One of our clients who we started working with in 2024 has an ecommerce brand based in Australia selling home products, with a focus on one in particular.
We managed to get them to rank #1 for both the product name itself and the main variation in terms of search volume, generating thousands of high intent visitors every month and leading to huge increases in revenue.
The best part? We didn't even need to invest heavily into backlinks.
Stay tuned to see how we did it.
The Problem
This website had a very peculiar problem - one of their main categories was competing with the home page for one of their highest search traffic terms.
This meant that they were not able to break into the top 5 for the search term, leading to decreased revenue and traffic.
The Solution
The solution to this issue had a few parts.
Part 1 - Figuring Out Which Page To Deoptimize
The first step was figuring out whether the home page or collection page should rank for the main search terms.
To do this, we looked at historical data of which page ranked higher on average, as well as all of the other competitors on the SERPs.
It became clear that the collection page needed to be updated (main SEO title, meta description & on page content) while the homepage needed to be de-optimized.
Part 2 - Practical Aspects Of Optimizing/Deoptimizing The Pages
Optimizing the collection page included a few steps:
- Rewriting the meta description to include the target keywords naturally and as close to the front as possible.
- Changing the H1 to include both variations of the main keyword.
- Adding on page content to the collection page, optimized around the main keywords.
For the homepage, we took a few steps to stop it from ranking for the keywords:
- Completely revamped the meta description to focus on the brand rather than the main keywords.
- Editing the content of the page, particularly the H1 and a handful of H2s to get rid of the main keywords.
The great thing here is that we didn't need to invest heavily into link building or content to make this change, all it took was a bit of elbow grease.
Part 3 - Monitoring Results Closely
After we made the change, it took a few months for the main keyword to pick up traction and slowly move from getting basically zero clicks per month to hundreds.
There were a few other tactics we used to solidify the ranking, but the main needle-mover was deoptimizing the homepage while simultaneously optimizing the collection page.
Other SEO Tactics We Implemented
In order to maintain the traffic to the page, we did a couple of other things to boost the page.
Supporting Blog Content
Product collection pages can benefit a lot from supporting, relevant blog content that has internal links pointing to the page.
Bonus points here if you can publish more than one article, interlink them all, and also building internal links to the collection page on each post as well (add fuel to this with backlinks).
This is exactly what we did in this case, and a lot of that informational content itself has gone on to rank highly for many terms and generate a lot of traffic separately in its own right, as well as help the collection page maintain its position.
Link Building To Supporting Blog Content
While we had the most success by implementing the optimization of the collection page and deoptimization of the home page, we also wanted to secure the long-term traffic to the page by building links.
To do this, we built a handful of backlinks to the supporting blog content, rather than the collection page itself. This is for a few reasons:
- Google has devalued links built directly to product/collection pages more and more over the last few years.
- Building backlinks to blog posts with internal links high up in the article works very effectively at improving keyword rankings.
We prioritized quality over quantity, as we only had a few options that were high DR, niche-relevant, and passed all of our other backlink metric tests.
Improved Internal Linking From Other Areas
The last thing we did was improve internal linking from other areas, prioritizing exact match internal anchors where possible.
To do this with the most impact, we looked at pages with the most referring domains, meaning the page could pass more link authority through to the target collection page.
The Result
For over half a year they have consistently ranked in the top spots for the main keyword and the main variation, generating thousands of high-intent visits and thousands in revenue.
Get in touch today if you want to explore how GrubSEO can achieve similar results for your clients.