If you’re an online store owner you probably keep asking yourself constantly what can I improve to sell more on my website. That’s exactly where my first client was when we had our discovery call. Fantastic products, very niche, unique offering, great website and history behind it but their organic traffic and revenue were not growing for a couple of years since the big agency was doing their SEO. Six months later, sales from Google had more than doubled compared to the same time the year before. Here's what we found, and what we did about it.

SEO Audit first 

Before drawing any conclusions I did a deep dive audit which included: log analysis, technical and content audits as well as competitor analysis to understand where my client stood compared to competitors.

Three big issues came up straight away.

Problem 1: Google was wasting time on the wrong pages

Every time Google bots visit your website they have limited time to crawl pages and content. Google allocates a limited amount of resources per site based on its popularity, authority, and server speed. 

When I looked at the data, I noticed something odd. Google was spending far more time on the checkout page than on the homepage or any other main category pages. That's a problem, because the checkout page doesn't need to show up in search results. Every minute Google spent there was a minute it wasn't spending on the pages that actually bring in customers. It brings zero value from an organic standpoint and wastes the crawl budget. Just to put the numbers in perspective these were the numbers; 

Problem 2: Duplicated content 

The next issue I found was that the website's CMS (Magento 2)  was creating duplicate pages without anyone realising. Same products, same content, just with slightly different URLs. All of them ranked in search results. Google couldn't tell which page was the "real" one, so none of them performed as well as they should. The fix was to analyse the log data, verify what’s in search and block it in robots.txt. We are now seeing some of the categories having uplift in impressions and clicks.

Problem 3: Pages weren't linked together properly

The third problem was how the pages connected to each other. A lot of category pages, and subcategories barely had any links pointing to them from the rest of the site. Internal linking gets far less attention than things like backlinks or content, even though it directly affects how search engines crawl and understand a site, and how link equity flows between pages. It’s the simple fix that can drastically improve how search engines discover and understand pages, improves authority of pages from commercial stand point but also helps users to navigate and flow though the website. 

Fixing the basics before anything else

Once we knew what was wrong, the plan was simple. Fix the basics first, before adding anything new. We cleaned up the duplicate pages, stopped Google wasting time on the checkout page and built  links between the top category pages so both Google and customers could find their way around. At the same time, we improved the content on the main pages and added simple FAQs, so people got useful answers to the questions they were already searching for.

The results

Nothing here was new to SEO. These were simply issues that came up during the audit, fixing what was broken and making the site easier for both Google and real customers to use.

Over the next six months, sales from Google search grew by 114% compared to the year before, more than double. The number of visitors coming from Google grew even faster, up almost 168%.

There’s still a long list of tasks to improve on the client's website and I'm so excited for even better results than we've seen so far.

If your website looks good but sales just aren't growing, it's worth checking what's happening behind the scenes before you spend more on ads or content. Sometimes the biggest wins don't come from doing something new. They come from fixing what's already broken. We can help you with that, get in touch today.