Overcoming Fierce Competition in a Niche Market Through Targeted eCommerce SEO Services

One of our relatively newer clients is one that sells specialty fishing tackle to saltwater anglers – jigs, rods, reels, and other fishing equipment. 

The competition online for the fishing industry is fierce enough, which presents not only a challenge but a unique opportunity through which we grew results more rapidly than typical for this client. 

Here’s how it all broke down. 

The Industry 

The fishing industry, unlike the firearms industry, and other aspects of outdoor sports, is not hindered by Google’s draconian and irrational restrictions. 

Online tackle shops can, therefore, pay to advertise. But that is an expensive proposition; consider the fact that for “fishing tackle,” which gets nearly 15,000 searches per month, there are a hundred and ten million results.

So that should give you the sort of insight into how competitive the market is. Now let’s shift things up; no fisherman starts his search for an online sale by looking up “fishing tackle.”

He or she is either going to look up a particular product or a class of product, such as “Rapala jerkbait” or “Penn Pursuit.”

That narrows things down slightly. It also happens to be the case that the fishing industry in general offers visibility based on authority, and that requires content – and most fishermen are not tolerant of low quality fluff that isn’t actionable on the water. 

This in turn means that all copy produced for an eCommerce SEO campaign in the fishing industry must be content-marketing focused, with an emphasis not on promotion, but utility. 

For instance, online shoppers might be interested in an article or a CMS page about the best lures for bass in the summer, or how to clean a spinning reel after a day on the water, rather than vapid copy about a given reel’s features. 

Given these unique considerations as well as the other notes on the industry, our task was to create a custom eCommerce SEO package for this client that met the challenges head on and still promised to deliver. 

The Approach 

There were a few things we had to hammer out before we could put together a coherent approach for this client. 

• We needed to find the right keywords we wanted to target. These keywords needed to be associated with either commercial or transactional search intent, and have viable volume. They also needed to have attainable difficulty scores. 
• There had to be a reasonable number of competitors for those search terms, and they also had to be highly relevant to the business model of the client in question. 
• We needed to meet with the client to determine what sorts of challenges its clients faced regularly, as well as what was important to them.
• And we had to put together a content strategy that hinged not only on keyword strategy but also content-marketing level topics that were useful for the client’s audience. 

From there, we could scope the campaign and assign deliverables that we expected to have the most measurable impact. 

The Deliverables

As part and parcel of this custom eCommerce SEO campaign, we had to ensure we were delivering according to the greatest needs of the client website, with a focus on generating the most palpable organic ranking increases. We opted to include:

• A backlink strategy involving publication on a variety of high domain-authority third party websites. 
• On page optimizations for the campaigns target keywords, in on-page copy, metadata, and page titles. 
• A technical audit and regular technical sweeps to uncover and rectify technical rankings factors that might not be optimized to the fullest. 
• A content publication stream of both offsite posts (used for building backlinks and domain authority) and onsite content, mainly in the form of blogs, which improved the website’s overall visibility for the target keywords and search terms, and which increased engagement from key members of the target audience. 

On the latter end, we worked closely with the client to collaborate on the topics covered by the content stream, including not only new topics previously uncovered by their content streams, but adaptations from their YouTube channel. 

The Results 

We tell our clients not to expect any appreciable results before, at minimum, a 6-month investment in eCommerce SEO services. At the same time, we take wins where we can find them, and for the client that is the focus of this case study, we saw promising results fairly early on.

Specifically, we saw considerable growth in the organic rankings of some of the target keywords we selected for the campaign. 

You can see some of those featured in the image below:

While this image shows that some keywords have not come into ranking yet, it also shows that we took several keywords from page 2 to page 1, and increased the position of several other target keywords by increasing their rankings on the first page. 

Total revenue is another way to evaluate the summary success of an SEO campaign. Even though SEO cannot guarantee increases in revenue, by targeting appropriate keywords associated with intent to purpose, we can often move the needle. In this case we certainly did:

Comparing total revenue from the past month as of the publication of this case study to the corresponding previous period (indicated in the screenshot), revenue was up over 44%. That’s significant, considering December is customarily a big month for eCommerce ventures. Nonetheless, our efforts yielded considerably higher revenue in the last month than the one prior. 

Given the fact that this campaign is comparatively new, these are nothing more than the shape of things to come, though they presage good things. 

For More Information on the Potential Payoffs of an Investment in eCommerce SEO Services

In the event these are the sorts of results you’d like to see for your own eCommerce business, get in touch with one of our SEO specialists and we will be more than happy to talk over your goals as well as potential options for a custom SEO package. Also, for more success stories, check out our full collection of eCommerce case studies.