+146% Sessions Growth for Bumbles & Boo

1. Improve Site Quality

Bumbles & Boo were keen followers of our methodology and content for 7 months prior to hiring us, so they had a strong baseline to begin working together.

Most of our technical suggestions had been implemented straight out of our playbook. Robots.txt, for example, was already in place. Unique content was already added to the bottom of most collection pages.

A few minor technical issues were identified such as indexable blog tags and product tags, which were a simple addition to their robots.txt file. As well as lacking structured data (Schema) on the homepage and blog posts. Minor fixes.

For this client, our focus was more towards design and internal linking. Design influences conversion rate and navigation, internal linking impacts the contextual relevance between pages (a ranking factor), as well as supporting the discovery and crawling of important pages.

For example, the before and after of product changes is rather extreme:

Before:

After:

These types of changes heavily contributed to the 26% lift in conversion rate we were able to achieve.

A smaller change was switching from showing full FAQs on the page to accordion toggles. More user-friendly, less scrolling, slight increase of conversion rate (i.e. # clicks to product pages, # add to carts).

And from a pure SEO perspective, we added internal linking structures primarily to and from collection pages.

Breadcrumbs were set up universally with up to two levels of collection links:

Products began automatically linking to relevant collections for user discovery and search engines:

Every change was A/B tested before publishing to all users, each one showing at minimum neutral conversions, but in most cases increases in clicks to product pages or collections, add to carts, or other relevant metrics.

2. Expand Bottom of Funnel

Beyond all the nerdy analysis and optimisation, SEO is about taking your SKUs and translating them into buying keywords.

Sometimes that is obvious, baby gifts has 8,200 monthly searches. But baby shower gifts has much more at 13,000 monthly searches, and while we initially expected it to be more information driven, it turns out to be one of their best keywords.

So this phase is about understanding the product selection, seeing what collections currently exist, then finding gaps.

Some of these were as simple as splitting existing collections, others brand new opportunities.

For example:

They had a collection for “Baby Teething & Bath Time”, which presumably they categorise as a single audience and age range.

Yet, there’s 5,700 monthly searches for “baby dressing gown”, which more than warrants the effort of a new targeted collection.

We found 21 potential gaps, with 11 being highly relevant and approved by the client. Adding up to 31,500 monthly search volume. A lot of searches to be accidentally missing out on.

3. Optimise Bottom of Funnel

With the right pages in place, targeting the right keywords, now it’s time to optimise for those keywords. The simple version of this is adding content. The complex version is using content to target a number of content-specific ranking factors, as well as targeted backlinks.

Let’s begin with the simple:

Bumbles & Boo had content across most of their important collections, as per our process in the Shopify SEO Playbook i.e. FAQs and short descriptions.

We identified their top 30 collections, that could be improved. Meaning top 3 with potential for #1, first page with potential for top 3, page 2 with potential for page 1, and specifics in-between. This became our focus for the next 6 months, as these pages were already responsible for most of their traffic.

We then added more FAQs, curated reviews, and more optimised descriptions to them.

FAQs are a great opportunity to target secondary keywords in the headings (i.e. questions). Along with additional terms within the answers.

Curated reviews are a user-friendly and conversion-friendly method of adding more keywords and terms onto the page.

And optimised descriptions are essentially the same, but must be kept concise and sales driven to avoid fluffing up the page.

That’s the simple version. Here’s the complex approach we actually used:

We used a number of tools to correlate which ranking factors matter for these specific keywords, how competitors are using these factors, how our client is using them (i.e. the gap), and then created a plan to achieve this with content while avoiding keyword stuffing.

For example, we’d analyse LSI (latent semantic indexing) coverage - conceptually related keywords that competitors use but our client doesn’t. This forms a plan of which terms to add and how frequently. Then we’d manually implement this, with AI as a writing aid, to smoothly insert these terms into either existing or new content while avoiding keyword stuffing.

The same applies to various other factors like entities, partial keywords, secondary keywords, keyword density, content length, number of headings, and potentially hundreds of others. Usually there are specific factors that move the needle for specific keywords, which is part of the analysis to determine what they are.

Combine this with backlinks using anchor text (i.e. text of the hyperlink) containing specific keywords, targeted at specific pages that would benefit the most (again, based on a gap analysis between keyword-specific competitors) - this gives you optimisation and promotion of your key pages.

Which is how we were able to grow traffic by an additional 146% in 6-months, despite the client already growing 275% in the 7-months prior, by following the exact same strategies we teach.