SEO Case: From 0 to 3000+ organic traffic — Construction Online Store

1. Tasks of the project of promotion of construction sites:

Online store of supplier of goods for construction and home and garden improvement. The site is at the stage of development. Semantic core is absent. As a result of competitor analysis a promotion strategy was developed, the basis of which was:

• preparation of SEO at the stage of launching the site;
• collection of a detailed semantic kernel (covering the entire catalog);
• development of the site structure on the basis of the semantic core and the client’s recommendations;
• internal technical and textual optimization;
• expansion of the site’s link profile and implementation of a link strategy.

2. Results of promotion of the site of construction themes

2.1 Growth of organic traffic:

Growth of traffic from organic search from 0 to 3402 people per month.

The graph shows 3 stages:

• October-November start of placement of optimized texts and meta
• February-March expansion of link profile
• April-May index expansion, SNP collection and optimization of new pages.

2.2 Increase in the number of key phrases in organic search

The volume of key phrases increased from 92 to 17011 key phrases.

2.3 Increased site visibility

Visibility increased from 0.00087 to 1.04924 according to serpstat.

2.4 Overall dynamics on the semantic core:

Starting indicators

At the start of promotion on the collected semantic kernel site had the following positions:

top-50 – 0%

top-20 – 0%

top-10 – 0%

top-5 – 0%

top-3 – 0%

That is, the site had neither visibility nor positions.

Dynamics of results after 12 months

For key groups of queries:

top-50 – 46 average index (+46%)

top-20 – 39 average (+39%)

top 10 – 23 average (+23%)

top-5 – 14 average (+14%)

top-3 – 9 average (+9%)

3. How we achieved the result of promotion of the construction company

3.1 Difficulties encountered

• In essence, there was nothing at the start

We started working at the stage of project development. It is important to note that this is a construction online store, SEO for which implied a fairly large amount of work to process the future catalog of products.

• The development of the site took about 1.5 months

We analyzed competitors – made recommendations on design for the developer. The design was quickly approved. After that we prepared the requirements for the technical part, which the developer implemented, we checked.

Useful material on the topic: Promotion of a new site

While the site was being developed – we prepared:

• semantic core of the project;
• distribution of queries on pages;
• first TOR for text optimization;
• analyzed competitors and formed a strategy for the link profile.

We started by analyzing the niche and studying competitors. As a result, we planned 4 iterations of semantic kernel preparation:

• over 40 pages of individual subcategories
• and about 15 main categories of the site

The main part of the preparation was done before the launch of the project.

In parallel with the collection and preparation of the semantic kernel:

• selection of direct competitors was carried out
• formation of content structure and the final formation of TOR for the optimization of each landing page.

After the launch of the site:

Weak indexing, low visibility, ambiguous relevance. And most importantly – incomplete catalog.

Problems were fixed by:

• Reduction of indexed pages by sections (a lot of half-filled pages, which fell into Detected but not indexed in GC);
• working with the site map
• eliminating page overlaps (solving the issue with cannibalization of queries);
• solved the issue with filling the site (by the client).

Difficulties after the launch were eliminated within 4-5 weeks, due to the fact that most of the problems were predicted (there were intersections in groups of queries, which, optimally was to review after the launch of the site).

3.2 Project Promotion Strategy

The primary tasks of the project, which were accomplished in the first 2 months:

1. Technical and SEO audit with derivation of TOR for the programmer.
2. Collection of core queries by priority categories and subcategories.
3. Expanding the structure of the site.
4. Conducting niche analysis and determining the pool of main competitors
5. Content work based on the analysis of competitors’ content (formation of structure, text, headings, meta).
6. Link strategy

3.3 Stages of optimization works

1. First stage. Technical and SEO audit of the new site

As a result of which, collected and put to work for the programmer implementation of basic tasks:

• Creation of robots.txt file, XML and HTML sitemap;
• Installation of SSL certificate;
• Adjusting the structure of pages
• Adjusting the menu in the header and in the basement;
• Connecting and customizing webmasters;
• Installation of Google Analytics counter;
• Breadcrumbs output;
• Acceleration of site loading speed;
• Adaptation for mobile devices;
• Implementation of Product, Breadcrumbs, Organization micro markup;
• Removal of erroneous pages from the index;
• Other tasks.

Useful material on the topic: Internal optimization of online store

2. The second stage. Collection and preparation of semantic kernel

At the first stages it was necessary to collect the maximum volume of semantic kernel for greater coverage. Therefore, in conjunction with the client in the first place emphasized the highest-priority headings and in parallel “killed the second hare”, ie, expanded the kernel on related headings, which allowed to increase the number of pages, expand the structure and approach a number of indicators to some direct competitors.

3. The third stage. Content creation

As a result of the analysis of the most frequent queries, the content was implemented:

• Complex TOR for optimization of page content (structure, text, headings, meta);
• Writing, checking and subsequent placement of the text;
• Increase of pages in the index through the creation and development of new landing pages of categories and subcategories

As a result, over the last year the site index has grown from 166 pages to 1627, i.e. 10 times:

4. Stage Four. Formation of a link strategy and monthly growth of link mass through procurement.

• Key competitors for Google rendition were identified;
• Uploading link profiles of direct competitors;
• Searching for donors;;
• Checking each domain for quality parameters;
• Determining the required monthly link budget;
• Publish links

4. Instead of concluding about the promotion of construction sites

A few important theses, specifically for this case study:

• For successful SEO promotion of a construction online store is necessarily necessary to prioritize the work on the semantic kernel and catalog, because in most cases – we are talking about a wide product catalog;
• If the site is being relaunched or just launched, SEO needs to start at the site development stage.

Thanks, tried to describe everything in detail! We hope the case study will be useful.