Challenge
This skincare client relied heavily upon e-commerce for the lifeblood of it’s revenue. They are an exclusive authorized reseller of many of the top skincare brands in the world and had built a reputation and brand that consumers trusted. They came to use with these initial problems:
Organic SEO Penalty
As they were so well invested in paid media such as Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, etc. they were still able to invest in the process of SEO even given the website had a penalty causing rankings and traffic to deflate exponentially from prior periods. The main issue was due to a large number of exact match anchor texts and links that were not good to have affiliated with the website.
Branded Rankings
Once the penalty was resolved and organic traffic began to increase due to content marketing, outreach, etc. the client was focused on the brands being sold to rank on page 1. To bid on the brands via Pay Per Click was costly as they were sought after by many resellers.
Technical Optimization
The website was robust with over 5000 indexed pages in Google. Additionally, the website was built and coded over many years with various Magento developers customizes certain parts of the website. The website needed a major emphasis on code optimization and SEO technical optimization for Google to crawl the pages and interpret correct keywords and priority product pages.
Solution
Our solutions based on the above initial challenges were:
Full Audit/Gameplan For Penalty Resolution
We analyzed the specifics of the penalty and took the appropriate measures over the course of 4-5 months to remove a high number of spam associated with the website. This enabled the search engine the impression the website did not deserve to be downgraded to restore prior traffic. We made numerous disavow files and requests to Google directly until we were able to see our rankings greatly improve and traffic/sales follow.
Page 1 For Brands
To bid on the brands via Pay Per Click was costly so we focused on individual product categories with a list of priorities. We had an extensive competitor footprint and reverse engineered all of the steps we felt the competing page 1 rankings had in which we lacked. We then began a strategic plan to implement better user experience on product pages, optimized code and layout for search, while including the product pages in content strategy (onsite and offsite).
Canonical Tags, XML Sitemap & Code Optimization
One the major impacts we found after thorough analysis was implemented a high number of correct rel=canonical tags. The website had many pages that were being cannibalized in the SERPs (I.E. Two identical pages that Google did not know which deserved the keyword ranking for). We also saw many pages with incorrect canonical tags which we fixed. Finally, we had to re-organize the XML Sitemap as it contained many unimportant pages first with a high priority crawl rate and many broken pages that no longer existed. Over the course of a year the website went under major technical optimization remedies. This helped Google crawl, understand and rank the website pages much higher than before.
Results
Addressing the search engine issues with milestones and completing each challenge before moving on to the next phase enabled us to:
- Earn the most organic keywords in Google the website had ever historically had.
- Increase organic visitors count more than 1029% from the prior period.
- Transform the organic channel revenue source from being third to the most profitable and highest grossing channel.
- Built the brand and website as an absolute authority in the niche with mentions from celebrities and influencers within the niche.
