About
The Champion’s Drawer is an e-commerce company based in Singapore, selling different types of outdoor gear. They are Singapore’s official distributors for Deuter products and sell direct-to-consumer.
Problem
The Champion’s Drawer used to engage a local SEO agency in Singapore that boosted their rankings and website visitors. However, a few months after their contract ended, they found that their website had dwindled in website visitors and sales.
When analysed, it was found that their website’s rankings were artificially boosted using black-hat SEO techniques that were not compliant with Google. The massive drop in traffic also coincides with an algorithm update that could have potentially targeted websites using these techniques.
With this information, it was sufficient enough to say that their website was potentially hit by an algorithm update, and the work done on their website had to be carefully managed in order to lift the penalty.
I started by doing a full technical SEO audit. Common with many e-commerce websites, their website was not well optimised for search engines. They had many broken pages, over 20 unused/unnecessary plugins, and website speeds that averages out to almost 15 seconds per page.
Objectives
- To restore their lost website traffic
- Increase the average monthly revenue
Solution
Technical SEO
Firstly, it is important to understand that e-commerce SEO differs from normal search engine optimisation. E-commerce SEO requires a more delicate understanding of how search engines work. Due to the large amounts of thin and duplicate pages found on most e-commerce websites, it is crucial to devise a strategy that ensures pages are crawled, indexed, and ranked.
The first step taken was to fix all the identified technical SEO issues. Broken pages were redirected to relevant pages, and those of no value were served with a 410 HTTP code.
Canonical tags were also set for products that had many variations to them. This maximises crawl budget and prevents index bloat while consolidating any link equity to the main product page.
As plugins cause website bloat, unused plugins were removed. The Champion’s Drawer had many plugins that served similar purposes. These plugins were replaced with a few others that offered the same purpose needed. This was especially important as it dramatically increased their website loading times, lowering conversion rates.
After these issues were tackled, the next step was to bring down the loading times. It was found that The Champion’s Drawer was using one of my recommended tools – WP Rocket. However, it was poorly set up and didn’t bring out the best value it could.
Next, due to visitors from different countries, a Content Delivery Network (CDN), Cloudflare, was installed. This CDN would serve cached copies of their website to international visitors from the nearest server, increasing page speed.
On-Page SEO
As they have previously engaged an SEO agency, on-page SEO was already implemented for keywords that they were trying to rank. Therefore, slight improvements were made to push these keywords up the rankings further.
Schema was added to their website using Schema Pro. Schema Pro makes implementing schema quick and easy, giving Google a better understanding of their website.
This served great importance as their business was both online and offline. By implementing product schema and local business schema, it provided Google with information that they need to push their transactional keywords up the rankings while also boosting their Google My Business profile.
Google My Business
The Champion’s Drawer already had a Google My Business profile set up. However, their profile was not performing well and was severely lacking behind their competitors. Therefore, they opted for a GMB optimisation, which greatly improved their map pack rankings.
The first thing done was to fill up all the necessary business information needed. Images were then geotagged to the physical location and uploaded. Related business categories were also added to their GMB profile based on competitor analysis done.
Lastly, citations were built in order for Google to understand that they were also a physical business in Singapore. The GMB optimisation done resulted in many transactional keywords shooting up to the top 3 positions, driving an insane amount of qualified traffic to their website.
Results
Most technical SEO issues were fixed, and their website was loading below 5 seconds on average. The technical fixes evidently pushed many of their keywords up the search rankings, and even beat authority websites such as deuter.com and Lazada.sg.
The Champion’s Drawer generated 4,404 website visitors and 76% of their traffic were attributed to search engine optimisation.
In 5 months, I have managed to help them rank for 17 keywords in the first position on Google. Additionally, there were also a total of 144 keywords on the first page of Google. This consequently increased their website visits by 100% monthly, and also doubled their monthly revenue.
Testimonial
“His methodology works. Our online sales doubled in revenue when compared against a monthly average. Typically, orders are received through our websites. With your help, I received numerous enquiries & direct orders. While seemingly minuscule, it resulted in costs savings as revenue was automatically credited to my account without incurring Paypal fees.” – Royston Foo, CEO, The Champion’s Drawer