When the owner of a rave apparel Shopify store approached us for advice and consultancy to improve organic traffic a couple of years ago, the store was at the very beginning of the journey.
The store sells rave outfits in a number of different styles and types. While based in Europe, customers can purchase products to be shipped worldwide.
Walk Before You Crawl With SEO
One of the most difficult aspects when implementing and SEO an organic marketing strategy to any website as an owner, is having patience, and further to that, trust in the process. These are part of every site owners makeup.
It’s one of the reasons SEO is considered a “dark art” or in some case even “snake oil”. Daily, if you visit SEO groups on Facebook or business groups on many channels, you’ll regularly hear that “SEO is dead”, or “SEO is a scam”.
The truth is, if you don’t have patience, or are engaging in inferior strategies, it’s understandable that these perspectives are common.
Being a founding partner in 2 digital agencies, and owning and operating a portfolio of both ecommerce and non-ecommerce online businesses over the last 15 years, I’ve experienced quite a bit, from the “wild west” days of spamming a sites to the top of the search results in a matter of weeks, making bank, and then seeing them disappear overnight with penalties. To where we are now, with AI coming to the fore, with the wild west feel coming back into play.
Over that time though, there is much that has remained true. Create a quality site, quality content, and implement sound linking strategies, add in plenty of patience, and you’ll win over and over again.
Yes, there is deeper technical knowledge and search patents to understand, but SEO is still pretty simply. Quality content, and quality links, win time and time again.
I don’t know of any SEO that has been in the industry for over 10 years, survived and thrived, that doesn’t think any differently. Even the died in the wool technical SEOs, when you really press them, the always come back to this.
So it’s always nice, and somewhat of a relief, when a site owners comes to you for help, and gets it from the start. This is exactly what has happened with this rave store, and he’s now reaping the rewards.
The Results
Two years down the track, and the site has taken off, both in traffic, revenue and profit.
What We Recommended & What Was Actioned?
The nice thing about this site was that it had products that already converted, and already had some traffic. It wasn’t brand new. This means when changes are made, the success or failure of those changes tend to make themselves known faster. The more traffic to the site means the more bots will visit, identify signals and act on those signals.
We recommended a number of technical changes. These included by are not limited to the basics, such as:
- amended collection page product grid URLs from /collections/collection-name/product/product-name –> /product/name
- added nofollow tag to social links in the footer
- amended H tags on all pages
- removed non-relevant H tags on all pages
- Provided a template for the pillar elements of pages including SEO titles, SEO description, URL string & H1 tag. These templates were supplied for all page types
- Improve site speed
- blah, blah, blah…….
So while the above are all very important, and should be considered in an Shopify audit, the main focus was on optimizing collection pages and tag pages. Essentially the focus was adjusted from a product first approach, to collection a collection and tag page focus.
After doing a deep dive on the market and semantic keyword options, there was opportunity to target collections and sub-collections at a much more granular level.
Collections Pages:
Again, the simple changes seem insignificant but are very important. We recommended the H1 contain the core topic / keyword, but also different from the SEO title and URL.
Example
URL: /collections/costumes-for-women
H1: Sexy Women’s Costumes
SEO title: Costumes For Women – Sexy Rave Wear
It was also recommended that relevant content was added to collection pages including FAQ sections to important collection pages. This was achieved by adding content below the product grids, to ensure users don’t have to scroll thorough text before they get to the product grid. Another way this could be achieved is by using “Read More” or similar tab in the description section.
Sub-Collection Silos
One of the frustrating parts of using Shopify is the inability by default, to create editable sub-collections.
We’ve solved this by leveraging tag pages. Our app, Optizen, allows tag pages to be edited easily, with content and meta information, creating truly unique and indexable sub-collection pages, and essentially creating correct silos.
By creating silos, and leveraging internal linking with breadcrumbs, filters, and body content, we can semantically relate collections to sub-collections, and vice-versa in a structured way.
Examples are leveraging colours, and or styles. The options are endless.
GSC Data
For the site in question, below you can see click data filtered only for collections and tag pages:
Looking deeper, below are examples of tag pages generating clicks in Google.
These are just a handful of the 10’s of tag pages generating clicks. The quality and performance of these pages is amplified with the ability to edit these pages with unique content and meta, combined with child / parent relationships between collections and sub-collections.
What’s Next For This Site?
To continue to grow, this site will be building out further tag pages and complete collection and tag page silos. In this market, search volume for colours for particular costumes is in the 100’s so the number of sub-collection pages that can be created is significant. These pages will continue to be indexed, rank, and grow organic traffic.
