Positioning is a process whose success depends on various factors – the quality of the website, the link base, the amount and formatting of texts, the size and strength of the competition, and many others. That is why independent SEO activities rarely work. Online store owners cannot afford to spend time exploring the secrets of positioning and making the necessary corrections. On the other hand, they are accompanied by uncertainty as to whether handing your website over to an external agency is a good solution, especially if you need descriptions of specialized products that people outside the industry have little understanding of. However, these are completely unnecessary concerns. You can effectively position your website on any subject. Let’s take the example of our client selling electrical equipment.
Results before positioning
The client in question runs an online store where he sells sockets, switches, cables, wires, extension cords, installation boxes, insulating tapes and other products used in electrical works. He signed a SEO contract with us in June 2019, opting for a budget of $ 1,400 per month. When we started SEO activities, the client’s website appeared in 18 phrases in TOP3 and 145 phrases in TOP10, while in TOP50 there were less than 1000 phrases. So it cannot be said that we started from scratch – the website was visible in the search engine and also had organic traffic. However, the audit showed us that the website has the potential to generate even more search engine hits and gain better places for industry phrases.
The first year of cooperation
During the audit, we noticed that the client’s website is available at two addresses, which would be a significant difficulty in positioning, among others due to duplicate content. At the beginning of the cooperation, permanent redirects to one of the addresses were introduced, thanks to which the problem was quickly removed and opened the way to new activities.
In the next stage, we focused on the most urgent issue, i.e. optimizing the pages of the most important product categories by adding comprehensive descriptions. We chose the best key phrases for each of them and placed them in the texts to increase the probability that the page will be high in the search results for these keywords. We have also determined the optimal H1 headings and meta titles, and we took care of the appropriate length of the text for each subpage. This brought the first signs of increased visibility, which showed that the chosen positioning strategy was working. The website appeared on 38 phrases in TOP3, 387 phrases in TOP10 and 1795 phrases in TOP50.
Second year of cooperation
After a year of cooperation, the client decided to extend the SEO contract and additionally increase the budget to $ 1,800 a month. As the most urgent changes have already been implemented, we focused on increasing website traffic with blog articles. We focused on extensive, valuable texts containing phrases loosely related to the client’s activity, which we could not implement in the category descriptions. This resulted in a significant increase in the number of phrases in top positions, and thus an increase in the visibility of the customer’s website, which translated into greater brand recognition. The client also agreed to expand the website with detailed categories that were optimized for long tail phrases. Thanks to this, we were able to fight the competition for even more keywords relevant in the industry.
The strategy based on extending the website with high-quality texts brought particularly noticeable effects in May this year, when the Google algorithm was updated. Our observations show that as a result, pages with a large amount of unique content recorded increases, and sites with little text or duplicate content fell in the ranking (e.g. product descriptions taken from manufacturers’ websites). This change confirmed our predictions about the future of positioning, and although it did not echo widely in the industry, it had a significant impact on a large number of websites, especially online stores. This is shown by the results achieved by our client:
– TOP3 – 218 phrases,
– TOP10 – 1099 phrases,
– TOP50 – 4656 phrases.
What is the conclusion of this? Positioning requires not only knowledge and experience, but also tracking trends so that updating algorithms, instead of destroying the effects of work, help to climb higher and higher positions.
