+140.8% Revenue Growth for Magnus Home Products

1. Improve Site Quality

Magnus is retailer with a large selection of 3,000+ products and many more SKUs. This naturally leads to technical SEO issues with identifying, crawling, and indexing so many pages.

We started by identifying over 500 unique page types or parameters that were indexable or crawlable that needed resolved. This is achieved by blocking with robots.txt, noindexing, removing internal linking patterns, and a variety of other techniques we’ve come up with specific to Shopify as a platform.

Beyond this, they needed functionality for more content on collection pages. This is useful for a multitude of ranking factors such as keyword density, usage of keywords, usage of LSI terms, usage of entities, etc. Our approach was to add FAQ accordions:

This was similarly added for product pages.

Internal linking was severely lacking, another cornerstone of great e-commerce SEO, as it creates contextual relevance between pages and supports discovery/crawling.

Breadcrumbs was our first addition, up to 3-level hierarchical structure, that automatically updates based on the navigation menu. Example below:

Next, there needed to be links between relevant collections. So if you’re looking at bathtubs, you can navigate down to clawfoot tubs or freestanding tubs. A simple link widget achieved this with limited space taken (to avoid damaging conversion rates).

Another key part of the overall site quality and performance of SEO, comes down to whether the traffic actually converts. Magnus had a reasonable organic conversion rate of about 0.83%, we were able to push that up to 1.30% with numerous tests and changes, mostly on the product page.

Before:

After:

Overall, this gave us a good foundation for the site quality and conversion, which saw immediate but small growth in traffic and revenue. The major performance growth came from phase two and three, but they require this foundation to work.

2. Expand Bottom of Funnel

One of the key parts of e-commerce SEO is converting products into keywords. So you take a list of bathtub SKUs, and then you research and determine what would someone search when looking to purchase this?

It could be types of bathtubs (clawfoot, freestanding), materials (copper, acrylic, cast iron, concrete), functions (walk-in, massage therapy), sizes (extra-wide, 73 inch, 54 inch), etc.

For some stores, this is completely overlooked, but Magnus had a fairly good grasp on it so our approach here was less extreme. We found 19 new collections to create with a theoretical traffic potential of 141,480 per year, for the top ranking website.

Sometimes these were simple overlooked collections such as stone bathtubs, which they had 10 products covering and a missed potential 19,200 traffic per year.

Other times it was very specific collections that aren’t immediately obvious. Both white and black bathtubs have a combined potential of 18,000/year. Modern freestanding tubs, oval freestanding tubs, and rectangular freestanding tubs have a combined 24,000 potential, showing how specific you can get.

These additions added significant traffic potential, but not as much as many of our clients that had barely scratched the service.

3. Optimise Bottom of Funnel

Once you have a high quality site (from an SEO perspective), and you have the pages in place to target as many relevant keywords/topics as possible, next you need to optimise and promote these pages so they actually rank well.

This stage is theoretically simple, actually incredibly complex.

The simple version is that we analysed the top 100 pages, then optimised the key SEO elements (title, H1, and subheadings) and then added more content in the form of descriptions and FAQs.

So the clawfoot tubs page went from no description to 7 FAQs at the bottom:

The title was changed to: Clawfoot Tubs for Sale | Vintage Cast Iron & Copper Bathtubs

This allows us potential to rank for:

• Clawfoot tubs
• Clawfoot tubs for sale
• Vintage clawfoot tubs
• Cast iron clawfoot tubs
• Copper clawfoot tubs
• Clawfoot bathtubs
• And every variation of the above

H2s, another key optimisation point, were similarly optimised:

And this was manually applied across 100 of their top pages. That’s the simple version that is fairly applicable to anyone, and serves as a good starting point for SEO.

It’s also deeply misunderstanding the complexity of doing this correctly.

See, by adding content you’re trying to check off multiple ranking factors that Google likely use for each individual keyword. These factors usually differ slightly per keyword, and even more so for completely separate topics.

Such as:

• Keyword density (what % of the content is the actual keyword)
• Partial keyword density, secondary keyword density, etc
• LSI terms (i.e. relevant terms, their usage, coverage of terms compared to competitors, density of terms, etc)
• Entities (i.e. names of objects, things, people, companies, etc. as well as density, coverage, and so on)

And a multitude of other factors that we’re able to estimate the importance of by analysing data and correlations, then simply testing what performs well for this specific store.

We take all of this into account when creating the content, so it actually ranks well and isn’t just AI garbage. Then results are monitored, and modifications are made based on that, and repeated as much as needed across many months as SEO as not immediate to take effect.

The end result is this phase led to dramatic keyword performance growth. From 715 to 2,545 top 3 keywords (+256%) and 903 to 5,862 keywords in positions 4-10 (+549.2%).