SEO Case Study: Over $42,000 Increase in Revenue in 6 Months

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Do you rely solely on advertisement to attract customers? Perhaps social media marketing? The unfortunate reality is that even with both, there are going to be dry spells from time to time. We know it, and you know it. That’s just how it is.

Our friends who run a motorcycle– and accessories store know it too. That’s why they contacted us back in May 2023 to learn more about SEO.

This is how we turned their business around and generated over $40,000 extra revenue just from organic search traffic, all within 6 months of working together.

1. Background

Here are some facts about our client:

• They are an e-commerce store selling motorcycles and related accessories and clothing items.
• They also operate a physical store and dealership.
• They worked with an all-inclusive marketing agency before, with horrible results leading to a negative ROI.
• Before we started working together, their main source of revenue was Facebook.

Being a brand based around motorcycles and riding, they naturally had lower revenues during the winter months, and higher during summer. We compare data between 2022 and 2023, from June to November, which is the main period of the motorcycle season.

2. Organic Traffic & Sales at the Beginning

In the 2022 season, their organic traffic was 50,500 users, coming up just a thousand users short of traffic from social media.

Using their average order value of $150, and a conversion rate of 1%, they brought in a revenue of $75,000 attributed to search traffic.

3. SEO Strategy

Seeing that search traffic is one of their major sources of revenue, we were excited to find out just how good their SEO is that they attract so many customers via Google.

We could not have been more wrong. What we saw left us absolutely shocked.

Their e-commerce store was severely under-optimized in a multitude of aspects, which left us wondering what would be possible for them with actual good SEO.

Our shock turned into even more excitement, seeing the unrealized potential behind the brand. We love this industry because it’s a fair game: if our clients win, we win.

We put our heads down and started auditing their store straight away.

A) Keyword Research

If you’re using small fish bait, you will catch small fish. – JK Molina

As with fishing, with SEO you have to use the right bait to attract the right customer. This translates to optimizing the webpage for relevant keywords.

With our client, this meant targeting several keywords related to specific motorcycle gear they sell. After some research, we were able to distinguish between about a dozen distinct areas of interest, and attributed three to four keywords to each.

We also took the store’s current ranking keywords into account.

B) Technical SEO

This is the aspect of SEO that left us shocked in the beginning of our audit.

Quite frankly, our client’s e-commerce store was suffering from major technical flaws. A combination of severely suboptimal pages, missing titles and descriptions, non-existent image ALT texts, and many more issues were heavily damaging the store’s rankings.

The solution: systematically fix everything. The truth is, there is no shortcut when it comes to technical SEO. Issues are often unique, especially if the store is using a platform like Shopify.

In this case, the client had worked with a development business in the past, which lead to several underlying problems causing inconsistencies on the surface. We dug in and went straight to the root causes, implementing solutions where they matter.

C) Content Creation

The store did have some blog content when we started working, though the posts were mostly outdated. In addition, they either targeted irrelevant keywords, or no keywords at all.

We hid all of the irrelevant and duplicate content and started writing and publishing high quality blog content, with tactical internal linking and relevant keyword targeting.

We also improved some of the existing content by adding internal links to some appropriate collection pages, fixing spelling and grammatical mistakes, and adding various graphics.

D) Link Building

An essential aspect of SEO is building links from external websites. This helps increase page and domain authority, leading to increased rankings on Google.

The store’s current backlink profile consisted of a rather high number of spammy backlinks. This is a problem, because as beneficial it is to have good backlink portfolio, having spammy ones will seriously decrease your page’s rankings.

Luckily, there is a way to get rid of these spammy backlinks. We compiled a list containing all backlinks we wanted to see gone and submitted the list to Google, requesting a disavow. Essentially, these backlinks will now be invisible to Google, so they won’t poison the store’s rankings anymore.

After cleaning up the client’s existing backlink portfolio, we looked forward to identify new backlink opportunities.

4. Results

After just 6 months of working together, we’ve managed to generate a great amount of incremental revenue for this store, while providing them with a healthy ROI.

Search traffic grew by 56%, bringing in an additional ~28,000 visitors.

We never take credit for results that aren’t directly connected to our work. What we can say, is that with a conversion rate of 1% and an AOV of $150, this extra traffic translates to an additional revenue of $42,000, over a period of 6 months.

Nothing showcases the power of SEO better than a success-story backed by numbers.

Not only is it smart to diversify your traffic source, this client shows that even if you’re already heavily relying on search traffic, investing in SEO can still be a no-brainer.

Thank you for reading this case study. We appreciate your time.

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Want to learn more? Check out more of our work here.