Butter Lane Antiques had a website hosted on One.com, using their site builder. This meant that URLs were not search friendly and very little was technically available to help the site gain visitation naturally from Google. Butter Lane wanted to know what was holding them back with their current website and what kind of budget and solution would be best for them to take their online e-commerce venture to the next level.
They were happy to manage their social media inhouse, so website optimisation and PPC management were the main requirements, along with being able to see how the site is performing, and how many sales were made.
Solution
As with many projects, WordPress was recommended as the platform to use for the new build, alongside independent hosting. As the site needed to stock hundreds of products, it was recommended for the site to be built by a local, third-party agency, while I provided consultancy to ensure it was delivered to requirements in a timely manner.
Once the new site was live, I provided website optimisation, PPC, consultancy and reporting on a monthly basis to ensure that WordPress was configured optimally and that their product pages had the Meta data and content to gain visitation via long-tail, relevant search terms. All orders were tracked, alongside what products garnered the most attention.
Outcome
After 2 years of managing their search campaign, search traffic levels grew from hundreds a month, to thousands, with no blog content created. Most of the increase was due to an increasing amount of product pages that had their Meta data and content continuously tweaked. A priority was to make sure that the product category pages performed well, with unique text and a clear user journey, so they worked as landing pages in their own right.
Top ten rankings were achieved for primary search terms such as “antique english jewellery”, along with longtail search terms related to their most popular products, such as “crown signet ring”.
Due to growth the administration of the website and it’s products became burdensome, even for WordPress. Because of this, the website was overhauled again at the beginning of 2017 to use Shopify. This streamlined a lot of internal processes, such as automating stock-levels with the website. As forecasted, using Shopify wasn’t ideal from an SEO perspective, but it was the right decision to ensure the company could scale for the forseeable future.