Brief
- Subject: online children’s clothes shop
- Region of promotion: Moscow and Moscow Oblast
- Domain age: 4 years
- Work start date: 19 June 2018
- Case renewal: 10 January 2019
- Minimum goal: get the school uniform portion of the website to the TOP in a month and a half. Because it’s the season in August.
- Maximum goal: get the website its former traffic and positions back.
An online clothes shop is one of the most difficult to promote for two reasons:
- Wildberries
- La’Moda.
Website condition
Traffic period from search engines from September 2014 to June 2018
The total number of visitors reached almost 2000 in 2016, but it had been going down for several years.
The current SEO optimizer said that he didn’t know what to do, and we had to say goodbye to him. Links were no longer being bought, TIC dropped, but nothing changed substantially. There were no apparent filters or sanctions.
He thought the demand was changing, and didn’t pay any attention to it until he decided to take positions. It was a surprise when the majority of the queries turned out to be beyond TOP50.
Nobody could understand why. And neither did I at the beginning. There were defects, a lot of internal optimization mistakes, but not extreme enough for the website would go down so smoothly. I agreed to take this project only because I was interested in solving this problem.
What was done
The first thing SEO begins with is an audit.
Everything was standard. I was checking against my own checklist and learned that the website had about 10 regional subdomains. The customer hadn’t even mentioned them, only after my inquiries, I managed to find out he made them upon recommendations in order to promote the website all over Russia. They had cloned the main website about 10 times and that was it! All done, as they say! Naturally, the affiliation check was positive. They had created these subdomains just when their website has begun to go down.
How the problem was solved
- The subdomains were glued with the 301-redirect page by page.
- We found over-optimization for key phrases. We had to rewrite texts in the entire section. LSI phrases were also used. Span, i, em, b tags were removed, we replaced them with span.
- Pagination pages were closed in robots.txt. We decided to open and optimise them. We put rel=”canonical”from all the pagination pages to the first one (a solution for Yandex). Additionally we put rel=”prev” and rel=”next” (solution for Google). We left text under the list of merchandise only on the first page.
- We removed meta=”keywords”. There is no sense in filling this tag now. It can lead to pessimization. Google doesn’t account for it since 2007. Yandex claims it ‘may’ take it into consideration. In practice, it’s a meaningless waste of time that creates pessimization risks for incorrectly picked key queries.
- Each card was augmented with a template to generate a unique description, since the cards aren’t unique and the description is taken from the manufacturer. In this manner we decided to dilute them and added a section with reviews. We also added a template for generating Title and Description.
- We added micromarking to the ‘bread crumbs,’ the product card
- We fixed the layout, put some scripts in a separate file and in the bottom of the code.
- Moved all the analytics into GTM and fixed the goals.
- Added an OpenGraf marking, social media buttons.
- We fixed the redirects – there were no redirects from multiple slashes.
- To remove doubles from the search and prevent their appearance for all the pages with the ‘?’ parameter we put rel=”canonical” to itself, but with no parameter.
- We optimized some large pictures. The actual size of the pictures differed from the size that was displayed (the pictures themselves were larger than what was shown on the website), we changed the resolution to the size that was displayed on the website. We also re-saved them for web, which shrank their size without visible quality losses.
- Added a Yandex.Chat button
- We found unflattering reviews about the shop. One customer was very upset that she couldn’t get her size, although the website had shown that it was available. For 2 months we had to gradually order reviews to increase the shop’s rating on all the resources where she had left her review.
- We rewrote Title and Description for the whole school uniform section.
- I published some crowd-links from my sources.
The result
Dynamics of consumer activity from search engines during the promotion period
Topvisor position and visibility
In a month and a half the website’s visibility increased from 25% to 64%. Almost the same level as Wildberries.
56% of monitored queries got into the TOP3. 69% are in the TOP10.
The number of customers grew by 80%.
