Fitness Website SEO Case Study: 200K Traffic in 3 Months

This is an SEO case study of how I managed to increase the traffic for an e-commerce website in the fitness and gym space after 6 months of working on the site by almost 50% on this massive site.

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 fitness and gym equipment here in Thailand that has been performing quite well on Google searches in terms of SEO. However, some of the recent algorithm updates have been causing a decline in rankings and traffic over the past years.

He’s a pretty well-known brand in the space but has struggled to rank for many head keywords such as “barbell”, “dumbbell”, etc. so he approached me for an audit and decided to let me work on the site along with his web developer to help rank for the head keywords and increase the site’s overall traffic.

Challenges

The 2 main working challenges faced are:

Highly competitive space: There are many high authority fitness center websites that are dominating the space along with major national e-commerce websites.
Huge website and custom platform: The site is a large e-commerce website that was custom-built with many complex system, which makes working on it even more difficult.

The Campaign

Here are the overviews of how I approached the campaign:

Technical Optimization

The first step towards the campaign is to fix the various technical aspects of the site that were holding it back. This includes things like:

Merging duplicated and near-duplicated pages.
Deleting thin content pages (including tag pages, blog pages, and some category pages).
Removing old legacy pages that were created during the testing phase of the site.
Restructuring the menu navigation to be more user-friendly.

On-Page Optimization

After rehauling the technical aspects of the site, the next thing was to focus on improving the on-page to make them even better.

This includes things like:

Heading (h1,h2 & h3) optimization
Category page re-optimization and re-design:

Although the client’s website already created a bunch of category pages to rank them according to the intent, he overdid the structure and made them look more like blog articles than proper e-commerce category pages. So I helped him restructure and re-design the pages to focus more on the product and intent.
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 “dumbbell”, 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 & optimization

Besides creating and optimizing existing category pages, I also created some new blog articles and re-optimized the existing articles to be better using the above techniques. In the process, I also fixed some that seemed to cannibalize with the category pages.
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:

Start building more backlinks to the category pages and blogs

Initially, the majority of backlinks were pointing to the homepage. After fixing the technical and on-page aspects, I also started building more links straight to the category and blog pages to help support the category pages more. For this, I focused on high-quality PBNs as usual along with a few guest posts.
Tweak the branding focus

As mentioned, this fitness website already had somewhat good branding which had been helping the site so far. So I advised the client to shift the branding effort to each individual pages more to help increase the user engagement signals on the page level.

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: