Project Aphrodite: $1,373 to $370,745 Monthly Revenue with SEO
Shipped Items Revenue
Return on Investment
Organic Traffic
Pageviews
Project Aphrodite was an affiliate marketing joint venture in the beauty industry that now serves as a blueprint for successful e-commerce SEO campaigns.
In this case study, we’re going to summarize every step we took to take this brand from 3,000 to over 350,000 organic visitors per month in 17 months while only spending $31,937.60 ($1,878.69 per month).
This resulted in $370,745.40 in shipped items revenue on month 17 alone! That’s a 197x ROI!
We’re going to cover everything: Technical SEO, Content Strategy, and Link Building.
We’re even going to give you a detailed breakdown of how we spent the $31,937.60.
We have a lot to discuss, so let’s get started…
Technical SEO
The first thing we did was a technical audit. And because this site was not originally optimized for SEO, we found plenty of technical issues.
Hosting
The first thing we did was switch hosting providers.
This was a no-brainer because the original host’s servers were outside the USA (closer to where the influencer is from) and we wanted the new content to rank in the USA.
We ultimately decided to switch to Kinsta, a premium hosting provider with servers in the USA, to improve performance and get access to a CDN (Content Delivery Network).
HTTPS
This was also a no-brainer.
The website didn’t have HTTPS. HTTPS is a MUST for every website nowadays.
Page Speed Optimization
Remove Unnecessary Plugins – The first thing we did was remove a lot of unnecessary plugins. These unnecessary plugins were those that only added to the aesthetics of the site while increasing bloat and slowing it down.
Utilize the Right Plugins – We used a combination of WP Rocket, ShortPixel, and Asset CleanUp Pro to optimize site speed.
Index Management
This site was not optimized for SEO, so there was a lot of thin content, media, archive, author, and even comment pages indexed.
Because we only want to serve valuable, SEO-optimized content to Google, we had to remove these pages from the index.
Content Strategy
After the technical audit, the next step we took was to come up with a winning content strategy.
This involved keyword research and getting a lot of SEO-optimized content published.
Keyword Research
Our approach to keyword research was fairly simple — to target the keywords our competition was already ranking for.
The Editorial Process
We have a very exhaustive editorial process at 607 Media.
We made sure to cover every single topic comprehensively and crafted content that not only engaged the audience, but also ranked high on search engines.
The objective was to establish the brand as a “topical authority” in the industry.
Over 17 months, we published and optimized 142 pages (337,974 words of content).
Link Building
The last step we took was to come up with a comprehensive link-building strategy. Backlinks are still considered to be Google’s number 1 ranking factor.
Over 17 months, we built 67 high-quality backlinks. With an average DR of 47.85 and an average traffic of 10,506.
Tier 2 Links
We also built tier 2 links to our backlinks. We do this to add power to our backlinks.
Over 17 months, we built a total of 62 tier 2 links.
HARO
We also used the Help a Reporter Out (HARO) platform to build high DR links to the homepage.
We were able to build 14 backlinks through HARO. With an average DR of 64.
Unlinked Brand Mentions
Lastly, we noticed that there were a lot of websites linking out to brand’s social media properties and not the website. So we simply reached out to these webmasters asking for a link to the website as well.
By doing this, we were able to build an additional 5 backlinks with a DR 70+.
Results
Now that we’ve gone over the SEO strategy, what kind of results did we get?
Traffic
When we first started working on this project, the website was getting around 150 organic visitors per day (mostly brand searches).
After implementing the strategies we discussed above, the site started getting over 11,000 organic visitors per day.
Monetization
On month 17, we earned over $14k from affiliate marketing ($370,745.40 in Shipped Items Revenue!)
Display Ads – We also earned over $7k from display ads.
Expenses
And how much did we spend? And what did we spend it on?
Over 17 months, we only spent a total of $31,937.60 ($1,878.69 per month).
Here is a detailed breakdown of our expenses:
Hosting – $2,997.89 – Yes, we spent nearly $3k on hosting alone. This includes overages and plan upgrades. *This is extra huge because we recently upgraded to the $3k/year plan on Kinsta.
Content Publishing & Optimization – $16,898.70
Link-Building – $10,501.78
Tools – $639.23
Other – $900
Final Thoughts
This case study reveals the potential of how a holistic and well-executed SEO strategy can yield a crazy return on investment. The project not only achieved an impressive 197x ROI but also established a scalable model for future e-commerce SEO campaigns.
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