In this eCommerce SEO case study, I’ll show you how I helped a biotech company to increase their revenue up to 500k from 100k through our eCommerce SEO marketing strategy.
You’ll Also Learn
- How to grow sales and revenue in a niche where the top competitors have already dominated for years.
- Reveal how I took the company revenue to 500k from 100k MRR by SEO.
- Describes the whole journey, including the challenges and some of our shortcomings.
So, sit tight with a cup of coffee and a notebook, because you’ll have to take a lot of notes from this journey.
About SEOsKit
SEOsKit is a thriving SEO marketing company. We have assisted over 100 business owners, including Colgate, Adobe, Huawei, and Made-in-China, with marketing strategies, services, and consulting.
Our business objective is to achieve the highest ROI for my clients from different marketing channels with updated techniques and strategies.
Case Overview
Honestly, the client had no impossible demands. He just wanted to outrank a specific competitor in the same niche. However, the competitor was a real deal in his line of business. It was one of the best eCommerce brands on the market.
The competitor site was 100% in authoritativeness. It gained references from Forbes and Men’s Health free of cost! The brand was earning an amount that could only be a dream to our client at that time. So, we understood why he only picked one site to outrank in sales and traffic.
This type of case is pretty simple, yet hard to complete successfully. Because a name that has been on the top rank for years in a niche with very specific types of audiences, won’t let you beat them so easily. Even Google won’t be convinced to easily change the #1 in the niche.
Despite the low possibility of success, my other 3 team members insisted on accepting the job, and so I did.
About the Client’s Business
Our client had a business selling biotech goods online. When we were introduced to this project, the website was already quite a known name among the customers.
Yet, the organic search traffic (nearly 3200) and sales weren’t that much convincing. The good side was the earning from PPC, around 500K $. It was clear that our project website was lacking in ecommerce SEO marketing. Because the price of products also seemed fair enough (350-1500$).
[Note: Understand that SEO doesn’t guarantee you success, It improves your online presence to be more viable to the visitors or clients. Especially for eCommerce brands or sellers who need to earn both topical authority and trust from their targeted audiences. ]
Our primary inspection assumed that the top competitor, which our client also targeted, was pulling out most of the organic traffic because of rank, quality content, better link building, etc.
Expectations & Demands
“I need you to beat the competitor that’s standing above my site, in terms of growth and revenue.”
That was the clear message I got from the business owner. We’ve already mentioned that the top performer was taking away most of the organic visitors and sales.
Besides, the company was quite in a hurry. Any further delay in making a good SEO strategy would’ve put the business in a pitfall.
A Thorough Website Audit & Market Research: Key Findings
At this point, our team was well aware of the situation. But we didn’t have the answer to the WHY. We needed to know the reasons why such a potential website was lagging. Also, gaps and woos on the ongoing strategy.
Thus, we did a thorough website audit using Ahrefs, SEMrush, Screaming Frog, etc. Meanwhile, we also analyzed the market competition and consumer intents.
The good things were:
- 54.1 K clicks on the site
- 1.71 M impressions
- Around 23 pages with first impressions
We knew there’d be tons of issues on the site. So, we weren’t surprised after finding these drawbacks:
- The website was made of Shopify and is missing some key elements or plugins for a better UX. This could be a reason for the bounce rate or low conversion
- There’s a huge technical SEO gap in the website. To be precise, problems like crawl errors, slow page load times, and missing meta tags were damaging SEO scores
- The website was full of thin content or articles, with no proper content plan. The content gap was clearly visible
- No existence of an ideal link-building. Either the existing links were broken or from sites with zero authority
In short, that site would’ve scored low against any ecommerce SEO checklist. We had to run the technical optimization and content writing part from scratch if we wanted to achieve the goals.
On the other side, a key finding was the number of consumers or visitors in this niche was very specific and compact. So, growing in this sector required something extraordinary.
Our Challenges Were Big
I think you’ve already guessed what we had to do for our target. But in case you missed something, we needed to make the website:
- Technically optimized
- Complete with human-first articles fulfilling search intents and convinces for purchase
- Linked with authority sites
These demands are completely primary ecommerce SEO services. Yet, there were some risks. Because the business had already got some reputation among customers and some sort of recognition from the search engine. So, there was a 50-50 chance of getting the opposite of what we were looking for, since we were about to dig deep into the core of optimization.
Challenges Outside SEO
Apart from these 3 major deliverables, one thing that bothered us till the end was the very long work chain of the company. There were hundreds of people in every department of that business.
As we weren’t the niche experts, we had to wait for their approvals in every part. Specially, in the content section. We understood that we had to rely on them for in-depth content creation. We decided to let them write the main parts and we’d optimize those later on.
So, the long-distance communication would cost us too much time, and we had to be prepared to handle it.
Besides, the developer team was outsourced from another country, not native to the client. The in-house team would’ve eased our technical optimization.
We didn’t know how to coop for technical works. That’s why we thought of consulting Shopify too, the platform used for the client’s website.
Strategies That Kicked Out For Us
Creating a Solid Roadmap
Now, it was time for a clear roadmap. As I mentioned earlier, we didn’t have the luxury to wait and observe thoroughly. That’s why we immediately made a draft of what we’d do and sent it to the client. Though we didn’t waste any time, the owner took a while to brief our proposal to the other persons related to the business.
The roadmap featured all three deliverables mentioned above. The bonus part was the On-page SEO. Although it wasn’t included in our initial plan, my teammates suggested doing so later on.
Improving Technical SEO Score
We were just about cry seeing the SEO health at first. It was just 7!
There were tons of reasons why the score was so low. The main ones were:
- Blunders in the schema markup
- Excessive page load times
- Several pages were published without any metatags
- No signs of any structures of headings
We discovered that these blunders happened because our client left the optimization job for his remote dev team. And obviously, web developers won’t have the proper idea to optimize websites.
So, what they did was 1) increase the fonts or use bold letters instead of headings, 2) use random or AI-generated phrases as meta and alt texts, and 3) focus less on the UX.
We knew we had to fix the technical aspects before anything else to prevent Google from penalizing the website. First, we made a primary structure for each type of page. Product pages, policy pages, and blogs, all got their own types of interfaces.
Then, we changed page titles, meta titles, tags, categories, alt texts, etc. for better structured data for the website.
As the website was made of Shopify, we directly contacted the support team. We asked them about the current plugins and plans of the websites and their credibility. We had some discussion so that we could know which plugins or setups to use with this Shopify site for better speed and optimization.
I guess, this was the best decision as no one better than the platform’s support team knew the best setup for our site.
Making a Content Strategy
We all are aware of the phrase “Content is King”. Even if it might sound exaggerating, but is true.
We already said that the existing content was very thin. Some were even pretty irrelevant. So, the content gap was huge. The website only had:
- Listicle articles
- Product descriptions
Our top priority in this step was to create a sound blog section. In ecommerce SEO marketing, the best way to generate conversion is by covering every subject of the niche for topical authority. It builds trust, authoritativeness, and expertise.
In short, we needed to implement Google’s EEAT format.
To cover everything, we performed a thorough content mapping to figure out which topics we needed to write on. During this phase, we found out that the niche is quite compact. For this, the scope to make new articles was low too.
Then we got an idea, we made a list of those niches that were relevant to biotech. Like health, food, fitness, etc. I made a list of those keywords that would also match with the main niche.
We divided the writing into two segments. Core articles, Pillar content, etc. were assigned to the dedicated members of the client’s team. As they had been working for years in this sector, we could say that they were niche experts. They wrote the articles, and we optimized them for the search engine.
The benefit of doing this was to gain depth and expertise in the writing. Other articles such as blogs, sales copy, reviews, etc. were our parts of the job. As this content was only to gain traffic, niche expertise wasn’t required.
In short, a wholesome SEO-friendly content set was implemented on the website with a proper publishing schedule.
Link Building with Authority Sites
You can call link building cherry on the top or a core rank factor. It works as both. In backlinks and outreach, our strategy was quite orthodox. We analyzed our competitors and learned what type of website referrals helped them to rank. We also manually tracked authority sites that can align with us for backlinks.
Luckily, we got positive responses from targeted businesses. Our proposal and planning were clear about benefitting both sides. I will discuss this link-building strategy later.
The Result Went Our Ways
After 6 months of dedication, the tables started to turn for us. As we are still working on it, the growth is still on.
If sum up the whole process, it seems something like this:
- 13x improvement in SEO health
- 63k+ more organic traffic in two years, 32x growth
- 740+ more sales organically, 8.4x growth
| Key Performance Indicatiors (KPI) | 2020 | 2021 | 2023 |
| SEO Health Score | 7 to 90+ by within a first few months | ||
| Organic Traffic | 2317 | 36000 | 65893 |
| Organic Sale ($) | 100k | 510k | 840k |
We won’t say it was a great feat. But still, the client was quite happy getting such a heads up in his business.
Besides, the primary goal, to beat the sole contender, was finally possible because of those numbers.
In Case You Missed Something
Long story short, we were able to hit the bull’s eye. Although it took us a while to show some genuine results, my team succeeded in putting the biotech business in a stable position.
My team is still working on this project for further improvement. Hopefully, we’ll bring better results soon. If we do so, we will make another Ecommerce SEO case study on it explaining our latest techniques.
Key Takeaways:
- The ecommerce website sold biotech products. Biotech was a very compact and specific niche
- The main purpose of hiring us was to beat the main competitor who was at the top before we started working
- The company was lacking in technical SEO, Helpful content, and High-value backlinks
- We improved structured data, page quality, content depth, EEAT parameters, and sourced backlinks from authority sites that our competitor also acquired
- Our project’s USP was we contacted the developer team of the platform that the client’s website was using. It helped us to make precise changes in pages and functions
- Within a year, the company gained 16x traffic and 5x organic sales because of the improvements
- We used the premium versions of Ahrefs, Google Analytics, Moz, SEMrush, and Uber Suggest to fulfill our job
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