10x traffic in 3 Months
In early 2019, I started working with a client who operates various wholesale eCommerce stores in the USA and UK. Although SEO had been implemented and there were numerous backlinks, the websites were not attracting sufficient traffic, with most ranked terms being informational in nature. Here, I will outline the key steps we took to boost site traffic from 50 visitors per day to over 400, focusing on wholesale terms.
Step 1: We conducted a comprehensive audit of the content, structure, and links of the sites. We identified three major issues. While content was present, it was not properly optimized, and much of it was merely rephrased product descriptions sourced from the official brand pages. The site's silo structure was adequate, but we encountered several canonical issues due to the poor structure of Open Cart (CMS), which was generating three separate pages for each subcategory without canonical tags. Setting up the canonical tags was a complex process, as we had to ensure that only the optimized pages would be indexed, thereby conserving crawling resources and reducing server load. Additionally, we created multiple sitemaps:
- Products sitemap
- Category sitemap
- Brand pages sitemap
- Informational pages sitemap
- Blog sitemap
We included only the optimized pages in these sitemaps, addressing the previous situation where hundreds of duplicate URLs for each subcategory and brand page were present.
Step 2: With the site structure, canonical tags, and sitemaps now in place, we turned our attention to improving content optimization and ensuring content freshness. To achieve this,