E-Commerce Case Study: From Tanking

Rankings To Doubling Traffic (Worth

$19k/month)
January 14, 2019

Hey Fellow SEOs and Entrepreneurs! First and foremost: Happy New Year to YOU!

Yes, YOU! One of the coolest things me and Marie get to do is share some of our successes with
SEOs like you who, we hope, take nuggets from here, experiment with them, and experience
your own successes. If you’ve done this in the past, please reach out to Moon (that’s ME!
*frantic wave!!!*) and Marie (*sitting across from me, in Texas, with a Texas flag wrapped
around her like a blanket*)

Today, we are sharing with you an e-commerce case study that me and Marie worked on in
April 2018. Keep in mind that while we work on bigger e-commerce and affiliate sites, we are
very selective about who we take on as a client.

Here’s what we were able to achieve:

See the flatline? And then a little somethin’ somethin’? And then like… that leap from July to
whocareswhen?

This part is important: we took on the client in April.

‘While the above image shows ‘all good (and it’s very hard to see the smaller dips), here are the
rankings for some of the keyphrases in the beginning:
So, back to the first image, all zoomed in to show you what tanking rankings *really* look like
on a downward trend:
When you have a thriving e-commerce site bringing in a ‘few grand’ that pays the bills & then
some… and you realize there’s a serious issue with the site and it could further tank completely
OR rankings might remain stagnant… you panic.

And we get it.

But let’s rewind and talk about the details.. and lastly, HOW we doubled the traffic for this
client’s e-commerce site.

How We Came Across This Client

You Guys, I swear to God, there I was, getting ready to perform my first jump off a ramp with
The Bird scooter, living life on the edge, when I hear ‘ting… ting ting ting’ on my iPhone.

Lo & Behold: it is THE Marie Ysais, messaging me:

Marie: “Hey, can you call me? I’m thinking of taking on this client. He has an e-commerce site
but some of his keywords are all over the place. I need your infinite smarts, wisdom, and good
looks to come through and give me your analysis. Like… ASAP!”

As I stared Death right in the eyeball, or at the very least, a possible fractured leg, I told it,
“You’re lucky Marie needs me. I’ll be back to handle you another day. For now, the world needs
my SEO’ing.”

Me: “Sigh, fine Marie. I’ll be home in 15. Let’s discuss.”

Why We Decided To Take This E-commerce Site On…

We get approached by quite a few e-commerce site owners as well as affiliate site owners. We
are very specific with who we take on and me and Marie bounce back and forth until we are both
on board.

Here are some of our initial observations with this site:

• Custom programmed e-commerce store

• 5 years old or older site
• Rankings had dropped (serious drop in revenue as well)!

Let’s delve a bit deeper.

Why I Don’t Care For Custom Programmed E-commerce Stores

The first one, for me personally, is a flaw. With a few solid options, I don’t think programming
your own solution is warranted, but in this case, this client already had a few other successful
sites, using his own platform, so I gave it a bit of a pass. Fine, get over it, Moon…
Site Age of 5 Years

We consider age a huge plus. I firmly believe that in some cases, age can lend to faster results.
At the very least, it’s not a newly setup store and we don’t have to worry about getting past the
3-6 month mark like we are super careful in doing with newly setup sites!

Stagnant Rankings

BAM! Once we popped this sucka into Ahrefs and went back and forth, not only did we identify
easy wins for the client (longtails and bigger keyphrases on page 2 of Google), but we saw a
serious problem.

Major keyphrase cannibalization for several keyphrases.

…a couple hundred, at least.

But not just that, the interlinking on the site was done without a real purpose to it. Quite like this
Meowdy sitch with Texan cats (don’t ask):
To summarize this nicely, frankly, a lot of these sites come to us with messy interlinking,
keyphrase cannibalization, and a host of other issues that present themselves once we dig deeper
and deeper.
We spoke to the client and shared in detail our concerns with keyphrase cannibalization. It is
extremely important to us to set client expectations correctly before we agree to take them on as
a client.

In this case, we told them the wait could be 3-6 months easily. The client understood this, and we
began work.

How Interlinking, Link Silos, and Keyphrase Cannibalization Go Hand In Hand

The problem is: what has worked really well in the past, SEOwise, won’t work right now.

2018 presented us all with some bitch slaps and 2019 ain’t slowin’ down, Son!

In fact, confusing the signals on your site will tank a site or keep it in a stagnant chokehold, leave
your site stuck. This has been the theme of 2018 (all year long) and if you’re doing this with your
site, please stop. Sooner or later, it will catch up to you.

And then, frankly, it can take several months to fix this, depending on how severe the case is
and, also, how quickly Google decides to have mercy on your site.

Someone fix that to say, ‘SEO’ in place of baseball.

So, here’s how keyphrase cannibalization happens. For whatever reason, whatever SEO’ing
you’ve done, you are sending confusing signals to Google. So now, for a certain keyphrase, it
may be ranking two of your pages from the same site, but not in top positions (that’s a ‘problem’
that I’d love to have, HA!) OR you’ll see two pages appearing/disappearing without stability for
a given keyphrase.

Some reasons this happens is because the SEO has been sloppy and doesn’t realize he is
targeting several pages for the same keyphrases. Whether it’s the URL, meta title or
unintentionally linking to a page with the anchor text the immediate page is supposed to rank for,
or other reasons, here it is.

It was clear that we needed to make some big changes to the site and in big numbers.

SEO Progress Isn’t Always Steady…

As much as we’ve seen keyphrase cannibalization cases sort out in a matter of 10 days to 4
weeks, we’ve also seen major cases take 3-6 months.

Well, this e-commerce website was no exception!

Imagine a mess that you have to sort out over dozens of pages and their URLs/slugs are
overoptimized…here’s an example:

• ecommersite.com/buy-red-apples
• ecommercesite.com/the-best-red-apples-you-can-buy
• ecommercesite.com/buy-these-cheap-red-apples
• ecommercesite.com/best-red-apples-to-buy-on-a-budget

….and then imagine, they’re all optimized for keyphrases such as “buy red apples”, “red apple
reviews”, “cheap red apples”, etc.

So now, all of these pages are competing in Google and keeping each other from ranking to the
top… because these pages are now sending confusing signals to Google.

Take that and multiple this by thousands of pages, and your head will be in a doozie.

So, do you know what happens when you fix thousands of pages at once? While these fixes are
very much needed, clients need to know that the progress will always look waaaaaaay uglier
before it gets better:

How Exactly Did We Fix This Mess?!

This is where organization is key. After a thorough software and manual audit and look at the
overall scope of things, we knew we needed to organize the data and break everything down
in steps so we could fix things step-by-step (and undo anything that caused issues down the
line).
Out of thousands of pages and blog posts, we marked ranking pages versus link silo pages.

This alone took quite a few hours as we had to check the content on some of the pages and see if
they could be used in a supportive, tiered link silo. Also, the ‘ranking pages’, needed a
significant clean-up and updates.

What does this entail?

This entails creating an Excel spreadsheet and going through all of our checks. Some of the
things we go over are:

• make sure none of the slugs are competing

• make sure supporting pages won’t cannibalize ranking pages
• titles of articles aren’t duplicated nor in conflict with each other
• meta description and titles are unique
• meta description and titles don’t contain same keywords/keyphrases
• alt tags target same keywords/keyphrases
• h1/h2/h3/h4 aren’t targeting keywords/keyphrases

Multiply all that with thousands of pages?

Let’s just say that if you want to take on serious e-commerce or affiliate websites, you need to be
super organized so you and your team can take the same sheet, understand the objective, and
continue with the work.

How This E-Commerce Site Ended Up Doing…

I purposely didn’t start this case study with the monthly searches for the keyphrases.

Why?

It’s as if in the SEO world, most SEOs tend to claim huge search numbers or else, pffft, their
work doesn’t matter.

I call bullshnizzlez on that. Here is a small snippet of some of the monthly searches we were
trying to shift our client’s site for:
Unfortunately, we are HIDEOUS at documenting case studies and we only have partial shots of
the green arrows, as well as the image the client sent to Marie a few months down the road,
which you’ll find below, in a sec.

But… but!

Only 3-4k searches per month? Yeeeeeep!

You have to look at what this means to an e-commerce client:

While that ~$18k is estimated traffic value… and we are not at liberty to confirm or deny, trust
me when I say… this e-commerce site does “pretty well.”

The client’s site has been holding steady around $19k/m “traffic value” (on average)
*winkwink*: Because with time…..all things approve.
This time, forget the arrow and look at the consistent rise

And, that’s about it, FOLKS! If you found this case study helpful, feel free to show it some love
by sharing it. Oh andddd happy SEO’ing!