Promotion of a Stationery Online Store

1. FIRST STEPS

This is the story of a long-term cooperation with the customer who sells stationery and school products. At the beginning of this project, we defined flaws of the newly created online store or, in other words, did a website audit. During the following stages, we corrected the detected errors, did a one-time setup and connected all services necessary for promotion: Google Analytics, Yandex. Metrica, webmasters, ranking analysis services, links, and more.

After that, we started to collect information on competitors and based on this data developed a working strategy for the first 6 months.

2. TASKS

We had to win a large portion of the stationery market and ensure sales for a new player on it.

• First of all, we had to:
• do a full SEO-audit of the site;
• correct errors based on the audit results;
• analyze competitors;
• form a promotion strategy;
• do keywords research;
• optimize categories pages and then filters;
• increase external link mass;
• increase the conversion rate of the new store.

Also, we completed monthly monitoring and control tasks:

• analysis of Google Analytics data;
• analysis of Yandeх and Google (Search Console) webmasters data;
• control over duplicate and non-indexed elements;
• estimation of the indexing status of pages;
• analysis of search bots scanning dynamics;
• security settings monitoring;
• analysis and correction of errors made by bots during website scanning;
• guidance on project development.

3. WHAT WE DID

As we have already mentioned, this was the cooperation with the newly created online store, which presupposed a lot of work. An SEO-audit, our initial stage, detected no serious technical problems despite some slight shortcomings that were promptly corrected. We also created handmade meta tag templates and integrated them into a store template, so the website was technically ready for future promotion.

However, we needed to take more active measures to make the most out of our work. We had to analyze competitors, see what they were focusing on and how did they work with links and content. Having analyzed this, we got an important information and completed a list of actions that would allow us to surpass competitors. The data also helped us to form a working strategy based on categories optimization, or in other words, landing pages optimization through keywords selection (keywords research), SEO text creation and its placement on pages with the correct HTML-markup, and meta tag templates correction in accordance with the existing semantic kernel.

We also worked to increase external link mass. To make our actions as efficient as possible we started with the high-quality thematic links. For this purpose, we wrote informational articles with links and placed them on trusted websites, mainly the online mass media.

Such links are highly effective but shouldn’t be overused. The point is that a deliberately written article with too many links can seem suspicious to search engines.

Therefore, it is also necessary to incorporate links from various thematic websites, forums or blogs.

This basic work lasted for 6 months and helped to get first sales and greatly increase the traffic. Though, this was only the beginning of our cooperation.

On the next stage, we expanded the website structure using filters. This way we received a few more hundreds of landing pages to be optimized, which we are working on now.

Already during the first year of the cooperation, we aimed to increase the users’ confidence in the website and the conversion rate. We did additional work to improve the website, made it more convenient, defined the benefits of the store, wrote reviews about it, and started to create positive reviews of the products on a monthly basis.

As the result, we achieved one of the highest conversion rate, which reaches 4%, threshold during the period of maximum demand while usually, online store conversion doesn’t exceed 0.5-1%.

Already within the first year, our actions helped the client to meet all expenses and return the investments. Whereas during the last year of our cooperation, online store ROI reached 611.98%. Hence, the client’s income was 6 times higher than the cost of products and our services.

We’ve proved our professionalism to the client, so currently our cooperation continues for over 3 years.

ROI ON SEO CHANNEL (3 YEARS)

Margin: 50%
Gross profit: 1,258,566.84 * 0.50 = 629,283.42 UAH
ROI = (629,283.42 – 176,000 ₴) / 176,000 ₴ * 100 = 257.55%.

ROI ON SEO CHANNEL (LAST 12 MONTHS)

Margin: 50%
Gross profit: 1,896,235.72 * 0.50 = 948,117.86 UAH
ROI = (448,117.86 – 62,940 ₴) / 62 940 ₴ * 100 = 611.98%.