We often start our work on positioning when the client has already built some visibility in the search network and a reputation among clients and simply wants to use the full potential of the website. Sometimes, however, we start from scratch, taking under our wing newly created websites that have not even had time to get used to the visits of google bots. Then our task is particularly demanding – we have to quickly prove to the algorithms that the website deserves trust. And it’s not that simple at all. According to a report presented by Paraphrase.Online, only 6% of online stores with the TOP500 most visible e-commerce sites are less than 5 years old. However, these are challenges that we can cope with with our experience. Let’s see it on a specific example.
The beginning of the SEO contract
The client in question operates in the Home and garden industry, and more precisely, offers indoor and outdoor lighting. We signed a contract with him in May 2019, so recently two years of cooperation in the positioning of the online store have passed. As we have already mentioned, the store was new then and it did not have an established position in search engines. The first pages have already been indexed and the website appeared in the results rankings, but these effects were disproportionate to the store’s potential. So, together with the client, we started to create a good history of the domain, which was to result in increased visibility on the web.
Initially, we put the greatest emphasis on creating a transparent, SEO-friendly structure of product categories. We developed an intuitive category tree and selected the most advantageous phrases, meta title and H1 headings for each subpage. After the client accepted our plan, we started to complete the category descriptions, taking into account the phrases selected for positioning. Our copywriters have created texts that describe a given group of products, which we then implemented on the client’s website. Gradually, we also started to build a valuable profile of links leading to a positioned website. Their quality was of key importance for us, because in the evaluation of algorithms, much more than quantity matters whether they come from pages that Google has previously found helpful for the user and trustworthy.
Results after 2 years of cooperation
After two years of work on positioning, the site has started to be quite well visible on the web. From May 2019 to May 2021, the number of phrases in TOP3 increased from 9 to 70, i.e. the client’s website was displayed in the highest positions on many strategic terms from the point of view of the brand. When it comes to phrases in TOP10, we recorded an increase of over 700% – the page appeared on the first page in the search engine for 771 terms. The number of keywords in the TOP50 also increased – from 1072 to 6649 to be exact.
We also obtained valuable links for the client with the dofollow attribute, i.e. those that network robots take into account when evaluating the website. They were placed mainly on the back pages of the relevant subject.
You have to anticipate in SEO
The list of factors taken into account by Google’s algorithm when determining page value is long and largely secret. The Mountain View company itself is reluctant to mention planned updates, and if it reveals a ranking factor, it is usually long after its introduction. Therefore, positioning is also about testing solutions, observing the results of various websites and drawing conclusions, which counts the most in the evaluation, and what will most likely be the most important in the future. Our analyzes led us to the conclusion that in the future, a large amount of valuable, unique content on the website will be of great importance, and in this direction we developed our clients’ websites the most.
Our forecasts turned out to be correct, and it did not take long to fulfill them. At the turn of May and June this year, there was an update, as a result of which pages with a small amount of content fell in the rankings, and those with SEO-optimized texts recorded large increases. This also happened with the website of the described client. Compared to the beginning of May to the end of July, the number of phrases in the top places changed as follows:
TOP3: from 70 to 124,
TOP10: from 771 to 1.12 thousand,
TOP50: from 6.64 thousand to 8.27 thousand.
This shows that the direction we are taking is the right one, and the visibility of the customer site is likely to increase even more in the coming months.
The discussed results were achieved through the Advanced package for e-commerce ($ 3,500 / month), which is intended for small online stores.
