Project Artemis: Doubled Organic Traffic in 3 Months

The Client

An established outdoor brand that has been around for nearly 30 years! Their wholesale business is flourishing, but they haven't seen much success selling directly on their website.

The Objective

Improve their organic presence online and grow revenue directly through their own Shopify store to create less dependence on their wholesale business.

↓ Results ↓

+105.99%

Organic Traffic

$40,272

Annual Traffic Value

230

Top 3 Keywords

581

Top 10 Keywords

To get SEO results in less 3 months, we always use our “SEO Quick Wins” playbook.

Here are the 4 steps we take to get our clients quick SEO results:

Technical SEO

The first thing we did was a technical audit. We found and resolved these issues:

Broken Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are the little links that help you navigate up (i.e., back) through pages prior to accessing this page.

Breadcrumbs are a key part of technical SEO performance. But on Shopify, out of the box, they’re practically useless.

By default, Shopify uses the URL to dynamically insert breadcrumb links based on which collection you accessed this product through. This isn’t ideal.

To fix this, we manually set a breadcrumb for each product using a custom metafield. We created a metafield named “breadcrumb” and stored the collection handle in there.

Within the breadcrumbs theme section, you can then use this to add a breadcrumb, like so:

				
					<a href="{{ collections[product.metafields.global.breadcrumb].url }}">{{ collections[product.metafields.global.breadcrumb].title }}</a>

This re-enables breadcrumb functionality and provides additional control over this, which is even better for SEO.

Broken Structured Data

Usually, most Shopify themes have Structured Data built in. But for some reason their Structured Data wasn’t working at all.

Structured Data is what allows your listings to look like this on the SERP:

Without structured data, you wouldn’t see any of the star ratings, # of reviews, price, shipping, etc.

So you can understand how important it is.

We eventually identified that the app that was causing this issue and found an alternative.

Once we removed the conflicting app, their Structured Data was finally working again.

Index Bloat

Shopify isn’t optimized for SEO, so there were TONS of unnecessary pages indexed – duplicate content in the form of tag pages.

Because we only want to serve valuable, SEO-optimized content to Google, we had to remove these pages from the index. We used a robots.txt to do this.

We removed 500+ pages from the index!

Here is the robots.txt file modified to include a few default rules we tend to use for clients:

				
					{% for group in robots.default_groups %}
  {{- group.user_agent }}

  {%- for rule in group.rules -%}
    {{ rule }}
  {%- endfor -%}

  {%- if group.user_agent.value == '*' -%}
{{ 'Disallow: /collections/all*' }}
{{ 'Disallow: /collections/vendors*?*q=*' }}
{{ 'Disallow: /collections/types*?*q=*' }}
{{ 'Disallow: /collections/*?*constraint*' }}
{{ 'Disallow: /collections/*/*' }}
{{ 'Disallow: /collections/*?*filter*' }}
{{ 'Disallow: /collections/*?*pf_*' }}
{{ 'Disallow: /collections/*?*view*' }}
{{ 'Disallow: /collections/*?*grid_list*' }}
{{ 'Disallow: /collections/?page=*' }}
{{ 'Disallow: /blogs/*/tagged/*' }}
  {%- endif -%}

  {%- if group.sitemap != blank -%}
      {{ group.sitemap }}
  {%- endif -%}
{% endfor %}

Sitebulb Crawl

Lastly, we ran a Sitebulb crawl to find and resolve any remaining issues.

We found more issues, such as:

Missing alt text
Broken Images
Missing H1 Tags
Orphaned Pages
Broken Redirects
Missing Meta Descriptions

Once we resolved all these technical SEO issues, we saw an immediate spike in impressions.

I’ve put together a FREE training going over our whole technical SEO audit process.

You can download it here: https://607.media/free-training-technical-seo/

Site Architecture

After the technical audit, the next step we took was to improve site structure and navigation.

Navigation

We need to make it easy for both users and search engines to navigate and crawl the content on our website.

For small stores, a simple shop menu may be sufficient. But for this store, we needed to restructure the navigation so that the different collection and sub-collection pages were organized properly.

And it was very important that we used specific and targeted anchor text. For example:

“men’s cycling shorts” not just “men’s”
“waterproof cycling shorts” not just “waterproof”

Homepage

This brand featured “best sellers” and “new arrivals” at the top of their homepage.

These seems fine, but this is actually a very common SEO mistake.

We don’t want to feature “best sellers” or new arrivals”.

These collections don’t have any search volume and we won’t want to waste our link juice.

Instead, we featured the collection pages with the highest search volume.

Shopping Pages

Next, we optimized the brand’s collection and product pages.

80% of revenue will come from collection pages. So it’s important that we optimize them for SEO.

The main issue with their shopping pages was that there was barely any content on them!

We added SEO-optimized content to all these pages using our templates below:

We’ve seen a strong positive correlation between the amount of content on a collection page and rankings.

This is because it helps search engines better understand what the page is about.

We’ve also seen a positive correlation between conversion rates and rankings.

High conversion rates signal to search engines that users are finding exactly what they’re searching for.

Foundational Backlinks

Lastly, we did some link building.

Link building is the powerhouse that drives Shopify SEO. To rank for high-volume transactional queries, strategic link building is an absolute must.

In the beginning of every new Shopify SEO campaign, we always build the following foundational backlinks:

Citations
Social Profiles
Press Releases
Media Links

These foundational backlinks improve your brand’s authority and signal to search engines that your brand can be trusted (and ranked higher on SERPs).

Results