012 - Supercharge Your Website: Skyrocket Traffic with Powerful SEO

Welcome to Woman Powering e-Commerce, where we explore the journey of a female e-commerce entrepreneur. In this episode, we'll discuss a crucial aspect of online success: Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While not my usual passion, I must share the incredible results we achieved through our SEO efforts—quadrupling our website traffic in just one month. If you're eager to replicate our success, join me as we delve into the strategies that yielded these remarkable results. While we won't cover every intricate detail, this overview will provide you with valuable insights to drive your own e-commerce growth.

Uncovering the Problem for our ecommerce website

In our previous episode, I mentioned the significant drop in our e-commerce sales, which was directly related to a decline in website traffic. Despite numerous attempts to revive it, we struggled to identify the root cause of this sudden drop. We invested in paid ads, SEO outreach, and even underwent a rebranding, but the issue persisted. Finally, we discovered that a 2021 Google update had adversely affected our website. Armed with this knowledge, we resolved to tackle the problem head-on, determined to regain our lost traffic.

Bringing in the SEO Experts

Our first step was to hire an in-house SEO specialist named Tim, who possessed a solid background in web development. This decision gave us the advantage of having dedicated expertise solely focused on our business's SEO needs. Tim audited our website during the interview process, allowing us to gain insights into the strategies he would implement if hired. With his expertise and passion for SEO, we felt confident in his ability to help us reclaim our lost traffic.

Implementing an effective SEO Strategy for ecommerce

To kickstart our SEO revival, we prioritized fixing technical issues plaguing our website. This involved addressing crawl errors and indexing issues, ensuring that our pages were correctly indexed in Google's search results. Even this simple step produced instant results, with our traffic showing early signs of recovery. Additionally, we focused on updating our blog articles, recognizing that outdated content can impact SEO relevance. By assigning our full-time blog writer to update high-ranking articles, we not only maintained SEO relevance but also witnessed significant traffic improvements.

Another crucial aspect was the removal of toxic backlinks. Although our backlinking strategy initially boosted traffic, we realized that some links from irrelevant websites were negatively affecting our SEO. By removing these toxic links and optimizing our internal linking structure, we saw a substantial increase in website traffic.

Achieving Organic Results and Future Steps

Within just four weeks, we experienced a remarkable fourfold increase in traffic, thanks to our focused SEO efforts. However, our journey doesn't end here. We will continue auditing our website, ensuring its alignment with the latest SEO practices. Additionally, we aim to enhance conversion rate optimization (CRO) to improve the quality of incoming traffic and maximize sales potential.

SEO Key Takeaways and Lessons Learned

Reflecting on this experience, several essential lessons emerged. First, as an e-commerce entrepreneur, delegating tasks to experts with greater knowledge and experience is crucial. While you may initially manage various aspects of your business, true growth lies in surrounding yourself with knowledgeable specialists. Hiring an in-house SEO expert proved immensely beneficial for us.

Staying up-to-date with industry trends is equally vital. While hiring experts is crucial, understanding the basics of current SEO practices enables you to make informed decisions and hire the right individuals for your team.

Conclusion

Our journey to quadrupling website traffic through SEO was a significant milestone in our e-commerce business. We achieved remarkable results in just one month by fixing technical issues, updating blog articles, and removing toxic backlinks. However, our commitment to growth continues, focusing on further website audits and optimization of conversion rate.

Thank you for joining me on this insightful journey. Your support is instrumental in inspiring more women entrepreneurs in the e-commerce industry. Remember to follow me on social media and subscribe to our podcast for future episodes. Until next time, keep taking action toward your goals and watch your business flourish.

Episode Transcription

012 - Supercharge Your Website: Skyrocket Traffic with Powerful SEO

Suzie (00:00):
Welcome e-Commerce empresses to this episode of Woman Powering e-Commerce. Join me every Tuesday and Thursday as I take you behind the scenes of my journey as a female e-commerce entrepreneur. Together we'll explore the highs, the lows, inspiring you to take action and achieve your own business goals. So let's get started.

(00:33):
So today I want to talk about SEO. It's not usually a subject I'm like super passionate about, but it's definitely a must in e-commerce or anything you want to do online. But I definitely want to share the results of our SEO efforts. Those are that we were able to quadruple our traffic in just one month. That is incredible. And I'm going to share with you all that we did. Not in very small details, but enough to give you a good overview so that if you ever want to repeat that, we'll have fun and you can do it on your side. So if you've watched my June takeaways episode, you've learned that in the last two years, our website, our e-commerce sales have dropped tremendously and that was due, well, it's not a hundred percent due to that, but it explains this drop in sales, is our traffic drop. So initially, less traffic means less sell. And like I had said, no matter what we did to bring it back up, because we didn't really know exactly where to pinpoint this drop, it just happened almost very quickly and instantly.

(01:51):
Well, we had tried everything and we tried to put more money into paid ads. We did more SEO outreach. We knew that it had probably to do with something about Google. I mean, you don't drop in traffic that much overnight. And one thing that didn't help is that we rebranded as well and changed websites. So that did not help us along the way. But without those, that was one of the solutions because our mobile traffic and conversion rate optimization was not doing so well. So we thought maybe it's or website that was old. Anyways, we tried it all. We didn't know where to really focus. So we tried more SEO outreach. We tried to do more of back-linking, and like I said, we changed our website thinking that was the thing. We even tried influencers. We tried PR, honestly, and more, so we didn't know what to do.

(02:50):
So finally we learned that Google made an update in 2021 that for some reason we missed. And that was what affected us dramatically. It sucked, but thank goodness, now we know what was the problem and we can actually work on it. And we don't do things halfway and we decide to attack a problem head on. So I'll let you know how we fix that and we're still working on it. But I mean, look at the results we got in only one month, so I could not, not share. Step one, we look to hire an SEO specialist. So that was a really great idea and we are so happy we did. Thank you Tim. Tim is our SEO specialist and we had honestly a fair share of agencies lately. So we prefer to hire in-house and to have full control over the work and at least make sure we have one person dedicated to our account or us, our company.

(03:55):
And the person we hired as well has a background in Dev and he used to be a software developer, so that definitely helps as well. So he had a pretty good background that reassured us and when we did the interview and talked, spoke with him a few times, he was definitely passionate about like the SEO. So it's always nice to see someone's passion transpire. You become all of a sudden passionate about the subject. So hired that person, first great move, step two, we had our website audited. That kind of happened during the interview process because we asked them, we usually always have a test done by whoever we're a potential hire to sue for a good fit. So one of the tests was to audit our website. So that's what Tim did, and he created a strategy that he would use if he worked with us.

(04:53):
So we hired him and now he's actually implementing that strategy. And that's it. And just to let you know, when we started our e-commerce, SEO year was actually something we're really good at. It was our strength. It really is what helped us skyrocket really dramatically, our revenue quickly. So it was one of our strengths and the method that we had found that would worked really well, we were still doing up until now. It had worked for so many years and it was definitely our secret sauce, secret recipe. But where we missed out is to ask ourselves, is this still something that works for us? Is it still as good as it was? Is our strategy what needs to be done as of today in 2023? So after the audit, we realized that what we were doing was not the right thing to do anymore. It used to work, it was great, but now we have to move on to find something else.

(05:58):
Plus we needed to repair the damage that that Google update had done on us a while back and that we had just learned about. And that's not counting that we had a new website. And to be honest, a new website means a lot of new work that you have to start some things over. And some of that work hadn't been done. We did the basics of course, but still a lot needed to be done. So for sure that affected our SEO. So we had to work on that. But usually, as an entrepreneur, you don't have that just one thing to do. So you kind of try to do what's most urgent, most important now, and then you kind of put off what's not urgent important until a little later. So that's what had happened. So that's why we hired someone because we needed to take care of this urgently.

(06:54):
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(07:16):
So number three, step three that we did is implement the strategy. So I'm just going to go over quickly what we did, just three points, we'll keep it simple. So what is the strategy that we took on? First of all, we fixed some major issues, any technical issues including crawl errors, indexing issues, so fixing Google Search Console errors, including pages that were not indexed properly or at all. So we did that, just doing that, we saw results almost instantly right away within the first week, or maybe I would say maybe first two weeks already, we were checking our results in Ahrefs and Google Analytics, and we saw the spike in traffic go up.

(08:11):
So that, I mean, it's simple, but also important. So we did that. Okay, number two that we did is update our blog article. So we had already started on doing that. So what happens is that it's important to update your blog articles because Google, if they're not updated to a recent date, they will not be as SEO relevant, therefore they can penalize you. So what we had already started doing, but we just improved the process and the strategy doing it was, we have a full-time blog writer that works for us. So we had to ask him, take all the highest ranked blog articles that drive the most traffic that are old articles and update those. So we just made sure to update them properly, made sure they were very SEO optimized, changed the date. So now we're currently still doing that. And again, that's definitely something that we saw really big improvement and it doesn't take long for you to see it.

(09:12):
So that really helped. And another thing that we did is removing a lot of toxic links. For example, when we did our back-linking strategy, so we had someone who would do back-linking all week long, that's all she did. She would outreach to all kinds of companies, and we tried to keep it industry relevant, but sometimes I guess we got links to other websites that were zero relevant, making them really toxic to our website in the end. So not serving us at all, it was doing the reverse effects so we understood what those links were. We removed those. So that was one thing. And another thing about links is that we optimized our internal links so that, optimizing your internal links is a hidden gem. It's super important to do. And when you do that, it just really increases your traffic. It does. So honestly, there's simple things. So people sometimes think you need to do a lot of crazy things. And honestly, that's what I thought, and I was just proven wrong in the last couple of weeks.

(10:28):
But we still need those simple things to be done correctly. They set the foundation to having instant good results. So those are just a few things. And the results is that in just as little as four little weeks, we were able to get our traffic to do times four. I'm just mind blown still. I can't believe it. It's amazing. So now that we've done that, we're going to do more of the strategy because that's just step part one of our strategy. Now we're going to start auditing our website and seeing what we can do. And we're going to work on CRO, conversion rate optimization, because now that we have brought more traffic, it's great. It definitely helped increase our sales automatically, but we know that we can increase the quality of that traffic and just make sure that the conversion rate is as optimal as can be.

(11:30):
So what I learned from this I find, is that as an e-commerce owner, first of all, you have to learn to delegate some of the tasks to the experts. We had tried to manage this whole SEO thing ourselves. We hired people and delegated, but we're the ones that showed them how to do it, which at some point, you can do that in the beginning, but eventually you have to learn to hire someone that knows more than you. Eventually you have to be the one that is the less knowledgeable on the team. That's how you grow. So that's what I'm learning right now. So our SEO specialist is the one that found the issue and it definitely paid off, and now we're implementing it. It's great. I'm happy I hired that expert that we needed so much. Another thing I learned is that hiring in-house is a good idea.

(12:24):
It's a really good idea. Do it. I'm going to do it whenever possible for sure. For certain things, I mean, it's more advantageous to just hire someone outside of your organization. But in this case, it was such a big issue for us that hiring in-house really served us. So that's great. I didn't want to delegate it to an agency because it's hard sometimes to know exactly what they're doing. So I prefer to have it on our side. And another thing is I have to stay on top of trends. Yes, you can hire the experts, but I think it's important to know at least the general lines of what's getting done right now. And that way it just helps you understand the role of that expert you're hiring. You know who you need to hire if you can't do it. So yes, stay on top of trends or at least know who to hire, and they'll do it for me and they'll do it better than me.

(13:22):
That's what I learned. So that gave you an idea of what we did to increase our website traffic quickly and dramatically. If you want to learn more in depth, maybe the tactics that were used, let me know and maybe we can dive in deeper in another episode. But for now, I just wanted to give you at least a few key areas that maybe can help you out and light up some bulbs. So thank you so much for your support. It is crucial to helping us reach and inspire more women entrepreneurs in the e-commerce business. Thank you for being part of this journey with me. I hope you gained valuable insights and inspiration today to keep growing and taking action towards your goals. Please follow me on social media. Also follow us on your favorite podcast platform to get notifications every time a new episode is uploaded. See you next time.