WooCommerce SEO Case Study
This electrical supply sales SEO case study will focus on one company and its products and services.
Client Background
I have worked with Powerpoint Engineering since 2010, looking after their eCommerce SEO.
I have had the pleasure of working in what are considered non-sexy industries for many years. These include companies in engineering, construction, fabrication, stone suppliers and quarries, timber suppliers, cladding, substation safety, and bicycle manufacturers—you get the idea.
Challenge Faced - Understanding
Due to the technical nature of this business, they have developed a tolerance for all my questions. Even though I had some engineering knowledge from my mechanical engineering apprenticeship – a long time ago – I changed careers very soon after.
Understanding the client’s products is the main goal at the start of all projects. Understanding the client’s target market and growth goals is a very close second.
SEO Project Tasks & Strategy
- Are the products and services local, national or international?
- Are they distributors and/or selling to end-users?
- Will they sell from their website, or is this lead generation?
- Will the websites be multi-lingual?
- Do they run conferences or attend trade shows?
Knowing these helps plan the strategy and follow-on monthly and daily SEO tasks. The following is the shape that these projects have taken:
- In-house training
- Website reviews
- Content reviews – keyword research
- On-site SEO
- Off-site SEO – eCommerce link building
Content Review and Keyword Research
These two were completed together as they inform each other. A clear understanding of the client’s business is essential to having good keyword research – this cannot be overstated.
The main problems occurred with content: content that was the same on more than one website and manufacturer’s product descriptions. All of these problems led to some parts of the sites being filtered by Google and not appearing in search results.
This area is an ongoing problem, though less than it was. Recruiting and keeping writers who can write high-quality product or service descriptions is difficult. Asking someone to write about a particular lockout tagout product and then do it repeatedly without using the same sentences is hard work. It is also expensive to keep technical writers.
The duplicate content across the websites, (more than 10), is now approaching an acceptable level.
Keyword research has also informed the blog content calendar and sharing on LinkedIn – where their audience can be found.
Link Building
Link building is required for any website to rank highly in Google’s search results. With engineering websites, we have two problems: creating good content for guest posts and the availability of target websites. This area is not like travel SEO or accountancy SEO where there are many more options.
On the plus side, these sectors tend to be less competitive and therefore need fewer links to rank.
As the company runs more than ten websites using WordPress and WooCommerce, we aimed to have each guest post placement link to two sites. This has helped to manage the cost, as link building is a long term – sometimes never ending – task.
Training
Powerpoint have their own in-house marketing and web development team. When we first met, they already had well designed and good-looking websites. The websites were underperforming due to a lack of knowledge of search optimisation for Google.
Our first few training sessions helped the internal team understand how their roles intersected with SEO. Creating written SEO processes and plans that are directed at writers, marketing managers, and web developers were better than an overview SEO cheat sheet.
Tracking
It can seem tedious to track changes to the website. If you are just adding a new product or updating a services page, it is easier to just do it and get on with other work.
However, setting up sheets to track changes meant we could tie website and business outcomes into the changes. (We now also use a website audit tracker)
Results and Outcomes
As can be seen from the image at the top of this post, their traffic from Google has kept increasing.
Conclusions
We currently work on twelve commerce websites belonging to Powerpoint Engineering.
During the last two years, AI has made a huge difference to the content and content quality across the websites. It has also helped us move faster by being able to summarise PDF files to be used as product descriptions. Growth has again taken off – it would have been great to have AI many years ago.
Ready to grow your business?
Let us work with you to create a strategy to achieve your goals.
