It’s Google’s world, and we’re simply living in it.
That’s what Vincent Totino, senior supervisor of seo and marketing at Solstice Sun glasses, says when it concerns making sure an ecommerce website is ranked in Google search results.
Totino signed up with Solstice in February 2018, and the sunglasses merchant tasked him with improving the seller’s traffic from search results. Totino knew that first up, it needed to upgrade its JavaScript-heavy site with friendlier HTML coding. HTML would make the site much easier for Google’s search bot to crawl and after that index all of Solstice Sunglasses’ pages for search engine result, he says.
” Back in the day– we’re talking five/six years back– JavaScript was extremely tough for search robotics to read, in some cases it still is, although it’s improved at it,” Totino says. “But I felt for an ecommerce website like ours, I think an HTML site would be more efficient, primarily since the amount of images that we have, and making sure images load quickly was crucial.”
Formerly, SolsticeSunglasses.com‘s code was responsive, and so it had dozens of different sizes of the very same image for the internet browser to show depending upon which gadget a shopper was viewing the site. For example, if a consumer went to SolsticeSunglasses.com on a mobile phone, the site would show the images that were proper to her screen size.
Nevertheless, due to the fact that Solstice had all of the images pre-sized, when Google went to crawl its website to index it for search results page, it had to crawl all the dozens of sizes of images, per image. Due to the fact that Google only invests a specific quantity of unknown time crawling a site, Google was not crawling all of SolsticeSunglasses.com to index, as it was spending the majority of its crawling time with the same images.
” It was ruining our crawl budget plan,” Totino says.
” If I have 2,000 pages to crawl, it’s going to take them three years, and those pages are not going to be crawled and not going to be ranking for my website,” he adds.
Totino knew Google did not have presence into its site since of Google’s webmaster tools that lets sellers understand how many crawls a day its site gets, to name a few metrics.
Solstice Shades upgrades with SEO in mind
Totino worked with website design vendor 43 Web Studio LLC to upgrade the website and alter how images would be shown to users. Now, Solstice only offers one image, and the code lets the browser know that it has to reformat it to fit the screen size.
The re-coded website released in June 2018, and Google is now crawling near triple the variety of pages on its website compared with before, Totino says.
The merchant also changed titles and meta descriptions, which is the text Google displays in search results page, to each page on its site with keywords it wishes to rank for. It also altered its item descriptions to have additional keywords in hopes of Google ranking it for those keywords. Now that Google’s bot crawled more of its site, it had more pages to rank and direct consumers to.
Outcomes from the redesign
Due to the fact that of the time it considers Google to recrawl and index the site, outcomes were not immediate. Plus, as soon as pages are ranked, it takes time for consumers to start checking out those pages, even more constructing up traffic and its SEO value, he says. That process took about 8 to 9 months, he states. However when the reindexing began, the outcomes were remarkable:
- Page views of its website from organic search increased 36%in June 2019 from when the site introduced in June 2018.
- Transactions through organic search increased 106%.
- Web traffic from organic search now represents 25%of the website’s traffic, up from 10-15%previously.
- Nearly 1,900 unbranded and branded keywords now rank on the top page of Google search engine result throughout desktop and mobile, up from 750 keywords in the year-ago period.
Totino also started using SEO marketing platform Conductor to see how its material ranks for particular keywords, which keywords bring in the most revenue-generating sessions and how it compares to its competitors. Conductor likewise shares with Solstice how buyers connected with the website, including what keywords shoppers were looking for in concerns to sunglasses that drove traffic and which ones didn’t.
For example, customers look for “female sunglasses” and “male sunglasses,” however, Solstice did not have gender signifiers on its product information page. The seller went through and included these where proper. The retailer saw roughly a 10%increase in its ranking for 200 of those keywords, Totino says.
Besides these modifications, Solstice dealt with other SEO-focused projects, such as making its URLs more easy. For instance, its previous product page URLs were long and included an enigma, that made it tough for Google to read. The merchant made the URL shorter and made sure the item name was early in the URL, which assists Google understand what material the URL has, and what content is pertinent on the page.
What’s more, sales from web traffic via natural search increased practically 61%year over year, which Totino states he was pleased with.
In addition to these arise from search results page, the seller also associates this job to other positive results, including an overall 66%increase in web traffic, a 73%increase in conversions, a 101%increase in earnings per online check out, plus customers see more pages per check out.
SEO remains an essential part of Solstice Shades
Right now, ecommerce is just about 5%of the merchant’s total sales. Nevertheless, this SEO job is an essential part of its plan to have online sales reach 15-20%of total sales in the future, says Monica Swendsrud, marketing director at Solstice Shades.
” If you don’t have a good SEO strategy, you are going to be paying for your traffic and all of your traffic that is pertaining to your website is through paid search or affiliates, and so on,” Swendsrud states. “Organic search is just that, it’s totally free traffic.”
SEO is a perpetual project, and Totino has to continuously keep track of and keep its website up to date, he says. At the start of the year, for example, Google increased the character limit in meta descriptions, which is the explanatory text underneath the primary title in search results page, to 300 characters– up from160 Totino went to operate at lengthening all of Solstice’s meta descriptions, only for Google to choose a few months later on that it was going to adhere to the 160- character limit, and Totino needed to alter everything once again.
SolsticeSunglasses.com likewise prepares to develop a blog site for its site to post content showcasing its expertise in the classification, such as how to discover the right sunglasses for your face shape. By doing this, if buyers search for “best sunglasses for a heart-shaped face” on Google, Solstice might be one of the search results page, driving customers to its website and potentially converting them into a client.
The job was completed with a team of three individuals on a “tight budget plan,” Totino says without reveling more.
