How To Bring Organic Traffic To Your Site
Dornbos Sign and Safety are a BigCommerce merchant who sells traffic and safety signs: stop signs, warning signs, plus equipment to display them like brackets and posts. They wanted to make sure their niche audience could find their products on search engines so they hired us for SEO services.
Our team has now been working with Dornbos for about seven months. In that time, we’ve focused heavily on user-experience, content, backlinks, and site health.
The results? A major increase in both organic traffic and paid conversions:
- Organic traffic rose 157% in four months
- Organic traffic is up 177% since the same period last year
- Conversions from organic traffic up 127% since the same period last year
Remember, Dornbos aren’t running paid ads of any kind. These results are purely organic (non-paid) traffic.
Why SEO Optimization Works
Are you an SEO skeptic? For many, SEO seems less straightforward than other types of marketing. Because Google’s algorithm is a secret, there aren’t officially documented rules for webmasters to follow. As a result, SEO optimization requires you to come up with a hypothesis that you must test and then measure with data.
However, that doesn’t mean there’s no strategy behind SEO or that you can’t quantify its results. In fact, this is one of the major benefits of working with a team of SEO experts: they have the experience to know the strategies that typically drive results and the expertise to interpret the data.
In the case of Dornbos, we worked to identify problems with their code base, content strategy, and overall site structure, then built a strategy to address those challenges.
SEO experts have the experience to know the strategies that drive results and the expertise to interpret the data to see what’s working.
How We Improve Organic Traffic
When working with Dornbos, our marketing team started with an SEO Foundation, like we do with all of our SEO and Digital Marketing clients. Our SEO Foundation entails two main phases. We first perform research to identify issues, opportunities, and how the website stacks up against the competition. The second phase involves fixing critical SEO issues, improving page load speed, and ensuring overall SEO health.
Keyword Research
Investing in smart keyword research can set you up for years of SEO benefit. Our team used keyword analysis tools to discover what Dornbos was ranking for, how they stacked up to competitors, and where their greatest opportunities lay. These keywords gave us a benchmark to strive for as we moved into the Monthly Optimization phase.
Investing in smart keyword research can set you up for years of SEO benefit.
Code Cleanup Boosts Rankings
An important step in our SEO Foundation is code clean-up. Websites that haven’t been optimized for SEO usually have inefficient or unnecessary code – what we call “code bloat.” Unfortunately, even mild code bloat can be detrimental to site rankings and user experience. Our developers got rid of the bulky code on Dornbos’ site and compressed images resulting in a faster and more Google-friendly code base. This gave us a clean slate from which to begin optimizing.
Even mildly bloated code can be detrimental to site rankings and user experiences.
Categories and Structure
You may not think much about your sitemap but Google’s bots do. One of the major ways Google understands what your site is about is by analyzing your site’s structure. On a BigCommerce site, this translates into categories and subcategories. Our team spent time creating a coherent structure for Dornbos, including legible and search-optimized title tags and meta descriptions. While we’ve been working with Dornbos for 7 months, this is still a work in progress for our team. Category structure is one of the most important aspects of SEO and how you will be ranked in the search results. Changing your category structure can either really help you or really hurt you. Carefully researching, testing, and properly implementing your new category structure is important for success.
Content And Backlinks
It’s important to continue to add to and grow your site. Google’s bots love fresh content and they judge the legitimacy of your domain based on how many other authoritative sites (not link farms) link to it. Our team added relevant content and backlinks every month to help Dornbos expand their digital presence.
Results: More Traffic, More Sales
Higher Organic Traffic
Let’s take a deep dive into the data. Here’s a screenshot from Dornbos’ analytics showing organic traffic over a one-year period with blue being the past 12 months and orange being the same 12 months one year before. The red arrow shows when they began working with IntuitSolutions.
As you can see, traffic has steadily increased. In fact, organic traffic went up 157% from January to May and is currently 177% higher than it was during the same time last year.
The graphs below show the same pattern of data and were taken from the marketing tools SEMRush and Ahref’s.
More Organic Keywords
In addition to higher organic traffic, Dornbos now also ranks for a greater number of organic keywords. This means that a greater number of search terms are likely to direct a user to their site. This graph shows Dornbos’ organic keywords over a three-year period.
As you can see, the number of keywords begins to rise dramatically in January 2018, when IntuitSolutions began work on their site. The number of keywords they organically rank for has increased by 52% in just seven months.
More Conversions
Conversions are key. Increasing sales is the whole reason you invest in SEO in the first place. The graph below shows how the number of transactions followed as we increased organic traffic. This is the most important factor when determining if our SEO efforts are moving in the right direction. You can drive a lot of organic traffic to a website, but if that traffic isn’t your target audience then the sales won’t follow. Good SEO results from reaching your audience by understanding how they’re looking for what you sell.
Conversions from organic traffic have nearly tripled, rising 127% from last year. This number takes into account seasonal changes in purchasing habits.
Good SEO is the product of understanding how audiences search for items like the ones you sell.
Ready For Results? Hire SEO Experts Today!
How are your site’s rankings? Want to sell more without shelling out for paid traffic? We offer SEO packages for BigCommerce sites of all sizes. Call us today for a free consultation!
