirmation were all displayed on separate pages.

One of the biggest pushes in eCommerce today is to deliver a checkout experience that is as pain-free as possible. To put it lightly, every step is a very large temptation for online shoppers to bounce or abandon their carts. This is also one of the reasons that the “one page” or “one click” checkout has become a matter of such focus in eCommerce. The more steps, the higher the chance of abandonment. Stortz’ checkout process had three separate pages.

Our eCommerce designers, with collective decades of design experience, know firsthand just how great of an impact factors like this can have on UX and on conversion rates. Our team redesigned and developed a new checkout page for John Stortz & Son in which all three pages were merged into one, as displayed below.

This updated checkout design reflects a process that is much more streamlined and presents shoppers with as few changes to fail to convert as possible. Interestingly enough, though we only recently concluded this aspect of their web development project recently, their team has already seen a marked improvement in user behavior – specifically conversions.

Concrete Results: Boosting Conversions

Only a few short months after implementing these changes, Stortz.com experienced some upticks in conversions. As you can see below, the conversion rate improved by about 3.4 since we concluded this portion of the project. To be specific, the data to the left shows the increase in overall conversion rate (among all users) comparing the time since we concluded the redesign of their checkout page in June 2021 through the present time (August 2021) as compared to the previous period. It is a steady but positive increase.

One of our client contacts at John Stortz & Son was not surprised by the positive effect this seemingly simple improvement had on user behavior. When asked if he expected a change to the checkout experience to have such a marked impact, he replied simply, “I did.” elaborating that the checkout experience is “one of the most important things for user experience. It’s paramount to the checkout process. It needs to be fast, secure and clear. I wish we would have done this years and years before.”

He also added, “The conversion rate increase has been the most important metric there is. Getting people to your website is important but you also need to be able to get them to convert. Any change you can make to improve conversion rate is vital.”

Interestingly, when asked what group of shoppers was most likely to be positively affected by the change in checkout experience, our client responded unhesitantly with, “Mobile traffic. Shoppers checking out on mobile devices need to have to make as few clicks as possible.”

There’s no arguing with that, because it’s true. Mobile shoppers constitute an increasing majority of overall online shoppers, and they are consistently intolerant of click-heavy, multi-page processes – not just with the checkout experience.

Interestingly enough, John Stortz & Son is investigating moves to make improvements to their site design that will directly impact the experience of the mobile shopping experience for the better.

Projected Account and Mobile Improvements

Currently, our client is interested in making potential improvements to their website with respect to their My Account section that would display specific account information as a series of badges or portals that could be expected to have a marked positive impact on the user experience.

Features such as “Addresses,” “Orders,” “Payment Methods” and other “Account Details” would all be navigable through a series of portals or badges on a single page, streamlining and enhancing the navigation experience and significantly condensing the process, eliminating a lot of back and forth clicking and scrolling. For mobile shopping specifically, this could be expected to be received as a significant improvement.

In an online marketplace in which over 70% of shoppers are understood to shop via mobile devices, any step in the direction of mobile optimization is a good one.

Stortz’ partnership with 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency as an eCommerce website design and development company is ongoing and only expected to become more fruitful as time continues. These results are not atypical of our eCommerce site design and development projects or our digital marketing services. They’re born out time and time again through our eCommerce case studies.

To learn more about our services as an eCommerce design agency, get in touch with our specialists today. You can reach us by phone at 888-982-8269 or at info@1digitalagency.com.

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The post The UX-Conversion Rate Connection: An eCommerce Web Design Case Study appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

Among the most common of all is “How long does eCommerce SEO take to work?” This is a question that is difficult to answer with specificity because of the complexity of our process and the unique variances that exist within each industry. However, there are a few things that we like to drive home for all of our clients.

The gist of the answer is that, while eCommerce SEO services can result in fairly rapid gains, this is far and away the exception and not the norm. We stress the importance of the fact that SEO is a long-term strategy that slowly develops higher domain authority and more competitive keyword rankings over time – and real, reliable results can often take as long as 6 months or longer to manifest.

This is why we love to showcase the success of our veteran clients that have been with us for an appreciable amount of time. Their commitment to the process and our ability to generate reputable, replicable results speak volumes to the process.

One such client is Divinity Clergy Wear, for whom we have performed many services, including migration, design, development and eCommerce PPC management. They have been a client of our eCommerce SEO agency for a year and a half at the point of this publication, and their success is typical of those that partner with us for the long haul.

SEO: Not for Those Who Relish Instant Gratification

Divinity Clergy Wear knew at the outset that to develop higher domain authority and rank for several competitive keywords, a partnership with 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency would not be a short-term bargain.

In December 2019, right about when their SEO campaign began, they knew well that it would take months to generate results. Complicating matters of digital marketing was the fact that they would be leaving their current eCommerce platform for BigCommerce.

It is often difficult to maintain traffic during a migration, let alone increase it, but we managed to hold the line even through a series of complex procedures, along with custom design and development work for their new store. If you’re interested, you can read about them in our previous case study, which focuses on our role as a strategic design and eCommerce development agencyeCommerce development agency partner with this client.

In this instance, the focus is on the long-term success of the project. As one of the preeminent eCommerce SEO companies in the field, 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency was confident in its ability to deliver reliable results for the client that would build on themselves over time. Now, more than a year and a half into their campaign, the numbers are in. Here’s how we made it happen: patience is one of the keys, but not the only one.

How It Works

Our SEO process may be well substantiated by results, but we create custom campaigns for each of our clients, taking into account the unique factors surrounding their industry. In a niche industry such as that for clerical clothing – and served by Divinity Clergy Wear – right at the point of keyword research, we had to pay careful attention to their prospective users’ search intent and the competitive density. We also had to consider the behavior habits of their target audience.

Once we collaborated with the client and developed a list of target keywords, we systematically scrubbed their website, DivinityClergyWear.com, removing duplicate content, rectifying broken links and disavowing toxic backlinks that could have a potentially deleterious effect on the health of their website. Our technical SEO team also audited their website for site structure issues that would need to be addressed, also optimizing title tags, metadata and much more.

Simultaneously, our creative team crafted fresh content for their category and product pages, along with a steady stream of blogs for their eCommerce website, all of them optimized for keyword density, structure and user experience.

With the ongoing content publication aspect of their content strategy, our specialists also continuously monitored both their Google Analytics accounts and their online store’s Google Search Console accounts. This would help our SEO experts detect and rectify any issues associated with traffic.

With the website optimized, content and link-building efforts underway and continuously improving, and their Analytics and GSC accounts under constant surveillance, it became a matter of time and responding to changes as they manifested themselves. Our SEO strategy accounts for all of these, and now, more than a year and a half in, we can compare the results of their campaign and highlight some of our long-term successes.

Comparing Short Term Results to Long Term Results

Even though we did see traction within the first year of their campaign, comparing some of the earlier data with the more contemporary results paints a clearer picture of the value associated with investing in eCommerce SEO services for longer than a year. Ideally, it is a process that should be invested in for several years and only continues to build on itself.

Consider the following screenshot from our proprietary SEO dashboard, which shows some of the more recent keyword movements that this client has experienced within the past few months. Even still, over 18 months into the campaign, we are still targeting competitive keywords with search volumes over 1,000 – and the point here should be stressed that this is a very niche industry. However, although some of these increases are modest, they are modest movements that continue even though we have been targeting some of these keywords for over a year.

Similarly, consider the following screenshot from the same SEO dashboard that shows some of our recent link-building efforts, which are significant, by any stretch. Even now, rounding a year and a half into their campaign, we are continuously adding new backlinks to their website, which continue to improve their domain authority and send them referral traffic.

Actual, concrete figures to their website tell a different, albeit compelling story. The figure below displays organic sessions on their website, comparing the most recent 6 months of their eCommerce SEO campaign to the 6 months that immediately preceded it. The increase, although modest, is steady, pronounced, and visually tangible.

Diving slightly deeper into these figures, you can see the analytical, quantitative figures that correspond to the graphic above. As you can see, organic users, sessions and pageviews all increased substantially – by more than 30%.

What presents an even more compelling picture is the same data, but corresponding to the most recent 6 months of the campaign as compared to the previous period a year prior. This shows how our efforts have built on themselves over time, and although the increases are more modest by comparison, the key takeaway is that results improve at a faster rate as the campaign continues. That is to say, the results from the last 6 months are most impressive, and promise to continue.

The visual is less impressive than the metrics themselves, which give relatively modest increases in organic sessions, users and pageviews – all beneath 10%. However, when considering the steady growth, coupled with the fact that it has experienced an accelerated trend in the past six months, the conclusions are clear. The clients that partner with specialists for eCommerce SEO services for the long term see the best results, and these manifest most strongly often after more than a year in.

How SEO and eCommerce PPC Management Can Work Together

It is worth noting that this same client, Divinity Clergy Wear, has also partnered with 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency for a PPC campaign, the results of which have been the focus of a separate eCommerce case study on PPC management.

Through the crafting of custom PPC ad copy and continuous improvements to their PPC campaign’s ad groups and performance, our eCommerce PPC management team has delivered unprecedented success for this client’s paid search advertising, generating an influx of new customers and sales that are not reflected in the figures given in this case study, as the figures presented here are organic.

To get the full story of how eCommerce SEO and PPC management services are the perfect matches for both short and long-term digital marketing success, read the recent case study on their project.

Contact Our eCommerce SEO Agency Today

1Digital^Ⓡ Agency is an eCommerce SEO company that has specialized in SEO services since 2012 and has mastered the art of customizing a campaign for ideal performance, with respect to industry idiosyncrasies, client-specific circumstances, highly specialized target markets, and much more.

To get started crafting a long-term strategy for your eCommerce business today, get in touch with an eCommerce SEO expert at 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency by calling us at 888-982-8269 or emailing us at info@1digitalagency.com.

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Developing a custom eCommerce SEO strategy requires a greater degree of understanding when it comes to the nuances between different industries, the search intent behind certain keywords, and technical SEO knowledge as well.

Understanding the key differences between each kind of online store and what individual clients are looking for in terms of business goals is what will truly separate a mediocre campaign from a successful one. The following case study outlines some of the techniques our team utilizes during the course of a campaign in order to achieve such impressive results.

Approaching a Unique eCommerce Industry

Legend Auto Sales, a thriving used car dealership hailing from the Seattle area, needed a smart, flexible, and localized SEO strategy for their website that would help them grow their business. This was a perfect case of a unique eCommerce situation that required a fully custom approach based on the needs of the client and the format of their business.

The used car industry is an outlier in the eCommerce world. When you think about the typical online store, most products can be bought over and over again without any issue. This provides a certain degree of consistency when it comes to keywords to target and the angle you can take when developing an SEO campaign.

However, even a reputable used vehicle dealership with a huge selection like Legend Auto Sales doesn’t have an unlimited number of the same vehicle on hand. When they sell an item from their online store, it is the only one of its kind and will inevitably become unavailable once it is purchased. This makes developing a sound strategy somewhat different.

As a dealership, they also offer an array of services as well, such as oil changes and tire services. These are not traditional eCommerce products and as such, need to be handled differently when considering the scope of an entire digital marketing campaign.

Wanting to push more organic traffic to their website, improve their domain authority, and increase their brand presence across the Web in general, the team at Legend Auto Sales knew they needed to partner with a marketing agency possessing a strong grasp of eCommerce fundamentals as well as a wide depth of knowledge in the automobile industry specifically. Based on our reputation, they sought out 1Digital® and before long, we were able to build them a fully customized SEO campaign based on their unique needs.

Developing an Automotive SEO Strategy

With any eCommerce SEO campaign, there are several factors that need to be considered in order to generate success.

• Proper keyword research that identifies untapped ranking opportunities.
• Technical adjustments that address issues such as duplicate content, overall site structure, and crawling errors.
• A comprehensive content strategy designed to improve brand authority and enhance the user experience, while providing critical SEO value.
• Paying close attention to meta titles and other important ranking factors and making adjustments to these areas as needed.
• Thoughtful backlinking and internal linking.

While these factors are common to most SEO plans, creating a strategy for a business in the automotive industry requires additional techniques and foresight.

For instance, there is a greater emphasis on local listings. This was a pain point for Legend Auto Sales, as they wanted to appear more often in the local map listings, which can be a powerful way to drive tons of traffic if implemented correctly.

The only way to accomplish this, however, is to prove to Google that you are not only an authority in your niche but that your content is relevant to people in that one specific area. This means adjusting the campaign at the keyword level before anything else.

To really lay the foundation for better domain authority, however, we needed to aggressively target very specific long-tail keywords as well. The automotive industry is incredibly competitive, so targeting generic high-level keywords just doesn’t work in most cases. We researched popular vehicle models in their region and coupled them with high-volume dealership-related key phrases to come up with a variety of gems that would ensure we would gain some traction at the onset of the campaign.

This specialized approach, industry-specific long-tail keywords targeting the proper region, would allow us to develop a powerful content strategy that would result in better positioning in the search results over time.

What Are Users Looking For?

One of the ways in which we go about developing the right eCommerce SEO strategy for clients is by asking, “what are the users looking for?” This can help answer a lot of questions in terms of the direction we want to go with for a campaign.

Good SEO means performing optimizations that directly benefit the user. This includes the implementation of informative meta titles and descriptions, copy enhancements that help give context to various landing pages and products, page speed optimizations, and smart internal linking that can help guide users to the information they need or to the proper product.

For a used car dealership wanting to increase organic conversions, the goal is to help users easily navigate through the website in order to find a vehicle that suits them or to take action by calling the dealership directly. In this industry specifically, users are looking for reliable information on certain vehicles, the perks of buying a used vehicle over a new model, and the qualities to look for in a dependable dealership. In other words, they want to be informed and reassured.

Performance is another issue that needed to be taken into consideration as well. Underperforming web pages negatively impact bounce rate and can hinder conversion rates. During the first phase of our automotive SEO campaign for Legend Auto Sales, we combed through the website to ensure it was in working order and that users would have an optimal experience. Issues with navigation, contacting, and checkout could severely limit the success of any kind of marketing campaign, so handling these issues is a vital step in our process.

The Importance of Optimized Content

At this point, it’s a well-known fact that content drives most SEO campaigns. Without carefully crafted content such as category descriptions and blog posts, the search engines are not going to recognize your site as an authority. Google looks at the value that content provides its users, and how well that content answers their questions, guides them toward the right purchases, and improves their experience on the Web in general.

Professionally written search engine optimized content is a large part of what makes our SEO strategies so effective. Even for eCommerce businesses niches such as the automotive industry that don’t typically leverage the power of blogs and other forms of content, we know that this is what users and the search engines are looking for. Rich, long-form content, contextual linking, answers to questions that users might have regarding a certain topic or vehicle, all of this is taken into account when we are mapping out our strategy.

It’s not enough to simply write content for the sake of it, however. We make sure that each piece of content is meticulously optimized so that it provides maximum SEO value. In a saturated industry such as used car dealerships, a professionally written blog is one of the only ways to truly stand out, especially for local area users looking for information relevant to their region.

Delivering the Results

Within a relatively short time, our thorough efforts started paying off for Legend Auto Sales. While it’s not uncommon to see results only after a campaign has reached the 6th-month mark, it only took half that time for us to see drastic improvements in key areas after we implemented our eCommerce SEO strategy.

Ushered along by our smart content strategy and user-centric approach, we noticed an uptick in organic traffic and time spent on site. We also noticed that several new keywords were coming into ranking, along with a higher search volume for a wide array of local keywords.

Overall, organic search numbers were up across the board from the previous period. It’s important to note that much of this success can be attributed to the use of very precise long-tail keywords. While the individual volume of some of these kinds of keywords is rather low, the effects of targeting these keywords compound within the scope of a larger SEO campaign. In other words, simply writing a few pieces of content that may include a couple of long-tail keywords may not have much of an impact on your rankings or organic traffic, but implementing a strategy that uses these keywords will generate much better results.

While gaining new users and increasing sessions are always great metrics to look at, one of the highlights we tend to focus on to gauge the health of a website is time spent on site.

It was clear that our SEO strategy was paying off not only in terms of improving organic traffic but in actually keeping users on the site longer. This is done through careful keyword selection and content creation.

Simply targeting any keyword applicable to your niche won’t often generate worthwhile results. This is due to the fact that certain keywords are connected to a certain search intent. If you target inappropriate keywords that don’t lead users to the right content, they will immediately bounce, which will negatively impact your website. Our approach is far more effective, as the data illustrates. We were able to drastically improve the time spent on-site in just about every category, just about doubling the figure in some categories. Only a carefully devised strategy that uses the right keywords can produce these kinds of results.

With a marked improvement in organic traffic and a modest increase in an array of other important metrics, our eCommerce SEO strategy was already paying off for our client in a relatively short period of time.

Why Are Custom SEO Strategies So Effective?

While the basics of SEO remain the same no matter what kind of website you are operating, you still have to adapt your strategy according to each individual niche and kind of website, otherwise, the results aren’t going to be as effective.

Our team of SEO experts understands that everything has to be aligned in order to climb the SERPs in competitive industries. From the user search intent behind certain keywords to the kind of content that is being produced, each part of the campaign needs to be customized accordingly. A lack of custom solutions or an over-reliance on cookie-cutter plans will doom a digital marketing campaign before it even has a chance to get off the ground.

We knew going in based on the kind of business that Legend Auto Sales was, and the industry they were operating in, meant that we were going to have to create an eCommerce SEO strategy that was built specifically for their business. This is how we are able to generate results for clients time and time again, with a personal approach to eCommerce marketing that goes beyond the same cut-and-paste tactics.

For eCommerce store owners who are interested in seeing real growth, a custom strategy is always the way to go. Every eCommerce business is different so it only makes sense that unique plans would need to be developed for every client based on their business goals and the kind of business they are operating.

Here at 1Digital^®, each of our marketing campaigns is constructed differently based on the needs of our clients. With an extensive background in all things eCommerce, we are able to develop comprehensive solutions that deliver more than just better rankings. We are interested in promoting growth, brand awareness, and higher revenue for our clients, and through our proven system, we know exactly how to chart a course in order to reach these goals over time.

If you are in need of a specialized SEO strategy that will help you compete at the local level, even in a competitive industry, get in touch with our team of digital marketing experts by calling 888-982-8269.

The post Driving Results With a Specialized eCommerce SEO Strategy appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.

Some businesses need to lean more heavily on some of these pillars than on others. For example, some businesses cannot utilize PPC strategies due to search engine restrictions, and so need to rely more heavily on SEO and content marketing for organic growth and on email marketing strategies for CRM and building greater trust and lifetime value.

Usually, however, the answer revolves around a mixture of these strategies, and no complete digital marketing strategy is complete without including some aspect of search engine optimization. It is one of the most accessible and practical collections of techniques for building sustainable growth and favorable keyword rankings online and reaching new customers organically. It could be said that there are no online businesses that would not profit from a well-developed and expertly executed SEO strategy.

You just might need the help of an experienced eCommerce SEO agency to see where the opportunity lies.

Uncovering the Opportunity

Akash Bajaj is no stranger to online sales, online marketing, or competitive strategies. His business, Advance Apparels, operating from AAShopUSA.com, has been continuously operating for 20 years, since 2001.

Their core business is in wholesale; they design and produce unique women’s clothing and then distribute it to a wide range of retailers. Much of their value lies in their unique designs and the fact that they can exhibit such excellent quality control. All of their clothing is produced in-house in their own factories using high-quality materials and time-tested, proven methods. Their unique designs are characterized largely by batik fabric, West African prints and the use of innovative, environmentally conscious fabrics like TENCEL^TM.

It was the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020 that really pushed Advance Apparels to get into retail. Many of their B2B partners were struggling in the wake of the pandemic, and Akash Bajaj knew that the future lay, in part, in reaching new customers by pursuing a B2C strategy.

The thing about B2C business is that it’s very different from B2B; starkly different, in fact. The truth is that many business-to-business dealings are months or years in the making, and involve many decision-makers and what can sometimes be called a cumbersome, even an arduous process. The payoff comes from the fact that B2B agreements are very lucrative and often involve substantial, sizable repeat purchases, making all of the upfront investment in time and parlance worth it. Business-to-consumer dealings are not like this; to say the least, the relationship between businesses and consumers is mercurial, at best.

Consumer preferences change quickly, as do their search patterns and purchasing habits. Worse, consumer sales typically constitute only a small fraction of what would be involved in a B2B transaction. To pursue a B2C model requires a drastically different approach.

For Advance Apparels, it would mean they would have to get creative, and this was something Akash Bajaj knew well. Creativity had never been a problem for them in the past; some of their greatest assets came in the form of their uniquely inspired dresses and their artful use of innovative and inventive new designs in fabric. If they could flourish in fashion – a competitive industry by any stretch – then they could flourish in digital marketing, and a custom-built SEO campaign could help them get there.

A Unique Business Structure Meets a New Strategy

Akash Bajaj knew that half of the battle would be getting in front of the right customers. His products could basically sell themselves as long as his marketing initiatives reached the eyes of qualified leads. This would mean that his website’s key pages would have to rank highly in the search results for the most competitive keywords aligned with his intended customers’ searches and intent. The trick would be getting there.

Advance Apparels had a history of creative approaches to producing and marketing clothing and fashion accessories. 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency had a history of producing unprecedented results for SEO clients in a wide range of competitive online markets – notably fashion. It was a natural match.

Advance Apparels began their SEO campaign with 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency in January of 2021, just under a year after the global economy started to recoil from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was high time to find new avenues to reach consumers, and it began with keyword research.

The thing is that a unique project like this would require a particularly lengthy period of time to research customer’s searching habits, intent and balance them with the competition. It’s almost obvious that the online market for fashion is one of the most competitive in all of eCommerce; what that means is that creating a jumping-off point with target keywords is extraordinarily difficult.

Targeting only the keywords with the highest volumes would be a course in frustration. Targeting only low-hanging fruit wouldn’t yield substantial results. What our SEO experts had to do was uncover an assortment of keywords that was perfectly balanced with respect to competition and practicality. It would have to be a set of keywords that were not only well aligned with user searches but also not over-competitive.

Our ultimate set of target keywords was expertly curated to represent the perfect harmony between attainability and competitive positioning. This would enable our team of SEO specialists to create both positive short-term movement while also enabling steady growth in rankings and traffic over time.

How an eCommerce SEO Expert Does It

Once our team had a practical list of target keywords to pursue, our technical specialists could begin certain technical and on-page optimizations, many of which would require target keywords to be executed.

At the outset of their SEO campaign, our specialists conducted a thorough audit of Advance Apparels’ website and structure, in order to lay the groundwork for the success that would follow. Our initial audit was conducted with the intent to uncover and disavow toxic backlinks and to remove broken links; we fixed the errors as we found them, and adjusted the website as necessary to rectify any standing crawler errors to ensure that Google could index the entire website accordingly.

We also audited their website for duplicate content that could negatively affect the online store’s rankings. It’s a common practice for eCommerce websites to reproduce manufacturer-generated content, especially on category and product pages, but it can be an issue because it can result in a penalty. We also audited their URL structures, ensuring that they were search-engine friendly and optimized.

With these preliminary aspects of the site audit out of the way, our technical specialists began a variety of other on-page optimizations, updating title tags and meta descriptions in accordance with our plan for the various pages of their website and how we intended for them to rank.

In addition to optimizing the H1 tags and meta titles, we also began systematically optimizing the content on a variety of key pages on their website, editing for keyword stuffing and optimizing for recency, keyword density, originality, and overall value to the user experience of visitors. Category and product pages represent amazing opportunities for optimization on which far too many eCommerce sites do not capitalize. Sometimes they are the only pages that customers visit before making a purchase, and they provide prime real estate for content-based optimization. Our content team created a wealth of new, optimized content for Advance Apparels to utilize opportunistically on several of their key pages.

Product and category pages are not the only pages that enable eCommerce merchants to add a boost of optimized content to their websites. Blogging also provides a viable avenue by which online businesses can optimize their websites and furnish their users with new, insightful information. This also represented one pillar of our optimization strategy for Advance Apparels.

Our content creators worked tirelessly since the beginning of their campaign to create a variety of blog posts for Advance Apparels, blog posts that improve the value of their website on several levels. For one, keyword-optimized blogs, and blogs on topics that generate a lot of search volume, are highly attractive to search engines like Google. In addition, our onsite content publication increases the completeness and practicality of our clients’ internal linking structure, boosting the authority of certain web pages for critical target web pages. When Google sees this, it indexes them favorably.

In addition, our content creators have been engaged in developing high-quality backlinks to AAShopUSA.com since the beginning of their campaign. Through the publication of a variety of guest blog posts, press releases and other forms of content, we direct a retinue of backlinks to the client website, increasing their authority for a variety of strategic keywords.

Taken in sum, these tactics vastly increase our client’s authority and ranking for target keywords, resulting in massive gains. As is often the case, the best argument is not explanation, but evidence, of which we have plenty for Advance Apparels.

The Results: Since We Started

One of the most straightforward ways to assess the results of eCommerce SEO services is by the growth in organic traffic that a client has experienced since the beginning of the campaign. It’s not customary to check results so quickly after beginning, but in the case of Advance Apparels, the results were uncustomarily immediate.

Organic traffic is directly related to a company’s organic rankings for keywords, and in the few months since the beginning of Advance Apparels’ campaign, they’ve seen substantial bumps in organic traffic.

The image above shows Advance Apparels’ total traffic trends during the period from January 1, 2021 to May 10th, 2021 (in blue) overlaid over the previous period, August 24th, 2020 to December 31, 2021. You can see easily enough that there have been marked improvements from the beginning of the campaign, especially as compared to the previous period; but the evidence is even more dramatic when you look at the results quantitatively.

The above image shows the figures for the same periods superimposed, giving metrics on users and new users, sessions and pageviews. Almost every figure is significantly positive, indicating noteworthy growth in users, sessions and pageviews.

There was an overall 106% increase in new users when the periods are compared, and a large growth in page views and sessions, both of which more than doubled. Much of this success can be attributed to the sweeping growth that Advance Apparels experienced for their top keywords, many of which were highly competitive.

The image above shows a cross section of some of the keywords we targeted for Advance Apparels as a part of their campaign. Though we can’t divulge the actual keywords – that’s a trade secret – you can see the global search volume for each of them listed, with some of their biggest increases being among highly competitive keywords with large search volume. You can also see that many of these keywords, and all of those displayed, experienced vast upward shifts in ranking, which brought in a ton of new users to their website.

While it’s striking enough how much their online presence grew when comparing the first 4 months or so of the campaign to the period immediately previous, year over year results are even more impressive.

Year over Year

We produced impressive results for Advance Apparels after only a few months – which, itself, is remarkable given that SEO usually takes several months to begin to develop a head of steam – when comparing the year over year results, the comparison is even more impressive.

The image above shows the same categories of data as the previous image, being users, new users, sessions and pageviews. The difference is that this comparison takes into account the first few months of our campaign with Advance Apparels (January 1, 2021 to May 10, 2021) and lays it over the corresponding period from the previous year (January 1, 2020 to May 20, 2020) during which this client was not involved with us for eCommerce SEO services.

This growth is even more pronounced; users, sessions, and pageviews have almost tripled from the same time last year, up nearly 200% in each category. There’s just no way to understate growth like this. Even new users, of which a large portion are organic users, was up over 150% – sitting at 169% – more than double the figures from the year before.

Another key metric to consider is how new clients interact with the website. One of the keys to bringing in new clients with SEO is not just to attract them to the website by occupying more favorable real estate on the search engine results pages (SERPs), but to align keyword rankings with search intent. With eCommerce SEO, you’ll also want to be looking for figures like higher session durations. The image below says it all.

This chart shows the amount of time that users to Advance Apparels’ web pages spend consuming content, moving along the sales funnel or otherwise interacting with the page. Blue shows the current period and orange shows the previous corresponding period from the year before, the same two periods as the year before.

Users to their website during the current period spend much more time, on average, on their web pages than visitors did a year ago. In fact, in almost every percentile, the session duration more than doubled, in some cases tripling. This means one thing: not only is more new traffic reaching AAShopUSA.com, but that traffic is more interested in their products and therefore composed of better-qualified leads.

These results might not be typical in the short term, but they are the types of results that we faithfully replicate for our customers, time and time again. We’ve served clients like Advance Apparels previously in fashion and cut our teeth refining our process – but we also serve clients in other highly competitive industries, including but not limited to automotive parts and services, art supplies, jewelry, consumer goods, electronics, a variety of services and so much more – to see a more comprehensive listing of some of the industries we serve, please consult our SEO by industry page.

We also serve clients that are PPC-restricted, giving them an avenue by which to circumvent these impositions with substantial organic growth. Each and every one of our clients gets a custom-built campaign that takes into account the unique situations surrounding their business, specifically, and their industry at large. In every way, we are true strategic partners for our clients that help them meet complex and ever-shifting obstacles in digital marketing head-on.

For Advance Apparels, those obstacles included fierce competition for a limited set of keywords, and a shift from a B2B focus to accommodate more B2C channels. You can learn more about the unique challenges faced by some of our other clients, and how we tackled them, in our collection of eCommerce case studies. Think for a moment. What are these challenges for your online business?

Give us a call today at 888-982-8269 to speak with one of our experienced Ecommerce SEO Expert. We’ll uncover the obstacles before you and present you with opportunities to overcome them. It may even be advantageous for you to start with a free eCommerce SEO audit that will help provide analytical insight into how best to pursue an SEO project. The strategies we devise are as diverse as our clients themselves, but growth in traffic and better-qualified traffic are within reach. You just need to take the first step.

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This is only one small portion of their proposal. They set out to be a low-cost leader with a comprehensive selection that offered fast, secure shipping. While they were at it they figured providing excellent customer service in their industry would help business along. It did, and they have built a loyal customer base.

One might think that in this industry, the products would sell themselves, especially if those who used the products were a captive audience. After all, those who rely on hearing aids don’t just simply go without.

On some level, this is true, but as the online marketplace floods with more and more shoppers and traditional retail avenues fall in preference to eCommerce, competition scales. Even in niche markets, sellers are competing for limited real estate at the top of the search engine results pages.

Local Battery, like any business, had goals of growth; growth in higher sales and bringing in new customers organically. Their corner of the market, however, was not without its challenges.

Industry-Specific Challenges

Despite the fact that Local Battery sells a fleet of unique, highly specialized products, their industry is not without competition. They may sell hard-to-find batteries and hearing aid
accessories, but they are not the only player in their sphere.

Even accounting for the exclusivity of some of their products, large online retailers like Amazon and Wal-Mart still constitute pretty heavy competition. Players like these are big competitors in a lot of industries and the industry for niche batteries is no exception.

Even if it were not for the larger players that naturally will eat up a large portion of potential market share, smaller competitors selling the same products are also vying for Google’s hottest real estate. There’s only one space at the top of the search engine results page for a given search term; if another competitor takes it and a user clicks, the chances diminish that that user will investigate the competition thoroughly. Websites that rank at the top of the SERPs often enjoy higher clicks and conversion rates. What does it matter to Local Battery if they offer superior service and prices if customers aren’t discovering their site?

This brings up a separate issue; businesses can effectively “buy” search results at the top of Google’s pages through paid search campaigns like Google Ads. The issue here is that many other competitors have much larger budgets; that makes it cost-ineffective for some smaller businesses to compete.

The solution, then, for a player like Local Battery facing these unique industry challenges, was to leverage the power of eCommerce SEO to steadily improve its organic keyword rankings to generate higher organic website traffic and subsequently, sales. It still involved an investment, but there’s no better strategy for developing long-term organic growth than a well-planned eCommerce SEO campaign.

A Unique Selling Proposition Meets Its Best Ally

Local Battery’s team was aware of these constraints, and they knew that eCommerce SEO was also not without its challenges. Search engine optimization results don’t produce themselves. To be effective, the campaign must be predicated on the right mix of keywords and the process must take into account website optimization, content publication, linking strategy and more. Local Battery knew that for this marketing strategy to succeed, the help of the right eCommerce digital marketing agency was vital. Specifically, they needed an SEO agency with a proven history of success.

The relationship between Local Battery and 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency was a perfect match. Local Battery was an eCommerce retailer in a niche industry and 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency was an SEO company that had propelled a variety of customers in niche industries to success before.

The Process

It is the SEO process that an eCommerce agency follows that directs its progress and generates results. 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency’s team of SEO specialists met with Local Battery’s owner, Osamu Manabe, to uncover some of the challenges facing his industry in general and his business in specific.

Taking that information back to the drawing board, the account’s project manager performed thorough keyword research, analyzing competitor’s standings, the comparative competitive viability of keywords and search terms, and the volume associated with each of them. This was crucial groundwork for a few very specific reasons.

For one, targeting solely high-volume, high-competition keywords, especially in an industry rife with competition, is not always a good practice at the outset of an SEO campaign. In order to generate higher organic traffic, an SEO strategy must account for the competition, volume and search intent of keywords in order to generate a mix that will reliably improve rankings. Going for nothing but high-volume, high-competition keywords can preclude opportunities for growth.

1Digital^Ⓡ Agency’s analyst and project managers knew this and they performed a careful competitive analysis to identify the best combination of short and long-tail keywords that were most lucrative to pursue. This would enable a stronger foundation for Local Battery’s project, from which they could more effectively pursue more difficult keywords and search terms in the future.

Armed with a list of expertly-selected keywords, 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency’s technical team began systematically improving Local Battery’s website structure for ideal optimization. The comprehensive audit and subsequent reforms conducted are too comprehensive to succinctly list, but included an audit to identify (and if necessary, remove) duplicate content, the optimization of headers, meta titles, and efforts to optimize on-page content (like product descriptions and category page content).

1Digital^Ⓡ Agency also audited LocalBattery.com to verify the SEO-friendliness of URL structure and to ensure that Google’s crawlers would experience no issues when attempting to index the website’s pages. The technical team also engaged in initial and ongoing efforts to uncover and remove toxic backlinks and any other bad links associated with the site.

Any digital agency’s SEO services that keep the long-term in focus also engage in optimized content production and publication. In addition to the optimization of the website’s on-page content, 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency’s creative team produced a variety of informative, internal-link suffused, keyword-optimized blog posts to further boost the success of the eCommerce business’s SEO project.

1Digital^Ⓡ Agency’s full-service SEO process also provides for a robust, comprehensive link building strategy that provides not only a healthy network of internal links but also provides a system of backlinks through the timely publication of offsite content that indicated Local Battery as the authority on target keywords.

All in all, 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency’s process, though well established, was flexible enough to provide thorough, industry-specific accommodations for Local Battery’s unique needs and competition. The data is proof of that.

The Results

Generally, SEO projects take some time to generate appreciable results for eCommerce websites. This is something we make very apparent to our clients as it boosts our relationship and promotes trust in the SEO process. However, in Local Battery’s case, it didn’t take long to see improvements.

Within only a few weeks of beginning the campaign, results started to materialize. One of the first metrics that can be analyzed to determine the effect of ongoing optimization efforts is the growth in organic traffic.

Looking at the period between March 1st and April 6th, 2021, when compared to the previous period (January 23rd to February 28th, 2021) that movement in organic traffic is apparent.

Much of Local Battery’s traffic comes from direct search, which in turn accounts for some of the growth in all users. However, Organic traffic for this period as compared to the previous period rose by over 50% (including users and new users). Sessions and pages per session were also significantly up during this period, both for organic traffic and all users.

Pageviews also tell a part of the story, as this metric gives a collective indication of how users interact with a website. Positive pageview figures are a good sign because they tend to indicate that traffic is reaching the website, but interacting favorably with it. Higher page views tend to suggest that traffic flowing into the pages on a website is better targeted.

During the same period, page views and unique pageviews for organic traffic and all users rose significantly, with the highest gains in organic traffic. This would suggest that the users ending up on Local Battery’s website organically were better aligned with their target market and thus more likely to convert. A look at conversions, transactions and revenue will complete the picture.

Again, for the same period, the data is compelling. Transactions rose significantly, both among all users and organic traffic, with nearly a 40% increase among organic users. The overall eCommerce conversion rate was positive for all users and the slight drop in conversion rate among organic users is not alarming considering the fact that transaction and revenue were both positive. It’s inevitable that some users will not convert, especially among first-time organic visitors.

The bottom line is revenue, which rose over 30% among all users and almost 26% among organic users when comparing the two periods. This figure is one of the most significant that can be displayed; traffic and organic traffic both rose, along with transactions and pageviews, suggesting positive user behavior. At the end of the day, money talks, and Local Battery’s sales profited – both organically and overall.

These are the kinds of results that careful targeting and thorough analysis, coupled with a proven, validated SEO process can deliver. We’ve generated similar results for clients in diverse industries, both big and small. One of the secrets to our formula is attention to the details that make the client’s space within the industry unique. Experience and attention produce results like these; sometimes in as short a span as that seen by Local Battery.

If you’re looking for creative ways to generate better brand awareness and reach new customers online, eCommerce SEO can be one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal. That is if you work with a provider that can develop a comprehensive strategy for your website.

Start today with a free eCommerce SEO audit or contact a representative directly at info@1digitalagency.com or at 888-982-8269. We’ll show you where you and your competitors stand, and show you opportunities for unprecedented growth.

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Their retail operation is supported by an eCommerce venture, SarcoInc.com, built on BigCommerce. Sarco’s team provides the same excellent customer service and profound historical knowledge to customers of their online store, along with a variety of the products, including firearms, ammunition, accessories, reproductions, and more. Again, their collection is vast. Enumerating it in text here would be pointless.

Other companies in the same niche have historically been faced with paid search restrictions. Google places restrictions on certain categories of goods. Sarco’s market fits their descriptors and is impacted by these restrictions. Being PPC restricted, Sarco pursued other channels, which brought them to 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency and SEO.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, however, remained a viable avenue for increasing online growth, attracting new customers, and serving as a lead generation tool for their online store. They just needed the right partner to provide BigCommerce SEO services to increase their website rankings to get their eCommerce site in front of more customers.

The First Round of SEO Services

Originally, Sarco Inc., partnered with 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency for a 35 keyword campaign back in October 2019. The process, even for a smaller campaign focusing on fewer keywords such as this, mirrors the efforts of our larger campaigns. Though we were only targeting 35 keywords, we still provided a thorough website audit to uncover the overall SEO health of the website.

We checked for duplicate content, optimized website images, determined that the site structure was acceptable, and uncovered and disavowed a number of toxic links.

After we had uncovered the most profitable set of keywords to target, we optimized headers and meta descriptions on key target pages while our content team started providing a variety of keyword-optimized, original content for their category pages and their blog. In addition to the onsite optimization efforts, we also published content to third-party websites for the purpose of building links to SarcoInc.com.

After having made a variety of improvements to their website and optimizing the site with fresh content, Sarco Inc. started seeing steady gains in website traffic. You can get an impression of the growth they experienced through this first portion of their campaign via the image below, which shows organic traffic to their website from February 1st, 2020 to June 3rd, 2020, superimposed over the period from September 30th, 2019 to January 31st, 2020.

Search engine optimization is a long-term game, so steady growth is more typical than rapid growth. You can see that traffic steadily increased to their website during this period, which is a good indicator of increasing website rankings and a more prominent online presence higher on search engine results pages. The quantified figures below show that organic users increased by nearly 50% during this period.

However impressive these gains are, Sarco’s Project Manager knew there was potential left on the table that would open the door for even more impressive growth. With such a large volume of potential short and long-tail keywords and so many relevant products on Sarco Inc.’s website, they could attain much larger gains with a campaign targeting additional keywords.

Uncovering eCommerce SEO Potential

With 1Digital^Ⓡ as their BigCommerce partner, Sarco Inc. had some of the finest minds in the industry at work on their project. Our BigCommerce SEO experts worked alongside Sarco Inc.’s team to uncover a list of potential keywords for a larger, 75 keyword campaign to generate even greater results.

By October 2020, 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency was armed with a fresh list of 75 keywords to ramp up Sarco Inc.’s digital marketing strategy to bring in even more traffic to their BigCommerce store. With this new list of keywords, we proceeded with on-page optimization efforts as before, optimizing title tags, metadata, and more, removing broken and toxic links, and monitoring Sarco Inc.’s Google Search Console for undue changes.

The new, larger campaign involved a similarly-scaled up content production effort. 1Digital^Ⓡ’s content team began aggressively producing a variety of blogs and website content, as before, but targeting more keywords and at an accelerated rate. The publication of offsite content for the value of their backlinks continued and was scaled up as well.

It did not take long for results to start presenting themselves, and they can be best displayed by comparing the first few months of Sarco Inc.’s progress to the period a year before. Below, you can see the change in organic traffic to sarcoinc.com from the period between December 2020 to March 2021 laid over the period from September 2019 to December 2019. These are roughly corresponding lengths of time and show the year-over-year change to Sarco’s organic traffic.

The visual representation of the shift in organic traffic is impressive enough, but the numbers are even more impressive. As you can see below, organic traffic and new users to sarcoinc.com improved significantly between the two periods.

Both organic users and new users grew impressively, but it only shows a portion of the picture. Naturally, any eCommerce business is interested in the bottom line. For the period displayed above, Sarco’s website also saw a marked uptick in transactions and revenue. Both figures saw big increases:

Organic traffic also reveals a lot of the success of an SEO campaign, and as of a report that was run at the beginning of March, you can see just how much of SarcoInc.com’s traffic was organic:

You can also see some of the dramatic shifts in keyword movement that Sarco Inc. has experienced as a result of the bump in their campaign. The image below shows the significant movement that Sarco Inc. experienced for some of the competitive keywords that we targeted in their project.

It only shows a small cross-section of the keywords we targeted, but you can see that many of them have large search volumes, experienced dramatic shifts in ranking, and have come to rank on page one of search results. Many of them also increased dramatically, jumping up 52, 63, even 90 positions to get to the first page. Getting Sarco Inc. to rank on the first page for such competitive keywords has been instrumental in driving new traffic to their website and bringing them new customers, even in the face of paid search restrictions.

Facing the Same Restrictions?

If, after reading this, you feel that hope is on the horizon for your own PPC-restricted online business, you’re right. We’ve achieved great results for a variety of clients in eCommerce PPC-restricted industries. For some of them we’ve even published case studies; check out our recent eCommerce case studies on our clients Cyclone Pods and MiR Tactical to see the results, among our other eCommerce case studies.

It helps to have the best SEO experts in your camp when you’re facing challenges like paid search restrictions or stiff online competition, but we’ve done it for many clients in the past and we can do it for your organization. All it takes is for us to get familiar with your goals and the unique circumstances surrounding your organization.

It also starts with a call. Whether you’re looking for an obligate eCommerce SEO agency or an SEO company that also offers eCommerce web design and eCommerce development services, we can help you out. We provide a little of everything that eCommerce businesses require, which is why there may be many digital agencies, but There’s Only 1Digital^®.

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