E-Commerce SEO Case Study: 1,000% Increase In Traffic After 6 Months

This is an SEO case study of how I managed to increase the traffic for an e-commerce website in the IT niche by 1,000% after 6 months of work.

Like any other of my case studies, I won’t reveal the website and keywords for security and privacy reasons. But in this article, you will find some of my overview process of how I went about achieving the results along with various screenshots proof.

Project Background

The client runs an online store selling IT and networking products of various categories in Thailand, including things like CCTV, IOT devices, access control, fiber optical cables, and more. There are over 400 products with 5-7 main product categories he wanted to target.

The website was built using WordPress and the client had been doing a bit of SEO by himself before approaching me with the SEO help. Normally I don’t do SEO for e-commerce stores because it requires a lot of work and I work alone, but since the client and I already collaborated on another project prior, I decided to agree to this request.

Challenges

Just like the majority of IT niches, this is no exception. There are lots of major players with high authority for some of the high-volume keywords such as CCTV or fiber optical cables. These are high-volume, high-value keywords with over 10k searches per month.

Another challenge is the client doesn’t have enough budget to invest in enough amount of branding, which makes it more difficult to go against other competitors with more branding, thus helping their SEO more.

The Campaign

Here are the overviews of how I approached the campaign:

Technical Optimization

The first step towards the campaign is to optimize for technical SEO. This includes cleaning up some of the low-quality pages like empty tag pages, duplicated blogs, the linking structure, and more. The main focus was on removing duplicate and bloated pages that can lower the overall site quality score.

On-Page Optimization

Next up is to focus on the on-page obsessively. What I mean by “obsessively” here is to optimize each and every detail to the tee.

This includes things like:

Heading (h1,h2 & h3) optimization
Category page creation:

Since the majority of traffic will go to product category pages, the next step was to do proper keyword research to build out as many relevant category pages that target various keywords. For example: targeting the sub-brand of the products, etc.
Sentence-level optimization using semantically relevant keywords:

By making sure that each sentence is properly optimized using semantically relevant keywords based on reverse engineering the competitors and using a proprietary tool that I created. You can use on-page tools like Surfer-SEO to help with the process. This step is applied to each category pages for maximum on-page relevance. The product page wasn’t really the priority here since all of the products are basically a list of their specifications that the client already does some basic SEO for.
Keyword count and variation optimization:

Making sure that I have used the right frequency of each keyword on the page. For example, the word “CCTV”, I made sure to check the competitors’ average and see how many times I should use this word. You can again, use tools like Surfer SEO, but there’s really no hard rule for this. I’d like to keep it a little lower than the average to avoid over-optimization.
Blog creation

Besides creating and optimizing new category pages, I also created a couple of blogs to help capture additional traffic and support the category pages further, following the same style of optimization (keyword count and sentence-level optimization)
Internal linking

Lastly, after all the page creation and optimization steps were carried out, I also made sure to do proper internal linking – connecting from one page to another using relevant anchor texts and keeping in mind the quantity.

Off-Page Optimization

Once the on-page of the site is ready, the next thing is to start looking into off-page factors.

Here are some of the things I did:

Advise the client to start with branding

Branding effort to drive engagement to the website helps support the overall on-page and backlink effort. I recommended the client to invest in some branding to help support the overall SEO effort
Backlink building

When the site was ready for link building, the next step was to build just a few guest posts per month coupled with high-quality PBNs to help support the branding campaign. This involves strategically building links to the right types of pages with selected anchor text for maximum results.

Results

Here are some of the screenshots from Google Search Console and Ahrefs, showing that the site has achieved its results after 6 months, compared to the previous 6 months: