+405.3% Traffic Growth for Masquerade Store

1. Improve Site Quality

While Masquerade Store had never been optimised for SEO, it was also a very small site with ~500 pages, most of which being product pages. That came with an advantage of having very few technical issues.

Still, there were pages being unnecessarily crawled, which were a simple Robots.txt rule addition, structured data setup (by default) but not fully optimised, canonicalised product linking issues, and duplicate H1s. But all fast, simple fixes.

Where more time was needed was the overall usability and conversion optimisation of pages.

Hub pagetypes were added for Halloween, and others, so shoppers can browse all product types in a structured orderly way:

Above the fold was heavily optimised to reduce scrolling as much as possible:

Benefit cards were added into the grid to boost conversions:

Curated reviews were added to support additional keywords/term usage, but also to show real product photos and support conversions:

And product pages were upgraded with internal linking via breadcrumbs and collection links, as well as A/B tested conversion improvements:

The end result of all this was a 46% lift in conversion rate from 1.58% to 2.31%, while simultaneously growing traffic by 4x. But most of that traffic growth came from the next two phases, let’s dive into those.

2. Expand Bottom of Funnel

The most important part of e-commerce SEO is translating products into keywords. Expanding “masquerade masks” into categories (and therefore keywords) for womens/mens masquerade masks, eyeglass masquerade masks, white/silver/gold/other masquerade masks, metal/lace/leather/other, venetian, etc.

Our initial analysis identified 17 new collection opportunities, based on existing products, that represented a potential traffic value opportunity of $63,144.60 per year.

But based on our deep collaboration with and openness from the client, we were able to generate so much more revenue than this. For example, when Halloween arrived, we quickly saw the positive impact of seasonality for this market.

With our support, the client expanded into premium witch hats, to grow their Halloween offering. We helped to research this, create the collection, optimise the collection and ultimately to rank the client top 3 for witch hats, with an averaged search volume of 52,500 per month.

This strategy applied across multiple categories and pages is how we were able to surpass even the biggest competitors within this niche, excluding only the large-scale generic party brands.

3. Optimise Bottom of Funnel

With the right category pages in place, and the right keywords selected, how do you actually start ranking well?

Ahrefs data shows the first clue:

When we began together, Masquerade Store had a domain rating of literally 0. After 24 months, we’d built it to DR30, with the latter 12 months seeing growth from DR11 to DR30 as we accelerated link building efforts.

It would have been impossible to achieve the current levels of organic traffic and revenue with a DR0 website. So immediately from the get-go, we realised we had to build quality backlinks and boost the DR.

This was initially focused to establish the brand, with links acquired to the homepage using only the brand name in the anchor text. Anchor text meaning the displayed text of the hyperlink. Then later integrating more targeted keywords in the anchor text, which is a strong ranking factor, but must be done cautiously.

This helped tremendously, but it was a true combination effort with content optimisation that delivered these results.

Every single collection was optimised for the basics: Title Tag, Meta Description, H1.

That means adding the primary targeted keyword, second keywords where fitting, and focusing on clickthrough-rate. In a few cases, such as women’s halloween masks, it meant the opposite. Removing keywords to resolve the conflict with the main halloween masks collection, which was causing inconsistent rankings.

It also meant adding content, sometimes in FAQs like the homepage, where we want limited scrolling and distractions from navigation:

Other times with short 150-200 word descriptions of a collection, conveniently displayed below product grids to avoid damaging conversions (yes, we split-tested this).

Of course, the reality is more complex. You can’t add any content and expect to outperform your competitors.

Heading 2s (H2s) must include your secondary keywords, these are a leading ranking factor. On the womens masquerade masks collection, you can see a few of many keywords we’re targeting:

• Elegant masquerade masks
• Ornate masquerade masks
• Masquerade masks for women
• Masquerade masks for ladies

Content should similarly be optimised for keywords, for example, “beautiful face masks for masquerade balls, prom dances, bachelorette parties, graduation” unlocks potential searches for:

• womens masquerade ball masks
• womens masquerade mask for prom
• womens mask for bachelorette parties
• and so on

But more than that, content is ranked based on its relevance and coverage. Is your competitors content more in-depth? Less fluffy? More relevant to the search? Higher authority/expertise?

These are vague terms, but in nerd-land we have specific measurement tools for these such as TF-IDF coverage, entity usage, keyword/term density, etc.

To support this, we have tools to directly measure the hundreds of potential factors influencing each keyword, then correlate these with position. Does higher keyword density correlate with better rankings? Does using more entities? Does using certain LSI or TF-IDF terms?

All of this combines to create a page-level content strategy. But in short, yes, we add 150-200 words of content to each page.

The results of this effort were staggering, we were able to rank #1 for Masquerade Masks (44k monthly searches), #3 for Witch Hats (52.5k monthly searches), #2 for Mardi Gras Mask (8.7k monthly searches), and many more.