Reversing Downward Trend To 100% Growth
Leather Furniture USA

Full SEO Audit

I kicked off with an in-depth audit of the site to find the issues holding back the site and the key opportunities. There were quite a few moving parts and one content page driving over 70% of the traffic. 

The audit reviewed the technical set-up, on-page elements and off-site signals. 

I identified a few key opportunities for us to focus on:

• The site attracted some decent rankings for commercial terms but they were all for a detailed guide on leather furniture rather than category pages.
• The category pages lacked optimisation
• There was little-to-none supportive content apart from one large guide
• All discontinued products still existed on site, in a hidden category – there were hundreds

Strategy & Keyword Research

I set about creating a clear SEO strategy for the site to ensure I could proactively improve each area to help reach their business goals. 

The strategy set out the plan across the core areas that needed to be addressed:

• Technical
• On-Page
• Content
• Link Building
• Analysis & Reporting

The keyword research was conducted across the entire leather furniture market to ensure we could create relevant pages and optimise existing pages for full keyword coverage, alongside new supporting informational-based content.

The keywords were clustered together and mapped to either existing pages or highlighted as new opportunities and prioritised based on the opportunity to rank (difficulty of the keyword) and the potential commercial value. 

Moving Ranking Keywords From Content To Category Pages

One of the major projects I worked on was to move keywords currently ranking for a big content piece and transition them to category pages. I hypothesised that this would increase the conversion rate as well as it decreased the journey length to find a product.

To do this I actioned a few tasks including:

• Re-optimising the category pages meta tags for specific target keywords (from the initial keyword research)
• Revising the content page, adding internal links to the category pages with relevant anchor text
• Updating the navigation to also make the top product categories more visible
• Added supplementary content to category pages to increase contextual relevancy

Over the course of 2-3 months, the keyword rankings not only switched over to the category pages, they also increased from low page one to top 3 as they switched. This also saw a 200% increase in conversion rate from the ranking changes.

Removing & Redirecting Expired Products

The previous owner had kept every discontinued product live on site, within a hidden category. These products were no longer driving traffic, however did have quite a few relevant backlinks that could be put to better use.

I redirected the expired products to the category that the product was in, keeping the authority from the links and driving it to the category pages.

Creation of Sub-Categories For Long Tail Keywords

From the keyword research undertaken at the start of the project, I identified over 70 long-tail opportunities for additional categories to be created based on our current product range.

This includes various pages such as:

• Two-seater leather sofa
• Reclining leather sofas
• Curved leather sofas

Together we set about creating these pages, launching them fully optimised, with supporting content and internal links placed from product pages and elsewhere on site to boost their visibility. 

Consistent Content Creation

The keyword research allowed us to create a supporting content strategy, a mix of bottom-of-the-funnel content such as ‘types of leather sofa’ to higher funnel pieces like ‘leather couch styles’. 

We worked on publishing consistently, with internal links through to products and categories where relevant. This content also started ranking quickly due to the site relevancy and naturally picked up links.