Give Smoke and Mirrors the Slip with Shopify SEO

The thing about eCommerce SEO is that it can be used to generate huge gains for a business, and it does this without discrimination. Any business, both large and small, can effectively compete for the same keywords. It all comes down to how capable your SEO expert provider is; how adroitly they can handle optimizing your website and your content; it isn’t all just about deep pockets and big ad spend budgets.

Additionally, there are some businesses with big ambitions for growth that are working in restricted paid-search environments. For some online businesses, PPC is not an option simply because Google has restricted their industry. Whether for better or for worse, this limits the digital marketing initiatives of players in a large range of industries.

For Cyclone Pods, there were a few things desirable about pursuing eCommerce SEO, provided the process was carefully laid out and efficiently executed.

Cyclone Pods, which is a specialty supplier of premium, nicotine-free vape juices, and associated devices, had sight set on growth. Despite the fact that Cyclone Pods products are geared towards users attempting to dissociate from nicotine, they still work in a PPC-restricted industry. That takes paid-search off the table for digital marketing projects.

Still, that didn’t discourage the ambition of the team at Cyclone Pods. They knew they wanted to bring in more traffic and generate higher sales, and they knew that with the right SEO agency partner, it could be done. Furthermore, since Cyclone Pods is built on Shopify, finding the agency with the best Shopify SEO services was paramount to success.

An Uncustomarily Large Project

There’s something else about Cyclone Pods. Unlike some online businesses with hundreds or thousands of products and services, Cyclone Pods only offers a few different devices and flavored juices. Their value proposition is rock-solid, but their assortment of products is still small compared to some other businesses in the vape industry.

Others in Cyclone Pods’ shoes might settle for a small campaign targeting 12 or even 25 keywords, but his ambitions were larger than that. They didn’t shy from the prize. They knew that Cyclone Pods had a unique positioning and a suite of products that, though small in number, was huge in potential.

Still, They didn’t choose 1Digital^® Agency for a 50 keyword campaign. They didn’t even shoot for a 75 keyword campaign, which would be sizable in scope even by the standards of eCommerce businesses selling hundreds of products. They opted for a 120 keyword campaign. Others might call it overkill, but the results 1Digital^® Agency secured for Cyclone Pods deliver a different testimony.

Preliminary Work

With such an objectively large campaign targeted scores of keywords and only so many different product variations to work with, 1Digital^® Agency’s specialists had their work cut out for them. As we do with all of our SEO projects, we started with keyword research to identify the most lucrative collection of keywords for Cyclone Pods to target.

This took into account competitive efforts as well as an analysis of the general industry landscape. Armed with a comprehensive list of relevant keywords with high search volume and aligned with customer search intent, our specialists lined up target pages and optimized them with new meta titles, header tags, and URLs where necessary.

We scanned their website for duplicate content, and finding none, audited their existing backlinks, disavowing the toxic links we uncovered; audited their website for broken links that would hurt their SEO. We checked their Google Search Console to ensure there were no crawler errors so that Google could access and crawl their pages for indexing.

With much of our preliminary work set up to deliver great results, we began optimizing CyclonePods.com with keyword enriched, optimized content, including a range of blog publications and category page content to stimulate UX and attract Google’s attention.

Content Publication and Link Building

A key component of our SEO process is content publication and link building. Using our comprehensive list of keywords uncovered during the research and planning phase of the project, we published new content to key target pages to increase their rankings for competitive keywords and phrases.

In addition to boosting their rankings for specified target pages, our content creators began routinely publishing to their blog, creating a variety of long and short-form content, keyword and link optimized to attract Google’s attention and recognition.

The content creation portion of our eCommerce SEO services entails thorough research into the target audience to uncover their needs and desires; what they’re looking for and why. This enables our content creators to craft blog content that is enriching, full of useful information, and most important, optimized for search engines.

Keyword Movement

It’s customary for the results of search engine optimization projects to take a while to build up and start rolling in, but Cyclone Pods was uniquely positioned for success. With such a large campaign targeting so many keywords and with so much room for keyword movement, their results began to mount fairly rapidly.

Their campaign with 1Digital^® Agency began in October 2020, and by January there were significantly noticeable results across the board. However, positive keyword movements became noticeable only a few short weeks after their campaign began.

The image below shows their keyword movements from the start of their campaign till the end of January 2020. It shows keywords for which they are not ranked, as well as keywords for which they rank in the top 30, top 20, and so on and so forth as indicated, to the keywords for which they rank in the top spot organically.

As you can see, at the beginning of the campaign, there were a large number of keywords for which they did not rank at all; the percentage of keywords for which they did not rank sharply declined, by about 33% within the first month of the campaign. It also continued a steady downward trend that is still ongoing.

At the same time, Cyclone Pods experienced sharp increases in organic keyword rankings in the top 30, 20, and 10 spots. Even their top 5 and top-spot rankings began a slow, but steady upward climb right from the beginning of the campaign.

For more perspective on the significant shifts for some of their top keyword movements, consult the following graphic (to the left) that shows some of their biggest moves. While we can’t divulge the keywords we’re targeting, you can see that there have been impressive improvements for many targeted keywords

All of these movements are for keywords that have come into ranking in the top 10 spots. Though this only reflects a small portion of keywords targeted for Cyclone Pods, as you can see from the image, there are a significant number of keywords ranking in the top 10 alone. Many of them rank not only in the top 10, but are actually in the first position. Additionally, you can see that some of these keywords ascended the ranks by leaps and bounds, improving positions by 31, 36, 40, even 54 positions to land within the top 10. One of the keywords highlighted here, which is now organically ranking in the 5th position, climbed 64 spots to land there. That is an impressive movement by any estimation.

Real Results

Keyword movement is crucial to the health of an SEO campaign and impactful, consistent positive movements will lend some insight into the health and efficacy of a project. That much is obvious with Cyclone Pods; their keyword movements have been on an upward trend for months and continue to rise.

However, some of the most basic goals of SEO for eCommerce websites are actually to bring more customers into an online store by capitalizing on those higher organic rankings. In Cyclone Pods’ case, traffic needed only a short while to get ahead of steam and really ramp up.

To give some general insight into the way traffic boomed as our project got rolling, consider the following image which shows organic traffic to Cyclone Pods’ eCommerce site from the beginning of their campaign in October 2020 through to the end of January 2021. The increases in organic traffic to their website appears even more dramatic when overlaid by organic traffic figures from the corresponding previous period, from June 2020 through the end of September 2020.

It is apparent that the volume of organic traffic flowing into their site, barring some aberrant spikes, was fairly consistent through the preceding period (June 2020 to the beginning of the campaign). In fact, traffic followed the same steady course during the first two or so months of the campaign with 1Digital^® Agency. However, in the background, keywords and website ranking were steadily growing.

Right around the end of December 2020, less than 3 months into the campaign, their organic traffic sharply increased. This was no random spike in traffic, as you can see that the trend continued in force and has maintained its course to the time of this publication, February 2021, at which point Cyclone Pods’ campaign is still ongoing.

In the image above you can see a more quantitative take on increases in traffic to their website. This data corresponds to the two superposed periods addressed by the first image showing organic traffic. During this period, organic traffic (users and new users) sessions, number of sessions, and pageviews all increased. New organic used to CyclonePods.com increased by nearly 30% during this time, along with a similar increase in pageviews.

Organic traffic to their website increased, along with sessions. Still, the icing on the cake is the figures that all eCommerce businesses are really holding out for – figures associated with sales. Money is the bottom line in all industries, and Cyclone Pods profited greatly during the period since they began their SEO project with 1Digital^® Agency, as compared to the previous period.

The little snippet above is concise, but it shows you what you need to know. Compared to the period immediately before starting their SEO campaign with us, Cyclone Pods’ overall eCommerce conversion rate saw only a modest jump. However, transactions and revenue both saw significant jumps.

During this time, their transactions grew by over 33% whereas their revenue grew by just a hair less. In any industry, in any economic climate, a growth of more than 32% in transactions and revenue figures is momentous; for an eCommerce client working in a PPC-restricted industry, targeting a huge number of keywords, the results are nothing short of impressive.

For Cyclone Pods, however, this is just the beginning. They look forward to many more months of spectacular growth in traffic and sales resulting from their SEO projects with 1Digital^® Agency, and we look forward to delivering them.

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Are you impressed by these results? It’s a little hard not to be, especially considering these are all organic increases resulting from sustainable SEO best-practices as executed by the leading eCommerce SEO company in the business.

If you’re wondering how to generate such gains for your business, but aren’t sure which SEO strategies to pursue, how to avoid keyword stuffing, or even what keywords to use, that’s understandable. There is quite a difference between black-hat and white-hat SEO, and we practically wrote the book.

Call us today at 888-982-8269 if you want to get started with a campaign of your own to generate higher website rankings, organic traffic, and revenue figures. They’re within reach, especially when you work with the Shopify SEO experts at 1Digital^® Agency.

In the meanwhile, if you need more proof, it’s only a few clicks away. Visit our collection of eCommerce case studies that you can filter by platform and service. You might be surprised to see just how many eCommerce merchants are dealing with the same challenges as you – and we’ve helped them all.

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