SEO case study: Online hookah store and vape shop in Ukraine

Description of strategy and solutions:

Online store selling hookah and vaping products. The website was developed. The site had a large assortment that was constantly being updated, but it was in poor technical condition in terms of SEO and basic content, and there was no semantic core. No external link building was done. Based on the results of a competitor analysis, a promotion strategy was developed, based on the following:

• Expanding the store’s product range;
• Creating pages for product brands and priority cities for promotion;
• Writing unique texts for product categories/subcategories and optimizing product cards;
• Correcting technical errors. The main problem on the website was and still is the lack of working filters. The solution is to implement site page nesting by category up to 3-4 levels and fully optimize these pages;
• Developing and implementing a link strategy based on competitor analysis with periodic adjustments;
• Constant updating of the blog to attract additional informational traffic to the site.

The main task is to achieve maximum results in terms of traffic and positions and to maintain positions at a consistently high level.

How we achieved the result

Technical condition:

Initially, we conducted a general technical audit and collected the semantic core. We needed to implement a number of significant changes, such as:

• implementation of product micro-markup, a question and answer block, and breadcrumbs;
• setting up redirects to bring the site’s pages into a single format, expanding the filtering system;
• improving the site’s loading speed, site map settings, Robots.txt Canonical, and pagination;
• Developed meta tag templates, set tasks for optimizing titles and meta descriptions for all types of categories;
• Developed and implemented interlinking blocks.

All technical edits on the site are done manually due to the CMS used. In addition, frequent configuration errors occur periodically throughout the promotion period, which requires additional attention.

Content work

It was recommended to present a more extensive range of products on the website, but this required the creation of new categories, so we took the following approach:

• We divided the process of forming the semantic core and preparing content into iterations.
• Together with the client, we continuously prioritized existing and new categories and brands of hookahs, tobacco, and electronic cigarettes.
• We developed a semantic core and, in parallel, technical specifications for texts for priority categories.
• We developed a content plan and regularly filled the blog with informative articles with links to product categories.
• We optimized the texts and meta tags separately for each product card.
• We worked out the text linking for all pages on the website.
• We added information pages and blocks to enhance the authority and usability of the website.

The constant removal of products and entire categories by brand due to their absence became a problem for preserving keywords and organic pages on the site. To solve this problem, several technical solutions were tested. A set of actions was selected that led to the best result.

Work on the link profile

The project had no backlinks, so we developed strategies to attract links and studied the link profile of competitors.

Based on the data obtained, we developed a strategy to attract links and began to implement it. The link strategy was constantly reviewed over a period of 4-6 months, and we monitored the profit from backlinks using various methods.

Results

• Increased visibility. Query dynamics, queries in the TOP 10

According to Ahrefs analytics, more than 1.7K out of 4.3K keywords were in the TOP 10

• The increase in organic traffic during the last year of promotion can be seen in the Analytics screenshot, from 250 to 500 users per day.

Organic traffic grew by 39.1% over the year and is the main source of traffic to the site.

• Organic traffic over two years has grown from 1.5K to 22K

Metrics 16 months ago:

• Clicks 290
• Impressions 7K

Metrics after 16 months:

• Clicks 800
• Impressions 22K