eCommerce SEO Case Study
Audit & Strategy For One Of The Biggest Online Supplement Stores In The World
Industry:

Nutritional Supplements

Services:

SEO Audit

SEO Strategy

Foreword

About the Client

This client is a well-known online retailer specializing in dietary supplements, sports supplements and bodybuilding supplements. The company's website offers comprehensive resources ranging from scholarly articles to premium-grade supplements. With a primary focus on serving professional athletes and anyone passionate about fitness, the company has achieved a legendary status within the industry.

Google Organic as a traffic source was the second-highest performing channel in driving revenue and conversions, closely followed by Direct, Google PPC, and Affiliate channels.

Despite achieving impressive results and generating organic traffic valued at millions of dollars, the company faced a significant challenge - a decline of 75% in non-branded organic traffic, mostly due to an irresponsible migration process to the Shopify platform.

Key Challenges

As a website's size and complexity increase, its technical aspects are crucial for SEO performance. Therefore, addressing the most significant technical issues became our top priority.

Incorrect Redirects

Previously, the eCommerce section of the website was located within the subfolder, and then got a dedicated subdomain. The migration was managed through global redirect rule. Unfortunately, this resulted in many 404 error pages and broken redirects because the global redirect resolves only a small set of pages. 

Poor On-Page Optimization 

The consequence of having under-optimized, broad and generic title tags due to Shopify settings is reduced performance. Then, the website had content issues on collection pages, from too many H1 tags on the website to formatting the entire paragraph as an H2 tag and displaying main content with text too small for reading. 

Broken Internal & External Links

Although the website architecture was changed, the old internal link structure remained the same, which caused unnecessary 301 redirects and 404 errors. Also, the website had more than 20,000 broken backlinks.

International SEO Not Utilized

Without proper hreflang tags and content in foreign languages, pages designed for other countries only ranked for English keywords, leaving huge untapped potential in other foreign markets.

Unoptimal Web Architecture

Due to the not utilized SEO structure and internal linking strategy, the decent portion of market demand was untapped. First, the filter pages were not visible to Google, since they are blocked from the Robots.txt file. Then, although having the right products, some filter values are not added in the filter section at all, missing a great opportunity in the market.

Poor Content Strategy 

With content formatting issues, imprecisely linked articles and pages, 1,800+ pages with a word count lower than 200, over 6,000 URLs that are indexed and didn’t bring any organic traffic - the content on the website definitely did not use its full potential. 

Next Steps & Strategic Action Plan

After identifying the fundamental issues and conducting global market research, our next strategic step is to develop a sprint-based action plan and implement revenue-driving corrections.

Place proper 1,000+ redirects for broken internal and external links
Manually change the broken internal links to avoid redirect chains and instantly improve user flow from the most popular pages
On-Page improvements (Meta Tags & Content on the collection pages)
New Meta Tags dynamic rules for international pages
Restructure the informational articles to form a meaningful Topical Authority map and further strengthen the position of market leader
Restructuring the website architecture to cover untapped demand for various of product types
Implement SEO Revenue Forecasting model