Fitness eCommerce SEO Case Study

Link building and content optimisation for a new eCommerce site

In August 2020, Digital Cornerstone started working with a single product (with multiple variations) niche fitness equipment retailer on a small but focused project with a simple brief…

Rank the collection pages for their new Shopify store by the end of December, ready for the new year, in a very competitive niche.

SEO strategies

Technical appraisal & site preparation

When we started working on the site in November 2020 we had a decent-sized budget and a blank slate to work with, so the 1st port of call was to make sure no technical issues were holding the site back.

And seeing as the site was built on Shopify, there was nothing seriously wrong, with only a couple of tweaks needed with regards to the canonicals.

Although Shopify isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, it's more than adequate for 95% of online retailers.

Collection & product page optimization

It's important to make sure that the collection pages are ranking in the top spots for a broad range of search terms for 2 reasons:

1. It nearly always satisfies user intent better than product pages
2. Allows buyers to see the full range of products without having to search

We're not usually a big fan of adding content other than the products to collection pages, however, in this instance, we decided it was the best option because we needed the search engines to completely understand the pages asap due to the limited time we had.

We also optimized the product pages so that they showed up in the SERPs when buyers were hyper-specific with their search terms.

Supporting content

We never create content for the sake of it as it's a bad strategy and will land you in trouble if not done properly.

All content created was based on buyer intent that supported the product itself, content such as:

• How to use X correctly
• Why does X benefit the body
• X product vs Y product

By doing this and internally linking with good calls to action we were able to bring in buyers who were already in the consideration phase of the buying cycle.

Link building

This is the big one, because without links, especially in the eCom sector, you will struggle to get any traction whatsoever. So we created a link building campaign to generate a mixture of backlinks from a range of sites.

We focused heavily, as we always do, on the relevance of the link and the metrics of the linking site.

And just so we're clear, the most important metrics here are how Google values the site we're getting the link from, not metrics like DR or referring domains.

Our link building campaign resulted in over 100 links going to the collection page, home page, a few of the product pages and some of the supporting content.

At all times we use the latest software to discover opportunities and analyse data, and link building is no different. Our software allows us to find relevant websites and blogs/articles, including the site owner, which in turn allows us to discuss link placements.

The results

Although at the time of writing (April 2021) it's still very early days for this site – it's ranking at and around the top spots for a number of it's target search terms, and some of these search terms are highly competitive and dominated by big brands due to the high commercial intent.

The screenshot below is a snapshot of the sales for a four-month period, which was just over 4 months after we started.

Note on the conversion rate: Although conversions aren't what we focus on as a company, we should point out that the true conversion rate is closer to 3% because many customers used PayPal or Klarna to pay for orders, and Shopify doesn't count those orders within it's system because they're not processed by them.

What's next?

This is an ongoing project within a highly competitive verticle that's got all of the big online sellers in, and we have been tasked with continued content creation through informational content via the blog and link building.