Nail Polish SEO Case Study

The Approach

1. 01

   Run a full Shopify SEO audit

   Whenever we start working on a new Shopify SEO project, we always start with our full SEO audit, which covers over 285 on-page, off-page, and technical SEO factors and opportunities. In the case of OrlyBeauty.com, they had tons of unresolved technical SEO issues, along with on-page issues, keyword cannibalization and poor collection and product page SEO.

2. 02

   Implement every fix, done for the client

   After identifying all the issues and opportunities, we jumped straight in and started resolving them for the client. We offer a done-for-you solution, so the client didn't need to involve their development team: our team handled everything, saving the client's time so they could focus on other tasks on their plate. It took about 21 days to resolve all of the on-page, off-page, and technical SEO issues, as well as keyword cannibalization.

3. 03

   Apply a meta title and description template to every product page

   Another issue OrlyBeauty.com was dealing with was unoptimized pages. There hadn't been much attention paid to optimizing specific pages for specific keywords, which is understandable when one of the main channels is paid advertising, which doesn't require keyword optimization the way SEO does. Even without keyword mapping, the store was getting decent organic traffic, but there were a lot of opportunities to lift it further. We researched all of the brand's top performing organic collection and product pages, as well as all of the top performing pages of our competitors. We came up with a template for the meta titles and descriptions of product pages that would capture the most relevant money keywords, and then applied it to every single product page, which instantly boosted rankings.

4. 04

   Research keywords and plan content at scale

   We dedicate an entire step to content planning because it's one of the most important parts of the process, especially when we write anywhere between 30,000 and 100,000 words a month for our clients. For OrlyBeauty.com we planned a ton of content, all related to frequently asked nail polish questions, covering everything from how to apply and remove nail polish to nail polish trends and style guides. We exported over 300,000 keywords, filtered them, clustered them by intent, and organized them into SILOs and article groups. Interlinking all the relevant articles in the same SILO improves topical relevancy further.

5. 05

   Write, upload, and publish every month

   After the content plan, we move on to writing, following a 5-page SOP that comes down to four steps. First, identify search intent: open the target keyword in an incognito window, work out why someone is searching it, and position the entire article around answering that. Second, outline: click through the top 5 to 10 results on page one and cover all of their topics and subtopics in one article, so it's the most in-depth on the topic. Third, link to at least 5 of the key collection and product pages we optimized earlier, which improves UX and sends referral traffic and link juice to them. Fourth, interlink the article with the others in its SILO, using keyword variations as anchors, so Google understands their context better. For more on writing and optimizing posts, see our guide to blogging on Shopify and optimizing for SEO.

6. 06

   Leverage the domain authority Orly already had

   Most SEOs would place link building at the top of their list, but we prefer to focus on it after the first batch of articles goes live, not because content matters more than links, but because we get a higher ROI on links after publishing new content. Our go-to strategy is PR and outreach: we get the client featured in relevant media publications through guest posts, write the content ourselves, and optimize each post for specific keywords so it ranks and gets traffic too, because a guest post with traffic is significantly more valuable than one without, no matter the DR of the domain. Because Orly had massive domain authority prior to starting the project, though, we didn't have to invest a dime into link building. That made this SEO campaign even more efficient in terms of budgeting, as we were able to leverage the domain authority that was built previously through all the years of hard work and PR.

The Results

The Foundation