Shopify SEO Case Study

We were approached by ShopSolarKits.com, a high-ticket Shopify store specializing in selling solar panels and equipment.

After running the initial mini audit, and talking with the client, we identified the following issues and opportunities.

These included:

• Poor technical & on-page SEO foundation,
• Insufficient keyword research & keyword mapping,
• Dozens of cases of keyword cannibalization,
• Low domain authority and lack of quality links.

In order to resolve these issues, and generate results for the client, we followed our 6-step process:

1. Running a full Shopify SEO Audit,
2. Full SEO Audit Implementations,
3. Keyword Mapping,
4. Keyword Research and Content Planning,
5. Content Writing, Uploading, and Publishing,
6. Linkbuilding.

Let's now jump into more details about each one of the steps listed above, that allowed us to generate $981,172.04 in Additional Organic Revenue in just 6-months.

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 & opportunities.

In the case of ShopSolarKits.com, they had tons of unresolved technical SEO issues, along with on-page issues and keyword cannibalization, due to the number of SKUs on their store.

After identifying all the issues, and opportunities - we jumped straight in and started resolving them for the client.

We offer a DFY solution, so the client didn't need to involve their development team, instead, our team handled everything, saving the client's time, so they could focus on other tasks on their plate.

It took us about 16 days to resolve all of the on-page, off-page, technical SEO issues, as well as keyword cannibalization.

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Another issue that the store had were unoptimized pages.

They didn't really pay much attention to optimizing specific pages, for specific keywords - which I understand since one of their main channels is paid advertising, which doesn't require keyword optimization as SEO does.

Even without the keyword mapping, the store was getting decent organic traffic, but there were definitely a lot of opportunities to lift that further.

With that in mind, we selected the top 25 pages, with the highest revenue potential per visitor, and mapped them to a specific keyword we wanted to rank for, with that page.

We then optimized the on-page of all those 25 pages for specific keywords, which instantly resulted in a boost in rankings.

Up next is content planning...

Yes, we dedicate an entire step in our process to content planning, as we believe it's one of the most important parts of the process, especially when you write as much content, as we do for our clients.

(We're writing anywhere between 30,000 and 100,000 words for our clients, per month.)

The reason why we're so aggressive with the amount of content we write and publish is not only because it's the fastest way to get tons of traffic and opt-ins (which are then converted into sales)...

But also because we're able to quickly become a topically relevant site in the eyes of Google, and once you achieve topical relevancy, SEO becomes really easy.

(Topical relevancy is achieved when you cover a topic so extensively, that Google learns that you're one of the best sources online for that topic - and then just hands over all the rankings to you.)

This is exactly what we achieved with ShopSolarKits.com - we planned a ton of content, all related to solar panels, by exporting over 200,000 keywords, filtering them, clustering the keywords by intent, and then organizing all of them into SILOs & article groups.

The reason why we organize articles into SILOs is to further improve topical relevancy, by interlinking all the relevant articles in the same SILO with each other.

Up next we have steps 5 and 6, which are done on a monthly basis, while the steps prior are done just at the start of client onboarding.

After the content plan is done, we proceed with content writing.

We have a 5-page long SOP for our writing team, but ultimately it comes down to the following steps that they always follow:

Start by opening the target keyword of the article in an incognito window, and figure out the reason behind someone typing that keyword into Google.

Why are they looking for that, what do they want to find, learn or achieve with that search?

Figure that out, and position the entire article around answering their question.

While in the incognito window, click around the top 5 or top 10 results on page 1 of Google.

Figure out what they're all covering, and create an outline for an article that covers all of the topics and subtopics in one article.

This allows you to have the most in-depth article on the topic, which usually results in great rankings and lots of traffic.

Remember the top 25 pages we identified earlier?

This is where they come in.

With every article, you write, try to interlink to at least 5 relevant pages you defined in your keyword mapping.

This not only improves UX, but it also sends referral traffic and link juice to those keyword-mapped pages and gives them a further ranking boost.

Interlink the newly written article, with all of the other articles in the same SILO/group of articles, using keyword variations as anchors.

By doing this you're helping Google understand the context of your articles better, which gives you an additional boost in the rankings.

Finally, we come to linkbuilding.

Most SEOs would place this at the top of their list, but we prefer to focus on it, after the first batch of articles goes live - not because we believe content is more important than linkbuilding...

But because we're able to get a higher ROI on links, after publishing new content.

In terms of our go-to strategy for linkbuilding, we like to focus on PR and outreach, where we get the client featured in relevant media publications in the form of guest posts.

We also write the content for all the guest posts we publish for our clients and optimize the guest post itself for specific keywords, so that the guest posts also start ranking and getting traffic.

That's because a guest post that gets traffic is SIGNIFICANTLY more valuable, than one without the traffic, no matter the DR of the domain.

In terms of the anchors, we like to use natural anchors and prefer linking to blog posts, instead of money pages like collection and product pages.

And that's it - After about 3 months, the results from the audit and implementations really started to kick in.

With all of the keyword-targeted content and niche-specific link building, we really started dominating more and more of our target keywords.

Following the exact steps above allowed us to generate an additional $981,172.04 in organic revenue for ShopSolarKits.com, in just 6-months.

Would you like us to help you achieve similar results for your Shopify store?

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