Vinod Mohite, Founder and Consultant at Mohite Digital Services has showcased the strategy used by him to drive organic traffic for a Shopify-based eCommerce store called Nest Asia. He successfully managed to raise the number of visitors from 1084 to 7047 (organically), in only 5 months! Keep reading to know how!
Nest Asia is a leading Shopify ecommerce store based in India, which generated maximum sales through social media presence, running Google Adwords campaigns and through email marketing. However, upon realising that most of their audience base was shopping for home décor by Googling different variants of relevant keywords, they prioritised their Google presence as a medium to gain sales through SEO for Shopify stores.
To increase Nest Asia’s footprint on google, we followed a basic strategy:
Website Audit
Collection Pages
Product Pages
Backlink Strategy
The Right SEO Tools
This 5-step SEO Strategy helped Nest Asia grow exponentially within a short span of 5 months! Let’s dive into the strategy to understand how:
A website audit done by the team revealed various technical SEO parameters that needed work before moving ahead. We checked for broken links, a proper navigation structure, URL structures, sitemaps, robots files, google analytics code, footer of the website, etc. In the end, we also made sure that the website was easily crawled and indexed by the Search Engine Crawler and also improved the website page speed
Once the website is ready to go, we made sure that our sitemap was well built and crawlable before we submitted it to search engines to get each page crawled. Getting your website crawled will allow it to gain credibility in the eyes of the search engine and it will file the right pages under the right keywords, ranking them when the user is searching for it.
Once the technical SEO is taken care of, we moved on to competitor analysis. One of the most important parameters to keep in mind while doing this is to make sure that your competitor has a good presence on the search engine. Otherwise, they’re not your competitor when it comes to SEO. You may come across competitors that may have a strong presence on other platforms like social media but not so much on search engines. These competitors are not relevant because we won’t be able to analyze any useful data for building our SEO strategy.
For Nest Asia, we started this exercise by checking our competitors for several KPIs such as domain authority, domain ratings, and keyword rankings. Various tools such as a href and MOZ come in handy to enable an in-depth analysis of our competitors.
As an Shopify ecommerce store, Nest Asia’s website had numerous collections pages. Each page, including all collections and primary website pages, needed an in-depth keyword research strategy. Based on this strategy, each collections page and each products page was supported with a different keyword strategy. For instance the blog section had a strategy focused on latest trends and popular topics searched by our targeted customers. We took help from tools like ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner for proper data mining.
Once we finalized keywords for each page, we made sure that relevant content was present on each page. Using this content as support, we used relevant meta tags such as ‘title’, ‘description’,etc. on every page to help increase crawlability of the website.
While naming the products that the client offered for sale, the client had only considered the branding perspective for these products.
[Pro Tip: Always name the products on an ecommerce website whilekeeping the searchability of the terms in mind as well!]
However, to make sure that individual products pages ranked when a buyer searched for something similar, we had to increase the searchability of that product. The only way to do that is to add relevant keywords in the names. It was a tedious job in the beginning, but the results we reaped were worth every ounce of effort put in!
While renaming these products, we kept the following things in mind:
What the user might search when looking for this product
Alignment of the product name with the brand image
Search-engine friendly URL as per targeted web page keywords
Relevancy of the name of the product with what it actually was. For e.g. a white mug should be called a white mug. Otherwise, the relevancy of the name is heavily lost.
If well implemented, link building can work as a strong foundation for your website’s SEO which can be cashed out on, in the long run as well. It can be the hardest part of SEO because it involves strategizing, selection of relevant websites and then getting links from these websites, which can help you create a strong footprint on the search engine.
We implemented this strategy for Nest Asia and approached relevant websites for creating such a backlink, with good success. Here are the few aspects we used to shortlist the websites used by us for creating backlinks:
Domain Authority: The domain authority of a website resembles the overall trust score and is rated out of 100. The higher the score, the higher the domain authority. While selecting websites, we made sure that they had a high domain authority for better SEO score for our own website
Domain Rating: Domain rating of a website is slightly different than domain authority. It provides an in sight into how powerful the backlink structure of that particular website is. It is rated out of 100 and of course, the higher the score, the better the rank! Apart from domain authority, we looked into the domain ranking of these websites while shortlisting them.
Spam Score: Spam score of a websites how cases how many spam websites are present. Having an association with any spamming websites triggers google penalty, undoing all SEO hard work done by the team. Hence, we made sure not to submit our portal to any spammy websites. This is a very important step!
Follow/ No follow: Having a mix of follow and no follow links is very important to legitimize the back linking campaign. When only no follow links are focused on, it might not reap good results as it doesn’t pass on any link juices. On the other hand, focusing only on follow links, may result into google thinking that you’re doing this for the sake of link juice and result in a penalty. Hence, a blend of both, with a higher focus on follow links is a better strategy to go ahead with!
Relevancy: One of the most important factors in link building is relevancy. Hence, it is very important that you submit your portal/content to relevant websites that provide good value. We made sure to follow this for Nest Asia as well!
When it comes to SEO, usage of theright tools is necessary to support proper research and analysis. Here are afew tools that we used to support our research:
Google Keyword Planner: Since it is a tool designed by Google itself, we believe that it is the right tool for conducting Keyword Research. The Google Keyword Planner Tool has enabled us to conduct in-depth analysis of the keywords searched most by our customers when they searched our clients’ products online. Apart from that, it has also helped us in targeting the appropriate keywords for each collections and product page on our website.
Google Analytics: Google Analytics is one of the most trusted analytics tools used widely by many website managers, SEO experts, and Adwords campaign managers. We too use google analytics to get detailed reports on our website traffic and overall website performance for Nest Asia, along with our other clientele. For this project, it helped us understand our progress and is our strategy was performing in the right direction. It also enabled us to revise our strategy and fine-tune it to get the best out of our website.
Shopify SEO Plugin: Another great tool that we used forincreasing the overall SEO score and sales of Nest Asia was the Shopify SEOPlugin. This plugin enabled us to enter the right meta tags to our pages. Italso enabled us to redirect old web pages/ broken links to new webpages.
Google Search Console: Using Google Search Console, we extracted data on page impressions, and the ranking position of our website for various keywords. This helped us to determine which keywords needed more focus to improve our results. Apart from that, we also submitted new web pages to google for checking any technical anomalies in our website in terms of broken links, crawl errors, mobile friendliness etc..
Ahrefs: Ahrefs is a powerful SEO Tool for conducting competitor research. It helped us to determine which portals are best to approach for backlinking of our website. IT also helped us find frequently asked questions (FAQs) that our customers asked for the products that we offered.
Monthly Report: This entire strategy was planned and implemented on a monthly basis. We made sure that we extracted monthly reports using all the tools mentioned above and recognized various pain points which needed to be worked on. Upon pin pointing these shortcomings, we made several revisions in our strategy and executed the newly built strategy for getting better results
Weekly Calls: We also made sure to connect with our client on a weekly basis to make sure we all were on the same page, in terms of workflow, the direction of work, and also enabled our client to understand the steps we had taken to increase their visitor count in the coming months.
This entire process has enabled us to understand the world of SEO a little bit better and helped us perform our best! We can proudly say that this entire strategy, collated by Vinod Mohite, has out performed all our expectations and allowed us to present more than 6x times rise in visitor count in only5 months!
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