The highest ranks in search engine results are the most wanted ones. It comes as no surprise as top 3 positions receive 50% of the search traffic. However, the bigger the website, the bigger the challenge for SEO. It can be particularly noticeable in the E-commerce sector.

Activities, such as the process of changing the assortment or adding and deleting subpages (i.e. product cards), targeting a great number of keywords and indexing limitations are only the tip of the iceberg. Online store management requires a lot of work and constant supervision. Find out below how did we deal with these issues.

Troubling tendency

Wapteka is the popular brand and big e-commerce that offers a wide range of medical products. The brand and its website received awards such as e-Gazele Biznesu 2016, Forbes magazine Diamonds 2016 and top positions on lists of the best online stores. Despite all that, the serious problem has occurred – the continuous decrease in web traffic. It is not good news for the online business. That is why our agency was asked to conduct an analysis and implement relevant changes.

Looking for causes

The first and important task was the conduct of a detailed analysis of wapteka.pl. The success of a whole project depended on it.

We took a closer look at every detail of the website and performed a site audit by using popular tools such as DeepCrawl and Screaming Frog. It helps us examine all parameters – basic (headers, tags) as well as advanced (canonical links, internal linking, indexing quality). Given the fact that app’s algorithms crawl around the website similarly to Google bots, it is easy to determine elements that need improvement.

The result of an audit was a 40-page report prepared by our agency. For the sake of the website, the assessment was very strict and carefully written.

Another aspect that is very important in modern SEO is the website’s content. Contrary to popular belief, SEO copywriting is a very demanding task. It is necessary to prepare texts that are full of keywords (beneficial for SEO) as well as of high quality and standard.

While working on the wapteka.pl website, we tried to keep in mind needs and expectations of its users. In the end, they are the foundation of every e-commerce’s existence. On the one hand, general SEO activities increase website’s visibility in Google, but on the other hand, they make it less user-friendly. That is why our agency always pays a lot of attention to usability by combining together SEO and UX. We are maximizing SEO potential and not ‘hurting’ ordinary users in the process.

To make sure everything will work properly, we analyzed user behavior on the website by using a Hotjar tool. Results helped us understand how customers use the website, how they navigate it or what elements capture their attention. However, A/B testing allowed us to assess the effectiveness of suggested solutions.

SEO in e-commerce

SEO audit performance and the optimization were only the beginning of our cooperation. The project involving such big website requires the right planning. That is why we begin each month by precisely defining the activities. To achieve that, we regularly monitor website’s rank and results we achieved. It helps us quickly determine current needs and manage resources.

Apart from SEO, we offer external (publishing on independent websites) and internal content marketing services. For the next months, we were trying to precise the product category tree (that was quite general), we were creating product descriptions and infographics. We also launched a company blog on the website.

Performed activities:

• Full SEO audit (technical) - to improve website’s technical side, speed, quality, indexing, availability for robots, internal linking and other key aspects
• Content SEO audit – adding phrases, content, news subpages, improving website’s structure
• Analyses and UX testing – UX analysis by using HotJar and A/B testings
• Acquisition of new and quality links to the website
• External copywriting – publishing on external websites
• Internal copywriting – content editing, creating descriptions, guides, infographics, running a blog

Results

Thanks to the great communication with the client and our mutual involvement, it was possible to achieve satisfactory results in a short period of time.

We managed to stop the decrease in organic traffic and improve website’s visibility online. As a result of our actions, the number of keywords in TOP3 increased by 120%.

What helped to achieve this success were undoubtedly quality links (acquired from external sources). We try very hard to obtain them in a natural way (engine-friendly) and pay attention their high quality. Such procedures pay off significantly in the future.

Our next objective was to increase the number of users. Our carefully planned and implemented changes turned out to be successful as well. The graphs below display the effective rise of parameters.

The increase in a number of referring domains; source: majestic.com

The increase in visibility and a number of clicks in the last 90 days; source: Search Console

All activities taken by us ensured the increase of website’s visibility on Google, which resulted in the increase of organic traffic on wapteka.pl. By looking at the course of the cooperation with the client, 2 phases become visible: Phase 1 (stabilization) and Phase 2 (a gradual increase).

The increase in a number of sessions (since the beginning of the cooperation); source: Google Analytics

In the comparison of the last 1.5 of the month to the same period in 2016, the number of new sessions on the website increased by 55%.

The increase in a number of sessions (year to year); source: Google Analytics

However, in comparison to the last two months (August 2017 – September 2017), the web traffic increased by 70%.

Summary

The website wapteka.pl is an example that shows the importance of the thorough optimization in websites and online stores. Audits give a chance to discover and repair those elements of the website that often no one suspects might be troublesome.

The wapteka.pl project might be the model example of the great cooperation with the client. This project also proves that the properly performed and implemented SEO audits and activities might turn out to be very beneficial.

Author

Łukasz Suchy, SEO Specialist at Ideo Force

Download the full report on interaktywnie.com, 31.10.2017r.