Is it difficult to rank a brand new website? It all depends on the niche, you may say.

In this case study, you will learn how Ecom We Do SEO team worked on a completely new website
in the competitive health and wellness niche and achieved impressive search visibility within only
10 months.

About the project

The project we’ll cover in this case study belongs to the health and wellness niche, or, to be more
specific, it deals with natural health supplements. The company is well known and established in
Canada, and this particular project is its new e-commerce venture that targets the B2C market.

We involved in this project since the ideation, but the ‘active’ stage of the SEO campaign started
about a year ago, in May’18.

The biggest achievement? Our team’s been able to build up organic traffic for a brand new website
within a short time, even though we consider this niche pretty competitive. We’ve also managed to
increase the conversion rate by over 50%.

Project goals & challenges 

The company operates in Canada with aor.ca domain, and initially, we considered keeping one
single web asset and keep a folder structure to target different countries (Canada and the USA)
which we found to be a better approach. However, the team faced some challenges related to
ERP, data, branding and marketing management, so we decided to go ahead with two different
websites.

The main KPI for the first year of this SEO campaign was to get the brand keywords in the
top 5 positions and non-branded keywords in the top 10 positions.

We think the biggest challenge was to bring a freshly built website to the top and compete with
the sites of the leading natural health supplement providers (aggregators) which are already
established and ranking well over the last 5 years.

Below, you’ll find an overview of the main SEO activities we’ve undertaken for this project.

Website audit

Our team carried out a detailed technical and SEO audit and eliminated the elements that were
not search-engine-friendly; there was a lot of clutter on the server that was being indexed.

As you know, e-commerce URL slugs can get really messy, that’s why we’ve changed the URL
structure and made it SEO-friendly.

This is how the URLs looked before fixing:

https://aor.us/click.php?c>’dmjdlgsbve>2’lfzxpset?’sbol>2’f>’vsm>iuuq;00xxx

And that’s how they look now:

https://aor.us/products/magnesium-potassium-aspartates

The site audit report in WebSite Auditor helped us identify things that needed to be fixed in the
first place.

As you know, e-commerce websites have many forms which collect personal details from users.
That’s why it’s important to make sure that all information is encrypted (not just credit card details).
So, we migrated to HTTPS at the very beginning of our campaign.

When most indexing and crawlability issues had been fixed, it was time to
analyze and optimize the site structure.

With the help of AOR’s team, we compiled a list of all necessary product categories and made
sure that all-important pages were linked (and were not more than 3 clicks away from the homepage).

To find the site’s orphan pages, we ran a check using the advanced crawler settings:

If you need to optimize the site structure of an e-commerce website, keep in mind the following:

• Site’s homepage must link to all your main category pages and potentially even some of
  your best product pages as well.
• Good navigation and internal linking ensure that those pages get the most authority from
  your homepage, and thus have a better chance of ranking high in search. During the audit,
  we found there were good internal linking opportunities within website pages, especially
  within the blog. One by one, we evaluated those opportunities and added links that would
  be great for users and search engines.

Redirects and canonical tags were used to get rid of the duplicate content issues.

As speed score is a ranking factor, the team also worked on optimizing site’s performance and
managed to achieve a decent result:

As we were working on the .us version of the original .ca website, it was also vital to apply
hreflang attributes to the site’s pages.

Keyword research

When we start working on a new project, we usually send an SEO questionnaire to the client to
understand more about their business, services, solutions, and the audience they want to target.

Then, based on the feedback and using a bit of brainstorming, we research, analyze, and determine
the core keywords for the business.

Generally, our keyword research routine can be described with these 7 steps:

• Running a comprehensive analysis of the client’s website, their business, and the industry.
• Understanding the priority products/services/solutions (and possibly naming variations, synonyms).
• Setting up a rough list of keywords.
• Evaluating keyword rankings feasibility. Marking highly competitive keywords (if any),
  which can take a longer time to rank (so the client knows about it).
• Understanding major competitors and the keywords they’re using.
• Getting more keyword ideas using various keyword research tools
  (SEO PowerSuite/Google keyword planner).
• Grouping the keywords into their best possible categories.

With this particular project, we had an initial list of keywords that included all product names
and worked on it in the following way. First off, we divided all the keywords into three main categories:

• core
• category (sleep, joints, detoxification, etc.)
• product (ortho sleep, probiotic 3, etc.)

Then, these three main categories were further divided into the following:

• buyer
• non-buyer
• brand
• non-brand

Finally, I added combinations along with long-tail keywords to target information seekers
(so we could convert them into buyers):

For example:

• buyer + brand
• buyer + non-brand
• non-buyer + brand
• non-buyer + non-brand

We create different keyword combinations by mixing different phases Using some powerful tools.

Here’s a draft of the keyword map based on my research and findings:

Organizing keywords helps a lot — the rankings may fluctuate frequently, but it gives us the
freedom to see if the impact’s been sitewide or any particular keyword category has been hit.
And then we can plan further optimization accordingly.

Additionally, the proper organization of keywords helps you evaluate which
category/sub-category of keywords has higher search volumes and which brings more traffic/conversions.

Competition analysis

I’ve invested a lot of time in competition analysis because when you have a new website without
acklinks/authority/content, it’s quite challenging to push your way into the top results.

In the first phase of SEO, our objective was to compete with the big e-commerce brands for the
product keywords (brand, non-brand, buyer and non-buyer variations), and we are glad to admit
that this has been successfully achieved.

Our tools helped us to see how well the competitors’ top category and product pages were
optimized for the target keywords and create an optimization plan based on this data.

For instance, we could quickly see if they were using structured data and the average word count for
body content. I strongly recommend looking for such on-page “gaps” within the top pages of your
competitors and use this data to your advantage!

Now we’ve already started working on competing with big e-commerce brands for our core category
keywords and the website’s outranking Amazon, iHerb, and Walmart pages for hundreds of relevant queries.

Content optimization

When you optimize an e-commerce website, you may need to work on millions of pages. I suggest you
should focus on the low-hanging fruit at the beginning of your campaign and start optimizing the most
important pages first.

As I’ve already mentioned, this client already had another website that had been generating traffic and
revenue, so I looked at its stats and checked the top-revenue landing pages.

If you have e-commerce tracking set up in the Google Analytics account, you can discover the most
important pages by going to:

Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages > sort by revenue (high to low) and add the ‘Organic traffic’
segment:

 

• On-page SEO for the category pages.
• On-page SEO for the product pages.
• On-page SEO for the blog content.

While working on each of this page types, the team made sure to optimize:

• Page URLs
• Page title and description tags
• Page h1 tags
• Page body
• Image alt text
• Internal link anchor text
• Schema markup

The content analysis tool helped quickly identify what needed to be fixed and improved on the site’s
pages:

 

This content keeps bringing relevant organic traffic and can be used in link building campaigns as well.

Backlink analysis and link building

As you know, the two things Google cares so much about when assessing websites are content and
backlinks.

We had no backlinks at the beginning of this campaign, and, to make things even more complicated,
we had to compete with established websites.

So, we simply started off link building by looking at the competitors’ backlink profiles. Our tool found
a huge list of dofollow backlinks and the work was humming!

This is the overall backlinks progress for the website:

In addition to the links earned through competitor research, the team’s been building links by using
ebooks, presentations, PDFs, images, video, and audio content.

Here are a few link building tips for those working on similar projects:

1. Use the link intersection tool to see which websites link to multiple competitors, but don’t link
   to your site. Reach out to them and ask for a backlink.

2. Search for easily replicable sources of links, such as links from forums, link pages, and niche
directories.

3. If a website is a reseller, try to get a link on “where to buy” pages on the manufacturer’s website.

4. You can try to partner with niche-relevant businesses. For instance, if your website sells health
supplements, you can get links from health/fitness websites that are not your direct competitors.

5. Partner with influencers. This definitely takes time and effort because you need to build good
relationships (or spend a fortune!) in order to get your product featured in their social media
post or blog article.

Project results

Short-term: Increased rankings and traffic

Long-term: Sales growth with an increased per cart value

The improvement in the keyword rankings is impressive! It surely demonstrates the value of the
entire SEO campaign:

Planned activities

Currently, we are planning to:

• Do regular on-page optimization (to keep in sync with Google ranking fluctuations due to
  competitors’ activities and the nature of Google’s constantly changing algorithms).
• Carry out a technical evaluation of the site on a regular basis and fix any issues found.
• Keep up with the consistent link building (to naturally grow website’s link profile that will
  help improve site’s rankings and increase traffic).
• Create new content to target more long-tail keywords.
• Submit AOR’s product feed to Google Shopping.

Did you have experience with similar health niche projects? Or maybe you’d like to ask Peeyush
some questions related to his SEO campaign? Feel free to share your opinion in the comments below!