Back to Case Studies

How a Running Apparel Retailer Grew Traffic by 509% in 6 Months

https://www.marathonsports.com/

Stats

72.1K to 438.8K Monthly Visits

Industry

eCommerce

Niche

Apparel

Reporting Date

January 2024

With nearly 59,700 sporting goods stores across the United States, the competition for local customers is fierce. Add in the massive revenue generated by online sporting goods eCommerce giants, and the challenge can seem daunting.

However, some local companies prove that carving out your own space in the digital realm is entirely achievable.

Meet Marathon Sports, a New England retailer of running apparel and accessories.

They recently grew organic traffic by 509% in 6 months, and we’re revealing how they did it so you can get inspired to grow your business.

Let’s get started.

About Marathon Sports

Marathon Sports was founded in 1975 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

It began as a one-store operation for runners, walkers, and fitness enthusiasts to get their sports gear.

Almost 50 years later, Marathon Sports has 22 locations in New England. They also have a thriving eCommerce.

Athletes can shop for running shoes, apparel, and accessories both online and in-store.

Marathon Sports is also a staple in its local running community. They organize weekly group runs and seasonal events like the Valentine’s Day run. They also share upcoming races in the New England area.

Most recently, Marathon Sports has brought back its annual Winter Warrior Challenge. Participants are encouraged to get outside and run or walk every day in January and February, earning badges and prizes along the way.

Historical Performance

According to the Wayback Machine, the Marathon Sports domain has been active since 1999.

However, we’ll focus on the last 11 years of its organic performance to understand how January 2024’s explosive growth compares.

Here’s a chart of Marathon Sports’ organic traffic during this time:

And to help comprehend the enormity of its recent growth, here’s a breakdown of monthly averages and annual totals:

So, what happened in 2023 to allow Marathon Sports to finally cross the 1-million annual traffic mark?

And even more impressively, skyrocket January 2024’s traffic to an incredible 438.8K organic visits?

Let’s find out.

The Catalyst: How Marathon Sports Reached 438.8K Monthly Visits

Marathonsports.com grew its organic traffic by performing the following:

1. Doubled down on content production
2. Transitioned from subdomains to subdirectories
3. Implemented product schema markup to win rich snippets

Let’s explore each strategy to see how it contributed to Marathon Sports’ newfound success.

1. Doubled Down on Content Production

Between July 2023 and January 2024, Marathon Sports doubled the amount of content on its site. They went from around 2.9K pages to 6K.

They added the following:

• New products
• New collections
• More blogs

And the effect was dramatic.

Keyword rankings started pouring in.

Here are just a few of the new keywords Marathon Sports started ranking for. Note the high search volumes (Volume column) and new traffic (Traffic.Diff column) it brought to the site.

Overall, this new content contributed significantly to Marathon Sports’ keyword rankings. They shot up from 47.2 keyword rankings in July to 105.4K in January.

Furthermore, they were ranking higher than ever before.

Looking at the chart below, we see how Q4 of 2023 and January 2024 underwent exponential growth in ranking positions.

Why this matters:

It’s no secret that more content equals more keyword ranking opportunities.

And the higher up on the search engine results page (SERP) you are, the more traffic you’ll get.

After all, according to SEO ranking statistics, the top 3 organic results get 68.7% of all clicks.

That’s why it’s critical to optimize your website for maximum visibility and ranking potential.

By implementing an SEO content strategy, you can pinpoint which keywords you want to rank for, tailor your content to fulfill search intent, and, ultimately, capture a larger share of organic traffic.

How to create an SEO content strategy:

This in-depth tutorial shows you how to create an SEO content strategy that wins higher rankings.

Here’s a brief overview of the process:

1. Invest in the right SEO tools.
2. Get to know your target audience.
3. Pick keywords aligned with your business. (For eCommerce, this would be buyer intent keywords.)
4. Identify your principal content types (e.g., blogs, videos, eBooks.)
5. Use topic clusters to organize your content strategy.
6. Plan your on-page SEO.
7. Implement processes for tracking keywords and performance analytics.

Tools for an effective SEO content strategy:

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market. It comes with a suite of tools to help you implement a winning SEO strategy without needing to know the ins and outs of SEO.

One of its most powerful tools is the TruSEO On-Page Analysis.

TruSEO streamlines content optimizations by providing real-time feedback as you create or edit your content. It analyzes key on-page SEO elements such as keyword usage, permalink structure, and readability.

You’ll get helpful checklists to ensure your content ranks well and resonates with your audience.

Here’s an example of the Focus Keyphrase Checklist:

Next, let’s look at some technical changes Marathon Sports made to reorganize its site structure.

2. Transitioned From Subdomains to Subdirectories

In recent years, Marathon Sports relied on subdomains.

Subdomains are a branch of your primary domain. It’s closely tied to your primary domain but is treated as a separate entity by search engines.

Here’s an example of what a subdomain looks like in a URL:

subdomain1.primarydomain.com

For Marathon Sports, they had two subdomains in addition to its primary domain (marathonsports.com):

• shop.marathonsports.com
• Stores.marathonsports.com

The shop subdomain served as the site’s eCommerce platform. Customers could shop for and purchase their running products online.

The stores subdomain organized Marathon Sports’ retail locations. Each page included helpful store details, like hours, address, and phone number.

Come Q4 of 2023, Marathon Sports started to transition away from subdomains. Instead, they opted for new subdirectories.

Subdirectories are like folders that live within your primary domain. They’re also aptly referred to as subfolders.

Here’s what one looks like a URL:

www.primarydomain.com/subfolder1

Now, here’s the thing about subdomains vs subdirectories: there isn’t a clear-cut winner of which is best for websites. It depends on your needs.

And they can both work for SEO.

Here’s Google’s Search Advocate, John Mueller’s take on the topic:

In general, subdirectories are a good option for small businesses.

That’s because subdirectories consolidate all your SEO efforts into one domain. This includes backlinks and page and domain authority.

Subdomains, on the other hand, are great when you’re running a larger business with several campaigns and unique content. They make it easy to organize and silo out business needs and traffic accordingly.

For further reading, this article does a good job of explaining the pros and cons of subdomains vs subdirectories. It can help you decide which is the best for your business.

Why this matters:

For Marathon Sports, it’s worth considering this site restructure as a contributing factor in its recent growth.

For your WordPress site, choosing the proper site structure is paramount. And even better if you can get it right the first time.

Luckily, the WordPress Multisite feature makes it easy to set up and manage all your sites from one dashboard. (We’ll give you resources on WordPress Multisite next.)

Also, if you’re like Marathon Sports and want to change your site structure, it’s important to take the right precautions to preserve your SEO performance and rankings.

How to set and change your site structure in WordPress Multisite:

This guide shows you how to create a multisite network and pick subdomains or subdirectories.

This setting cannot be changed later on.

With that said, there are ways to transfer your subdomains to your primary domain should you decide to follow the same path as Marathon Sports.

You can use this step-by-step tutorial to learn how to move WordPress subdomains to a primary domain.

Finally, regardless of which site structure you decide to use, you’ll want to implement multisite SEO. It’s not as difficult as you may think, and certain plugins can streamline the process.

Let’s look at which one we recommend next.

Tools for multisite networks:

AIOSEO was designed with multisite networks in mind.

Here are some of the top ways you can save time while optimizing your multisite network with AIOSEO:

• Activate your AIOSEO license across your entire network with 1 click.
• Import and export SEO settings from one site to another.
• Edit and manage Robots.txt files to control how search engines crawl your sites.

We’d also like to highlight the Redirection Manager tool.

Redirection Manager allows you to easily set up individual and full site redirects. That way, if you ever need to change URL structures, you’ll safeguard any hard-earned rankings.

Next, we’re going to look at what optimizations Marathon Sports made to get more attractive search results on the SERP.

3. Implemented Product Schema Markup to Win Rich Snippets

Marathon Sports uses product schema markup on the backend of its website.

Product schema is a type of schema markup that helps search engines understand your content. It lives in your website’s code and communicates important details about your page to search engines.

In turn, search engines can use this information to generate a rich snippet on the SERP.

Rich snippets display more information than standard search results. This helps them stand out to users and get more clicks.

Here’s an example of one:

See how much space that takes up in search results?

It has a lot of eye-catching details, like the photo, star ratings, and additional product information.

At the end of 2023 and the start of 2024, Marathon Sports won a lot of these rich results.

Rich snippets with images were their most popular. They ranked for 51K keywords with image rich results in January.

Review snippets were their second most popular, with 15.3K ranking keywords.

Why this matters:

Rich snippets get the lion’s share of clicks, boasting a 58% clickthrough rate (CTR.)

Non-rich results have a CTR of 41%.

That’s why it’s critical to optimize your site for these attention-grabbing search results.

Now, let’s look at how to get them.

How to implement schema markup for rich snippets:

This guide demonstrates three methods for adding schema markup to WordPress without a plugin.

Each uses JSON-LD and requires some coding knowledge.

If you run an eCommerce, you should also check out Google’s guidelines for implementing product structured data.

Tools for rich snippet schema:

Hate the idea of touching code?

You’re not alone.

A lot of website owners don’t feel comfortable implementing their own schema markup. The good news is that you don’t have to.

Schema generator plugins are the easiest way to add schema markup to your WordPress site.

And you don’t need any coding knowledge to use them.

AIOSEO’s Schema Generator automatically formats structured data for you. All you have to do is pick the schema type you want.

The Schema Catalog comes with several different schema markups, including product. Just click the + button, fill out a few informational fields, and that’s it!

Standout SEO Wins

Before we wrap up, there’s an additional SEO technique worth highlighting at Marathon Sports.

1. They optimize blogs for Google’s People Also Ask box.

Google’s People Also Ask (PAA) box appears prominently on the SERP and aims to answer related questions to the original search.

It has an accordion-like appearance that can be expanded to reveal the answer, as shown below.

Marathon Sports optimizes its blogs to win PAA results by doing the following:

• Crafting high-quality content that fulfills search intent.
• Implementing schema markup. (Although, we would like to see FAQ schema, which they do not appear to use.
• Optimizing subheadings to include keywords and questions.

And while it hasn’t been a huge traffic generator yet (PAA results account for 4.4% of January’s total traffic), we wouldn’t be surprised to see it take off in future months.

Ultimately, Google’s PAA box is covetable SERP real estate, and every site should aim to be included in it. These results can boost brand awareness, enhance credibility, and increase CTR.

Tool: FAQs are an integral part of winning PAA results. You can effortlessly add FAQ blocks to your content with the help of AIOSEO. These blocks make it easy to write your question and answer, then implement FAQ schema automatically for you.

Takeaways

In our analysis of marathonsports.com, we’ve discovered how new content and some strategic technical optimizations catapulted organic traffic to new heights.

Now, let’s recap which strategies you can use on your website and others to reconsider.

Top 3 Strategies to Emulate

1. Create more content. Expanding your website’s content offers a multitude of benefits for SEO. By regularly publishing relevant, high-quality content, you keep users engaged and build authority. It also helps you rank for a broader range of keywords and presents more internal linking opportunities.
2. Choose the right site structure. Selecting an organized and intuitive site structure is beneficial for users and search engines. A clear and logical hierarchy makes it easier for visitors to navigate your site. It also helps search engines crawl and index your pages efficiently. Consider factors such as categorization and internal linking when selecting your site structure to ensure it aligns with a positive user experience and SEO best practices.
3. Use schema markup to win rich snippets. While implementing schema markup doesn’t guarantee a rich result, it increases the likelihood. Schema markup makes it easier for search engines to understand your content. And the easier it can understand your pages, the better chances it has of ranking. Schema markup can then help you get an eye-catching search result that earns more clicks than non-rich results.

Bottom 3 Strategies to Reconsider

1. Blogs show authors, but no author bios. While showcasing authors can add credibility to your blog posts, omitting bios can leave visitors wondering about the expertise and background of the writers. Author bios establish trust with readers and can help build authority for search engines. They’re a great way to practice transparency and send positive Google E-E-A-T signals. Plus, with tools like AIOSEO’s Author SEO, they’re super easy to set up and implement.
2. Several pages are missing meta descriptions. Meta descriptions play a crucial role in attracting clicks from the SERP. They act like previews of your content, compelling users to visit your site. Pages without meta descriptions appear incomplete and less informative than those with them. Because of this, you’ll want to ensure a unique meta description for every indexable page. You can even use a meta description generator to write them for you.
3. Some pages are flagged for being difficult to read. Content readability measures how easily users can read and understand your content. Users will lose interest when it’s too difficult, and your page can experience high bounce rates. To improve your readability score, opt for simple language and short sentences. You can also break up blocks of text with headings, bullet points, and multimedia. The TruSEO tool checks readability for you and gives you actionable insights to fix it.

Steal Our Winning SEO Strategy: A Checklist for Your Website

Are you ready to grow your eCommerce business and win more sales?

SEO is the key to getting your site in front of more online customers, and with this exclusive checklist, you’ll have the steps to make your optimizations a homerun.

Download A Free SEO Checklist

Access our comprehensive SEO Checklist with a single click. We’ll deliver it straight to you, putting actionable items with SEO tools and tutorials right at your fingertips.

Enter your name and email to download a free SEO checklist.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.

Name *

Email *

Get My Free SEO Checklist

Boost Your Visibility and Organic Traffic With AIOSEO

What if you could skip past the SEO learning curve and jump straight to higher rankings and more traffic?

AIOSEO can help you do just that.

With thousands of 5-star reviews and trusted by over 3 million website owners, AIOSEO offers an all-inclusive toolkit to enhance your website’s visibility effortlessly. And the best part? It’s incredibly user-friendly. We believe SEO shouldn’t be limited to experts. Explore some of our favorite features below, all designed to help you grow your business.

• TruSEO Score: Get a snapshot view, or go into detail, of your content’s on-page SEO with this innovative tool. TruSEO analyzes your content optimizations and gives you actionable insights to maximize its reach.
• Robots.txt Editor: Control how bots crawl your site with the Robots.txt Editor, which allows you to override default WordPress settings. This tool also makes it simple to manage rules across a multisite network.
• Redirection Manager: Prevent humans and bots from getting lost when you move content or domains. Our Redirection Manager helps you easily choose and implement the best redirect type that preserves SEO.
• Rich Snippet Schema: Choose from various schema markups to claim more rich results on the SERP. It’s as simple as choosing the schema you want; then, we’ll format the structured data for Google.
• FAQ Blocks: Add FAQs to your content to increase the likelihood of appearing in Google’s People Also Ask box. These results help boost brand awareness and increase clickthrough rates.
• Author SEO: Create powerful author bios that showcase your experience and expertise. This addon aligns your content with Google E-E-A-T guidelines and helps readers trust what you’re sharing.

Back to Case Studies

How a Women’s Fashion Brand Grew Site Traffic by 737% YoY

https://www.sachinandbabi.com/

Stats

26.3K to 220K Monthly Visits

Industry

eCommerce

Niche

Apparel

Reporting Date

January 2024

In the competitive world of online fashion, even established brands can struggle to grow their visibility.

Sachin & Babi, a high-end apparel and accessories retailer, faced this very obstacle. Traffic appeared stagnant, barely reaching 20K monthly visits.

But at the end of 2023, they found their breakthrough, bringing January 2024 to an incredible 220K monthly visits.

So, how’d they do it? And what can other eCommerce owners learn from their SEO strategies?

Let’s find out.

About Sachin & Babi

Sachin & Babi was founded in 2009 by husband and wife Sachin Ahluwalia and Babi Ahluwalia.

Their namesake ready-to-wear brand features women’s apparel and accessories.

Gowns and dresses are their most sought-after designs, making them a popular choice for special occasions.

According to its website, “Sachin & Babi believe in celebrating every day and dressing with joy. Collections are designed for the special moments in life…both big and small.”

Today, Sachin & Babi is stocked in some of the most prestigious retailers, like Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Bergdorf Goodman.

They also have a flagship store on Madison Avenue in New York City.

Historical Performance

According to the Wayback Machine, Sachin & Babi acquired its domain in 2010.

However, Semrush historical data only goes back to January 2012, so this is where we’ll start our traffic analysis.

Like many new businesses, traffic was gradual to start. Between 2012 and 2014, Sachin & Babi averaged 547 monthly organic visits.

They hit the 2K milestone in 2014 and then doubled it in 2016.

Traffic was consistent for the next 4 years, with 2017–2021 averaging 8.5K monthly visits.

Then, 2022 started to show growth, and 2023 blew its performance out of the water.

So, what happened to spark this unforeseen growth at Sachin & Babi? And which strategies unlocked a higher level of organic traffic?

Let’s dive into these answers next.

The Catalyst: How Sachin & Babi Achieved 737% YoY Growth

Sachinandbabi.com grew its organic traffic by performing the following:

1. Targeting low-competition keywords with new collections
2. Implementing product schema to win rich snippets
3. Obtaining backlinks from relevant, credible sources

We’ll explore each strategy in detail and share how to leverage them on your website.

1. Targeting Low-Competition Keywords With New Collections

Between January 2023 and January 2024, Sachin & Babi increased its page count by almost 400 URLs.

This change brought the site to just over 1,000 pages, a 57.7% increase year-over-year (YoY).

Around 130 of these new URLs were product listing pages (PLPs) dedicated to Collections.

Here’s a sampling of these pages and their respective January 2024 metrics:

And while their traffic is doing great, what’s more helpful to you is what they did on these pages to actually get it.

Let’s use the Empire Waist Gowns Collection as an example to see how Sachin & Babi uses strategic keyword targeting to help this page rank.

Here’s the URL slug: /collections/empire-waist-gowns

And what the page looks like on the site:

Right off the bat, we know this page is targeting the keyword “empire waist gowns.”

They’ve included this keyword in the following places:

• URL
• H1
• Body copy

It’s also in the page’s metadata, as shown below, which we revealed using the All in One SEO Analyzer Chrome Extension.

Semrush gives us further insights into this keyword, revealing low keyword difficulty.

Keyword difficulty (KD) measures how hard it is to rank on the first page of Google search results for a keyword.

The lower the KD, the easier it is to rank.

For Sachin & Babi, “empire waist gowns” has a low KD% of 17. And they ranked for it quickly.

This page appeared to debut in February 2023 and had 107 rankings by March.

As of January 2024, the Empire Waist Gowns Collection ranks for 229 keywords, many of which are in the top 3 positions of search results.

In addition to ranking for its primary keyword, this page also ranks for the following low-competition keywords:

Overall, Sachin & Babi does an excellent job targeting low-competition keywords in its content. This strategy highlights an understanding of the value of targeting this type of keyword.

Why this matters:

Low-competition keywords are valuable to websites of all sizes, but particularly for small businesses looking to grow their visibility.

Since there is less competition for these long-tail keywords (a term used to refer to keywords with 3 or more words in them), websites can win rankings more easily and quickly than competitive terms.

And if you refer back to the volume column in the last image, there’s search volume for these keywords. That means there’s significant traffic to be had from ranking for these keywords.

How to find and optimize for low-competition keywords:

This tutorial shows you how to find low-competition keywords, but here’s a brief overview of the process:

1. Create an account on a keyword research platform like Semrush. (There’s a free 7-day trial, and you can cancel anytime.)
2. Check keyword difficulty and look for keywords with “very easy,” “easy,” or “possible” scores. (In Semrush, these keywords have light green, dark green, and yellow dots next to them.)
3. Use the Keyword Magic Tool to get related keywords and sort by ascending difficulty.
4. Save your keyword findings.

Once you have a list of keywords, you’ll want to work them into your overall SEO content strategy. This beginner’s guide on focus keywords will also show you how to optimize your content so it ranks in search results.

Tools for low-competition keywords:

You don’t have to be an SEO pro or digital marketer to cash in on these easy ranking wins.

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the leading WordPress SEO plugin that can help you find and optimize your site for low-competition keywords that convert.

You can connect to your Semrush account using the Keyphrase Suggestions tool to get keyword ideas directly in the WordPress editor.

The example below shows keywords generated for a “yellow dress” page:

You could then run these keywords through Semrush to get their keyword difficulty.

As for adding them to your content, just click Add Keyphrase and make your optimizations. The TruSEO tool will let you know if you need to make adjustments. TruSEO analyzes your content and gives you actionable checklists for improving its reach.

The example below shows the Focus Keyphrase Checklist and reminds us to include our keyword in the introduction.

Next, let’s look at how Sachin & Babi uses schema markup to make its product stand out in search results.

2. Implementing Product Schema to Win Rich Snippets

Schema markup is a type of structured data that lives in your website’s code. It communicates important details about your page to search engines, making it easier for them to understand your content.

Search engines can then use this information to create a rich snippet on the search engine results page (SERP).

Rich snippets, or rich results, are search listings that display additional information.

Here’s an example from Sachin & Babi:

Sachin & Babi have used different schema markups in the past, but it appears that they started using AggregateRating schema in mid to late 2023.

AggregateRating schema is a subset of product schema, which is a must-have for eCommerce businesses. Here’s how the two schema types relate:

• Product schema allows you to share product details, like its name, description, price, availability, and more.
• AggregateRating schema is one element of product schema (and others) that allows you to share customers’ ratings and reviews.

The two combined can create product review snippets, like the one below.

By implementing both schema types, Sachin & Babi skyrocketed its review snippets.

They went from 15 in September 2023 to 21.7K keyword rankings in January 2024.

This implementation could have also contributed to the site’s recent influx of image rich results, too.

Sachin & Babi went from 1.5K rankings in January 2023 to 10.6K rankings with image rich results in January 2024.

(Product schema allows you to assign ImageObject schema, which can increase the chance of winning this type of search result.)

Why this matters:

According to SEO statistics, rich results have a 58% clickthrough rate (CTR). This is significantly higher than non-rich results, which have a 41% CTR.

By optimizing for rich snippets, businesses can gain a competitive edge in the crowded online landscape.

And while schema markup doesn’t guarantee a rich result, it increases the likelihood, making it an integral component of strong SEO.

How to implement product schema on your eCommerce:

This tutorial shows you how to add product schema in WordPress. You can also follow this guide on product review schema to get star ratings, like Sachin & Babi.

For a more general tutorial, this article demonstrates how to add schema markup without a plugin. It shows three different methods, and each requires basic coding knowledge.

Tools for product schema:

Want an easy way to implement product schema without touching code?

AIOSEO’s Schema Generator has you covered.

In this innovative tool, all you have to do is pick your desired schema type (in this case, product) from our catalog.

Just click the + button, fill out a few product details, and add your review information. That’s it. The Schema Generator will implement the structured data for you.

Now, we’ll look at the final contributing factor to Sachin & Babi’s growth: backlinks.

3. Obtaining Backlinks from Relevant, Credible Sources

In January 2024, Sachin & Babi grew its backlinks to an impressive 47.9K.

And what’s even more impressive about these backlinks than their quantity is their quality.

These backlinks have high page authority scores (AS) and come from credible sources. They’re also relevant to Sachin & Babi.

For example, Who What Wear and Harper’s Bazaar are two well-respected fashion authorities. Having them as sources signals to search engines that Sachin & Babi’s content is also valuable within the fashion industry, which can boost their niche authority.

Why this matters:

Backlinks are like votes of confidence for your website. And, in general, the more you have, the higher you rank.

After all, backlinks are among the top two ranking factors, making them a powerful contributor to your site’s overall success.

However, quality does matter.

High-quality backlinks from credible, relevant sources are “healthier” for your site than thousands of spam links.

How to do link building on your site:

This tutorial shows you how to get backlinks, but we encourage you to develop a holistic linking strategy that goes beyond just backlinks.

You should also optimize for the following:

• Internal links (from one page on your site to another page on your site)
• Outbound links (from your site to another external site)

This link-building guide shows you how to optimize for all three types of links.

Tools for link building:

Link Assistant is a time-saving tool for internal linking. It populates internal linking suggestions in the WordPress editor, which you can add with the click of a button.

Standout SEO Wins

Before we conclude, there’s an additional SEO technique worth highlighting at sachinandbabi.com.

1. They display an HTML sitemap on their website.

An HTML sitemap is a clickable list of all the pages on your website. It organizes content for users to aid in site navigation.

You’ll often find HTML sitemaps in the footer of a web page, displaying the site’s main pages and subpages.

Here’s what ours looks like at AIOSEO:

Some websites, like Sachin & Babi, prefer to create a designated page for their HTML sitemap.

Sachin & Babi use this page to organize its content for users (and show off one of their designs).

This sort of navigation experience can help users uncover new corners of your site and boost content discovery. It also supports your internal linking strategy because you hyperlink each page.

Tool: AIOSEO makes it easy to create and display an HTML sitemap on your WordPress site. Here’s a beginner-friendly tutorial on how to do HTML sitemaps on WordPress.

Takeaways

In our analysis of Sachin & Babi, we uncovered the key strategies that grew their online visibility and organic traffic.

Now, let’s see which strategies to replicate on your website and others to reconsider.

Top 3 Strategies to Emulate

1. Target low-competition keywords for easy rankings. Sachin & Babi targeted and won over niche markets by focusing on long-tail keywords with low competition. This strategy is transformative for emerging or smaller brands looking to grow their visibility. These keywords are easier to rank for, allowing you to capture more SERP real estate and foster brand awareness.
2. Use schema makeup to win rich snippets. Implementing schema markup on its product pages helped Sachin & Babi earn rich snippets in search results. Product review snippets, which include star ratings, price, and availability, make listings more eye-catching, leading to higher clickthrough rates. Schema markup also helps search engines understand your content, potentially boosting rankings.
3. Focus on quality over quantity for backlinks. Sachin & Babi recently acquired backlinks from reputable, authoritative sites within the fashion industry. Relevant, high-quality backlinks can help establish your niche authority while influencing rankings. Backlinks are among the top two ranking factors, making them a crucial component of an effective SEO strategy.

Bottom 3 Strategies to Reconsider

1. Excluding author bios on your blog posts. Neglecting to include author bios on blog posts can deprive your content of personalization and authority. Author bios show readers that the writer has expertise and credibility on the topic, helping to establish trust. They also send positive Google E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) signals to search engines, which is proving to be a driving force behind rankings in 2024. We recommend using an Author SEO plugin to create and add author bios for your WordPress posts.
2. Exceeding metadata character limits. Overloading metadata with characters can lead to truncation on the SERP. These less-than-ideal listings can cut off valuable information, negatively affecting CTR. To ensure your metadata is within character limits, run your copy through a SERP preview tool before publishing. You could also use AI to generate meta titles and descriptions for you.
3. Neglecting to include image title tags. Failing to include descriptive image titles can hinder the user experience. Image titles appear when users hover over or click an image, providing additional context. They’re a unique opportunity to provide additional value and help search engines more easily understand an image’s content. You can use smart tags in the AIOSEO Image SEO tool to add image title tags automatically.

Steal Our SEO Winning Strategy: A Checklist for Your Website

Are you ready to compete with the big players and claim your space on the SERP?

Get your exclusive SEO Checklist with all the steps to put your site at the top of search results.

Download A Free SEO Checklist

Access our comprehensive SEO Checklist with a single click. We’ll deliver it straight to you, putting actionable items with SEO tools and tutorials right at your fingertips.

Enter your name and email to download a free SEO checklist.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.

Name *

Email *

Get My Free SEO Checklist

Boost Your Online Visibility and Organic Traffic With AIOSEO

Prefer a streamlined route to SEO success?

AIOSEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin and has all the tools you need to dominate the SERP—fast.

Trusted by over 3 million website owners and with thousands of 5-star reviews, you’ll be in good company as you improve your online presence. We simplify SEO so you can focus on what matters most: growing your business.

Here are some of our favorite features:

• Semrush Keyphrase Suggestions: Perform keyword research and find long-tail keywords without leaving WordPress. AIOSEO connects with your Semrush account to serve keyword ideas in the WordPress editor.
• TruSEO On-Page Analysis: Get an in-depth but easy-to-understand analysis of your optimization efforts. Each page includes an actionable checklist to help you maximize your content’s reach.
• Rich Snippets Schema: AIOSEO offers various schema markup options to help you claim more rich results on the SERP. It’s as simple as choosing the schema you want; then, we’ll format the structured data for Google.
• Link Assistant: Get link suggestions, edit anchor text, and add internal links to your content in just 1 click. Link Assistant helps you effortlessly build a better linking strategy.
• Smart Sitemaps: Easily generate HTML, XML, and RSS sitemaps with the help of AIOSEO. These dynamic sitemaps ensure all your content is crawled and indexed efficiently for faster rankings.
• Author SEO: Create powerful author bios that showcase your experience and expertise. This addon aligns your content with Google E-E-A-T guidelines and helps readers trust what you’re sharing.

Back to Case Studies

How a Textile Manufacturer Grew Traffic by 1,086% in 6 Months

https://www.hiendaccents.com/

Stats

7K to 83K Monthly Visits

Industry

eCommerce

Niche

Textiles

Reporting Date

January 2024

In 2024, the global textile market is projected to reach 213.8K enterprises with a market value of USD 171.1 billion.

Yet, for small businesses, standing out amidst this vast landscape requires more than just local efforts or word of mouth. Instead, you’ve got to get strategic with your online presence.

And that’s exactly what the subject of this case study did.

Meet HiEnd Accents, a family-owned business making its way into American homes with luxury bedding designs.

In just 6 months, they achieved an astounding 1,086% growth. We’ll dive into the SEO strategies that propelled them to success and share tips and tools for implementing them on your eCommerce.

Let’s get started.

About HiEnd Accents

HiEnd Accents is a textile manufacturer of luxury bedding and home linens. It was founded in 2005 in Dallas, Texas.

Initially, it focused on high-end rustic designs, but as the business grew, so did its portfolio.

Today, HiEnd Accents is based out of Irving and caters to all styles, including traditional, contemporary, and more.

HiEnd Accents offers an affiliate and wholesale program. Some of their partners include Wayfair, Macy’s, and Dillards.

Historical Performance

According to Semrush historical data, hiendaccents.com started generating traffic in 2015.

Monthly traffic didn’t break a thousand visits until the following year. And besides two anomalies in April and May 2017, monthly traffic stayed in the 1K range until the end of 2019.

Then, in 2020, HiEnd Accents experienced its first real traffic growth. It averaged 4.8K monthly visits during this time.

For the next few years, monthly visits teetered in the 4–6K range.

Then, the latter half of 2023 changed everything.

Organic traffic took off starting in August. And since then, there hasn’t been any slowing down.

January 2024 marks the highest traffic to date at 82.9K visits.

So, what exactly happened to trigger this explosive growth? And are there ways to replicate it?

Let’s find out.

The Catalyst: How HiEnd Accents Went From 7K to 83K Monthly Visits

Hiendaccents.com grew its organic traffic by performing the following:

1. Targeting non-branded, buyer intent keywords
2. Implementing image SEO best practices
3. Using product schema markup
4. Obtaining more backlinks

Let’s look at each strategy in detail to understand how it contributed to HiEnd Accent’s recent growth.

1. Targeting Non-Branded, Buyer Intent Keywords

HiEnd Accents added over 300 new URLs to its site between July and January, bringing the site total to 1.6K URLs.

About 61% of these pages were dedicated to new products, and 35% went to new collections.

And while the latter takes a smaller percentage of the content, it became the bigger contributor to HiEnd Accents’ traffic and keyword rankings.

To illustrate these developments, let’s compare the top-performing pages and keywords in July and January.

Let’s start with the pre-growth month of July.

These were the top traffic-driving pages of the month:

And these were the top-ranking keywords:

Let’s dissect what this tells us about July:

1. All top-ranking keywords were branded. This means they contained some variation of the business name in it. Branded keywords are good for when you’re well-established and have high brand awareness. However, they’re not the best at introducing your brand to new customers because they need to know your brand name to find you.
2. The top keywords have navigational intent. Search intent tells you the goal or purpose behind a user’s search. There are four types of search intent: informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional. July’s navigational intent simply reinforces that HiEnd Accents’ customers already knew where they wanted to go—HiEnd Accents’ website.
3. The homepage generated 63.6% of all site traffic. Considering how all the top keywords were branded and with navigational intent, it’s no surprise that the homepage received the most traffic. Unfortunately, this doesn’t allow higher-converting pages, like product pages, to take the spotlight in search results.

Now, let’s look at January.

These were the top traffic-driving pages for the month:

And here are January’s top-ranking keywords:

Let’s explore the new state of the site in January:

1. The top-ranking keywords are now non-branded. HiEnd Accents is now ranking for more general search queries that aren’t exclusive to their brand. These keywords have higher search volumes, allowing HiEnd accents to cast a wider net and reach a broader audience.
2. Keywords have buyer intent. Buyer intent keywords signal that users want to purchase a product or service. HiEnd Accents strategically targeted these keywords in their new content and is now ranking for them.
3. Collection pages take the lead, generating the lion’s share of traffic. We no longer have the homepage at the top. Instead, the comforters collection takes 41% of site traffic. The bedding collection follows at 23%.

Why this matters:

HiEnd Accents’ transformation highlights the impact of SEO when building out your content.

By shifting from branded to non-branded keywords, businesses can enhance their reach and attract new customers.

Moreover, the emphasis on buyer intent keywords supports the buyer’s journey and drives conversions.

For HiEnd Accents, this approach proved successful. They more than doubled their keyword rankings from July to January, as shown below.

How to find non-branded, buyer intent keywords for your site:

This tutorial shows you how to find buyer intent keywords. You’ll need a Semrush account to follow the steps, but the strategy also applies to other keyword research tools.

If you need help getting started, this guide shows you how to do keyword research.

As for identifying non-branded terms, it’s easy. You’re good to go if the keyword doesn’t have a brand attached!

Tools for keyword research:

Did you know that you can do keyword research in WordPress?

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) makes this possible with its Keyphrase Suggestions tool. This unique feature connects with your Semrush account to provide keyword ideas directly in the editor.

Here’s an example of some suggestions for a NYC subway page:

To find the search intent of these keywords, you could perform a quick keyword search in Semrush. If it aligns with your content’s goals, optimize for it.

Now, let’s look at how HiEnd Accents uses images to stand out on the search engine results page (SERP.)

2. Implementing Image SEO Best Practices

Between July and January, HiEnd Accents more than tripled its rankings for rich snippets with images.

The chart below demonstrates this growth, with January image rich snippets ranking for 8K keywords.

Images are a powerful way to capture users’ attention and drive more traffic to your site.

Here’s what one of these rich snippets looks like on the SERP:

Now, here’s the thing about images: Search engines can’t view or understand images without some textual context. That’s why it’s critical to communicate the image’s content with image SEO.

Image SEO is the optimization of certain elements of your image. This process helps search engines understand the photo and plays an important role in user accessibility, too.

HiEnd Accents uses image SEO best practices to increase the chances of winning rich snippets.

Here’s how they do it:

• Use an SEO-friendly image file name.
• Optimize alt text with the primary keyword.
• Implement image schema markup.

Why this matters:

According to SEO statistics, rich snippets get 58% of all clicks.

Non-rich results have a lower clickthrough rate (CTR) of 41%.

That’s why optimizing your site for rich snippets, including images, is critical.

Furthermore, image SEO can help you rank in Google Images, where there are approximately 1 billion searches every day.

How to do image SEO on your site:

Follow HiEnd Accents’ lead and optimize your images with strategic keyword placement.

For example, you’ll want to include your focus keyword in the following areas:

• Alt text
• Title tag
• Image file name

You’ll also want to pay attention to elements like:

• Image dimensions
• Image schema
• File size
• Captions

For a full list of items, this image SEO tutorial shows you how to optimize for each.

Tools for image SEO:

Image SEO can be labor-intensive without the right tools.

At AIOSEO, the Image SEO feature eliminates much of the manual work of image optimizations. You can customize and automate certain image SEO elements in just one click.

For example, automatically generate image titles using smart tags, as shown below.

As for schema markup, our Schema Generator implements image schema for you. It’s as easy as uploading your image in the schema settings, and we’ll take care of the rest.

Next, let’s take a look at why schema markup is important.

3. Using Product Schema Markup

HiEnd Accents uses product schema markup throughout its site.

Product schema is one type of schema markup common for eCommerce businesses, but several different types exist. (Here’s a look at available schema types in AIOSEO.)

Schema markup lives within a web page’s code. It communicates important details about the page to search engines.

Search engines can then use this information to better understand your content and generate a rich snippet on the SERP.

Product schema, in particular, allows you to add elements like images, reviews and ratings, price, and more—which brings us to review snippets.

Review snippets are extremely valuable for eCommerce businesses. They display an average rating, typically in the form of stars.

Here’s what one looks like:

In January 2024, HiEnd Accents received an influx of review snippets—3,119 to be exact.

That’s a 136.3% increase over July.

Why this matters:

Over 99.9% of users read reviews when shopping online. Because of this, they’re integral to a strong online presence.

Ultimately, review snippets help you:

• Show off social proof
• Build trust
• Foster loyalty
• Increase CTRs
• Drive sales

How to implement product review schema on your site:

This guide shows you how to add schema markup to WordPress without a plugin. It gives you three different methods, and each requires some coding knowledge.

If you already have a schema plugin, like AIOSEO, this article shows how to add product review schema in WordPress.

Tools for product schema markup:

AIOSEO’s Schema Generator makes schema markup a breeze. No coding required.

Simply pick the schema markup you want, and we’ll format the structured data for search engines.

The Schema Catalog comes with several different schema markups, including product. Just click the + button, fill out a few information fields (you can add review details during this step, too), and that’s it!

Next, we’ll conclude HiEnd Accents’ growth strategies by discussing backlinks.

4. Obtaining More Backlinks

At the end of 2023 and the start of 2024, HiEnd Accents experienced a substantial increase in backlinks.

Backlinks are links from other websites to yours.

Most of HiEnd Accents backlinks come from images (85%), which is unsurprising considering how well their images have been ranking in search results.

Unfortunately, Semrush flagged their profile for having too high of a follow share (99%.)

Your average website should have a mix of both follow and nofollow links. Follow links tell search engines to crawl the link and pass on SEO equity. Nofollow links do not.

When your site has too many follow links, it can look suspicious to search engines.

That’s why it’s good to maintain a natural balance of the two, with follow links being higher.

Why this matters:

Backlinks are like votes of confidence for your site.

They tell search engines you have something valuable to offer and vouch for your content.

They’re also among the top 3 ranking factors, according to 2024 ranking statistics.

How to do link building on your site:

Backlinks are just one piece of a well-rounded linking strategy.

This article shows you how to get backlinks, but you’ll also want to optimize for the following:

• Internal links (from one page on your site to another page on your site)
• Outbound links (from your site to another external site)

This link-building guide has all the steps you need to optimize for each.

Tools for link building:

Link Assistant helps you find internal linking opportunities quickly. With linking suggestions that populate in the WordPress editor, it’s as simple as clicking Add Link.

Standout SEO Wins

Before we wrap up, there’s an additional SEO technique worth highlighting at hiendaccents.com.

1. They control crawling with robots.txt.

Robots.txt is a text file that tells search engines which pages they can crawl and which they cannot. HiEnd Accents uses this file to prevent crawling of certain pages with sensitive data (for example, customer logins and account pages.) You, too, can prevent bots from accessing these areas of your site by using a disallow directive in your robots.txt file.

Tool: While it sounds technical, generating and editing a robots.txt file is easy with AIOSEO. The Robots.txt Editor allows you to add rules, like a disallow directive, in just a few clicks.

Takeaways

In our analysis of HiEnd Accents, we’ve uncovered the strategies behind their recent organic success.

Now, let’s recap which strategies you can replicate on your eCommerce and others to reconsider.

Top 3 Strategies to Emulate

1. Broaden your reach with non-branded keywords. Grow your audience by targeting search terms that aren’t tied to your brand. Non-branded keywords allow you to capture users who are unfamiliar with your brand but are searching for products similar to yours. This strategy can increase your visibility in search results and attract potential new customers.
2. Boost sales by targeting buyer intent keywords. Focus on keywords that show a readiness to purchase. Buyer intent keywords signal that users are actively seeking a product and are likelier to convert. By targeting these keywords in your content and ad campaigns, you can grow your return on investment (ROI) and generate more sales.
3. Implement schema markup to win rich snippets. Schema markup helps search engines understand your page and can lead to rich results on the SERP. Rich snippets attract more clicks than standard search listings, driving more organic traffic to your site.

Bottom 3 Strategies to Reconsider

1. Not using image title tags. Even though HiEnd Accents does a good job implementing image SEO, they overlook image title tags. These attributes appear when users click or hover over an image. They also provide search engines with additional context, making it easier for them to understand the image. You can automate image titles using the Image SEO feature in AIOSEO.
2. Missing meta descriptions. Meta descriptions give users a preview of your content on the SERP. Failing to include them can result in search engines generating them for you (sometimes they do this when you have them, too), but it may not be ideal. To increase search engines’ likelihood of using yours, set a unique meta description for every indexable page. You can even use a meta description generator to write them for you.
3. Exceeding meta title character limits. Meta titles should be between 50-60 characters. When they exceed this limit, your meta title is truncated, leading to incomplete or unclear titles on the SERP. This can diminish their effectiveness. We recommend putting your metadata in a SERP preview tool to check you like how it looks and, ultimately, boost your CTR.

Steal Our SEO Winning Strategy: A Checklist for Your Website

Do you want to join the winning ranks of eCommerce sites like HiEnd Accents?

This exclusive SEO Checklist has all the optimizations you need to make it to the top of the SERP.

Download A Free SEO Checklist

Access our comprehensive SEO Checklist with a single click. We’ll deliver it straight to you, putting actionable items with SEO tools and tutorials right at your fingertips.

Enter your name and email to download a free SEO checklist.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.

Name *

Email *

Get My Free SEO Checklist

Grow Your Visibility and Organic Traffic With AIOSEO

What if you could take a streamlined route to replicating HiEnd Accents’ winning formula?

AIOSEO can help you do just that.

AIOSEO is the most powerful SEO plugin on the market. With thousands of 5-star reviews and trusted by over 3 million website owners, you’ll be in good company as you grow your rankings. You’ll get a traffic-winning suite of tools to help you take on the competition and win more real estate on the SERP.

Here are some of our favorites:

• Semrush Keyphrase Suggestions: Perform keyword research directly in the WordPress editor. AIOSEO connects with your Semrush account to generate and serve keyword ideas for your content.
• Image SEO: Turn on automatic image alt text and title attributes with a single click. You’ll save time from manual entries while helping users and search engines understand your images.
• Rich Snippets Schema: AIOSEO offers various schema markup options to help you claim more rich results on the SERP. It’s as simple as choosing the schema you want; then, we’ll format the structured data for Google.
• Link Assistant: Apply internal linking best practices with easy linking suggestions and reports. These tools will help boost content discovery and prevent orphan pages.
• Robots.txt Editor: Control how bots crawl your site with the Robots.txt Editor, which allows you to override default WordPress settings. This tool makes it simple to view your robots.txt file and manage crawling rules.
• WooCommerce SEO: Streamline your eCommerce SEO to win higher rankings for your product pages and product collections. This time-saving tool helps you customize and automate meta titles and descriptions so your product stands out on the SERP.

Back to Case Studies

How an Australian Graphic T-Shirt eCommerce Grew Traffic 6,383% YoY

https://threadheads.com/

Stats

4.2K to 273.6K Monthly Visits

Industry

eCommerce

Niche

Apparel

Reporting Date

January 2024

Like many eCommerce ventures, winning users’ attention in a product-saturated market is no easy feat.

But for Threadheads, a graphic t-shirt company, the challenge was met head-on.

With a laser focus on SEO, Threadheads skyrocketed its online popularity in 2024.

And we’re telling you exactly how they did it.

Join us as we dissect the SEO strategies that grew their traffic by 6,383% YoY and share tips for replicating their success on your eCommerce.

About Threadheads

Threadheads is a graphics apparel and accessories manufacturer based in Melbourne, Australia. It was founded in 2018.

Threadheads is known for its pop-culture references and unique designs. They feature vintage graphics, exclusive artist illustrations, and custom printing.

It’s also renowned for collaborating with brands like NASA, Ghostbusters, Harry Potter, and more. These collaborations produce officially licensed merchandise exclusive to Threadheads.

Today, Threadheads has over 10,000 five-star reviews. They’re a leader in graphics apparel and offer both a wholesale and affiliate program.

Historical Performance

According to Semrush historical data, Threadheads’ domain started getting traffic in 2021. They ended their first year with a total of 11.1K organic visits.

In 2022, this number grew to 57.4K.

But it’s 2023 that really started to make a difference.

In the last few months of the year, Threadheads experienced significant growth in organic visits. They reached an average of 32.3K visits per month, totaling 387.3K visits for the year.

Then, January 2024 blew this already impressive organic performance out of the water.

In 2024’s debut month, Threadheads reached an incredible 273.6K organic visits.

That’s equal to 70.6% of 2023’s total traffic for the year. And in a single month!

So, what changed to set this new trajectory for Threadheads? And how can you use their strategies to get the same growth for your site?

Let’s find out.

The Catalyst: How Threadheads Achieved 6,383% Growth YoY

Threadheads.com grew its organic traffic by performing the following:

1. Targeting unique audiences with each collection release
2. Implementing product schema to win rich snippets
3. Growing their backlink profile to a record-high

Let’s explore each strategy to see how it contributed to Threadheads’ newfound success.

1. Targeting Unique Audiences With Each Collection Release

Between January 2023 and January 2024, Threadheads more than quadrupled the number of pages on its website.

They went from approximately 1.3K URLs to 5.8K.

These pages consisted of new product (a natural occurrence for eCommerce sites) and, more importantly to their traffic, new collections.

Now, while many apparel websites, including Threadheads, build out collections based on product type (like t-shirts, sweaters, etc.), they didn’t stop there. Threadheads also complemented its site navigation with more shoppable collaborations.

What’s unique about these collaborations is that each product listing page (PLP) caters to that audience’s fanbase.

Threadheads uses on-brand references to speak to the target audience. For example, the Harry Potter landing page calls for “all wizards, witches, and muggles,” while the Batman collection features an illustration of Gotham City.

This approach ensures a personalized shopping experience that resonates with the intended audience. It also helps drive increased engagement and more organic traffic, as Threadheads was able to cast a wider net for keywords.

Why this matters:

By organizing niche interests into collections, Threadheads was able to target a wide range of keywords. And—even better—these keywords have low competition.

That’s because they’re pretty specific.

Let’s look at the Seinfeld collection as an example.

When we look at its top keyword rankings, every keyword has a keyword difficulty (KD) of 21 or less.

This is extremely important because the lower the keyword difficulty is, the easier it is to rank for.

And, if we look at the Volume column to the left of KD, these keywords get a significant amount of searches.

“Seinfeld t shirts” has 880 monthly searches while “seinfeld shirt” is 1K.

That’s huge!

Couple these low-competition keywords with a tailored landing page, and it’s no wonder Threadheads is crushing it in its domain.

And its keyword rankings prove it.

In January 2024, Threadheads ranks for 23.7K keywords. That’s a 6,370% increase over the year prior.

How to find low-competition keywords for your site:

This tutorial gives you an in-depth look at how to find low-competition keywords, but here’s an overview of the process:

1. Create an account on a keyword research platform like Semrush.
2. Check keyword difficulty and look for keywords with “very easy,” “easy,” or “possible” scores.
3. Use the Keyword Magic Tool to get related keywords and sort by ascending difficulty.
4. Save your list of low-competition keywords.

Once you have your list, you’ll notice many are long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are searches of 3 or more words. For example, “vintage graphic tee.”

These keywords are gold for your website because they’re low competition and have high conversion rates. This means they’re super easy to rank for and can get you results fast.

Now, you’ll just want to work these keywords into your SEO content strategy so users can find you and buy.

Tools for finding and optimizing your site for low-competition keywords:

You don’t have to be an SEO expert or digital marketer to cash in on these easy keyword wins.

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is a WordPress SEO plugin that can help you find and optimize your site for low-competition keywords that convert.

The Keyphrase Suggestions tool connects with your Semrush account to show relevant keywords in WordPress. You can generate keyword ideas for any page or post.

The example below shows keywords generated for a page about “game of thrones shirts.”

You could then run these keywords through Semrush to pinpoint their keyword difficulty.

As for adding them to your content, just click Add Keyphrase, make your keyword optimizations, and the TruSEO tool will let you know if you need to make adjustments. This tool analyzes your content for your target keywords and tells you when you’ve hit the mark or have room to improve.

The example below shows how we used our primary keyword (focus keyphrase) in most places but are missing it in the meta description. It’s an easy fix.

Next, let’s look at how Threadheads uses schema markup to make its product shine in search results.

2. Implementing Product Schema Markup to Win Rich Snippets

Schema markup is a form of structured data that lives in your website’s HTML. It’s a specialized code that communicates important details about your page to search engines.

Search engines can then use this information to generate a rich snippet on the search engine results page (SERP.)

Rich snippets, also called rich results, are search listings that display additional information on the SERP.

Here’s an example:

In Threadheads’ case, they use product schema markup throughout their site.

Product schema can produce visually interesting results like the rich snippet above. It can display the following elements:

• Images
• Prices
• Discounts
• Ratings/Reviews
• Shipping information
• Refund information
• Stock availability

Why this matters:

SEO statistics reveal that rich results have an impressive 58% clickthrough rate (CTR). This is significantly higher than non-rich results, which have a 41% CTR.

Threadheads has seen remarkable growth first-hand thanks to its implementation of product schema.

In January 2024, they ranked for 11.4K keywords with image rich results. To put that number into context, they only had 710 image rich results in January 2023.

They’re also winning more review snippets.

Review snippets are another type of rich result you can win from product schema. They show the average star ratings and number of votes/reviews, as demonstrated below.

In January 2024, ranked for 9.7K keywords with review snippets.

Overall, rich snippets are a powerful driver of traffic and sales, making them a critical part of your optimization strategy.

How to optimize for rich snippets on your site:

As we saw, schema markup is one of the best ways to win rich snippets.

And while you can implement several different types, product schema is essential for eCommerce.

This tutorial shows you how to add product schema in WordPress. You can also follow this guide on product review schema to get star ratings, like Threadheads.

For a more general tutorial, this article demonstrates how to add schema markup without a plugin. It shows three different methods, and each requires basic coding knowledge.

Tools for implementing schema markup:

If you hate the idea of touching code, you’re not alone. Many website owners feel overwhelmed when breaching the topic of schema markup.

The good news: implementing schema is actually quite easy when you have the right tools. And you don’t need to know how to code.

You can use AIOSEO’s Schema Generator to pick and effortlessly set schema markup for your website. This innovative tool has a catalog of schema types, including product.

Just click the + button, fill out a few easy fields about your product, and we’ll implement the structured data for search engines.

Now, we’ll look at the final contributing factor to Threadheads’ growth: backlinks.

3. Growing Their Backlink Profile to a Record High

Backlinks are hyperlinks from external sources to your website. They act like votes of confidence for your content, telling users and search engines that you have something they should see.

In the latter half of 2023, Threadheads upped its backlinking strategy. They acquired a significant boost to their backlink profile, totaling 69K backlinks in January 2024.

This was the record high (although, as we analyze this site in the first few days of February, it looks like they already broke it!).

It’s worth noting that Semrush did flag Threadheads’ backlink profile for having too many follow links. This brings their backlinking strategies into question and could be a potential risk down the line.

Follow links carry more weight and pass “SEO juice” unlike nofollow links. Every site will have a natural combination of the two, but it’s best to aim for more follow links.

For a full explanation, check out this article on follow vs no follow links.

Why this matters:

In general, the more backlinks a page has, the more traffic it gets.

Astonishingly, over 66% of pages don’t have any backlinks. That means that if you’re willing to put in the work, you can reap the benefits.

A strong link-building strategy is integral to making your website stand out.

Let’s look at resources for learning how to do it.

How to do link building on your site:

This comprehensive guide shows you how to get backlinks.

And while backlinks are critical to a well-rounded linking strategy, you should also optimize for the following links:

• Internal links (from one page on your site to another page on your site)
• Outbound links (from your site to another external site)

This link-building guide details how to optimize for all three types of links.

Tools for link building:

Link Assistant can help you find internal linking opportunities in no time. With suggestions that populate in the WordPress editor, it’s as simple as clicking Add Link.

Standout SEO Wins

Before we conclude, there are two additional SEO wins we’d like to highlight at threadheads.com.

1. They leverage social media to connect with their audience.

Threadheads understands the power of social media. They have almost a quarter of a million followers on Instagram and 17.9K on TikTok.

On these platforms, they share sneak peeks at new product drops, behind-the-scenes videos of office shenanigans, and answer entertaining customer questions with a generous load of sarcasm. They “get” their audience and engage them in a way that’s authentic.

This strategy helped build brand awareness, turning Threadheads from a local Australian brand to a global graphics apparel leader.

Tool: You can easily share your latest content using AIOSEO’s social media integration. Add up to 11 social media accounts and share away!

2. They jump on trends—QUICK.

While it makes sense for an apparel company focused on pop culture to get on trends quickly, the rate at which Threadheads does it is impressive.

Specifically, we’re talking about the Barbie phenomenon in the summer of 2023.

The movie premiered at the end of July, and multiple I am Kenough products hit the site in August.

In our reporting month of January 2024, the above I am Kenough hoodie was the site’s most visited product page.

Tool: Google Trends is an excellent tool for learning what users are looking for now. You can search by terms, see what’s trending in your country, and even compare topics. This Semrush write-up explains how to use Google Trends to inform your marketing strategy.

Takeaways

In our analysis of Threadheads, we’ve unwrapped the strategies behind their recent SEO success.

Now, let’s recap which techniques to use to grow your website’s traffic and others to reconsider.

Top 3 Strategies to Emulate

1. Target high-converting audiences with low-competition keywords. Keyword research can help you identify niche audiences and keywords with little competition. By optimizing your content around these keywords, you’ll attract a relevant audience with a high conversion rate. Ultimately, you can think of low-competition keywords like low-hanging fruits, ripe for the taking. They’re easy rankings and fast wins.
2. Implement product schema to win rich snippets on the SERP. If you run an eCommerce, product schema is a must-have technical SEO element. Schema markup can help you win attractive product snippets in search results. These eye-catching listings display additional information, like price, images, and customer ratings. Product snippets have a higher CTR than non-rich results, making them an essential component of your SEO strategy.
3. Focus on link building. Backlinks from authoritative sites improve your credibility in the eyes of search engines. Aim for quality over quantity, and watch as they drive new organic traffic to your site. It’s also important to note that backlinks are just one component of a strong link-building strategy. You’ll want to optimize for internal and outbound links for maximum efficacy.

Bottom 3 Strategies to Reconsider

1. Some meta titles are under 30 characters. Meta titles, or page titles, are the blue hyperlinked text you see in search results. They tell users what to expect from your content, so it’s important to optimize them accordingly. After all, the more compelling they are, the more clicks you’ll get. By not taking full advantage of the 60-character limit, Threadheads is missing a valuable opportunity to entice users to their site. For your eCommerce, you can use an SEO title tag generator to write and optimize them for you.
2. There are duplicate meta descriptions across several pages. Meta descriptions appear below the page title on the SERP. They provide additional context and act like a preview of your content. Since every page of your site should be unique (to avoid duplicate content issues), it makes sense that your meta descriptions are unique too. An AI meta description generator can craft them for your content.
3. Not every page has an H1. When users are on your website, an H1 tag is the title of the page. H1s play an important role in the user experience (UX) and help search engines understand what your page is about. Every indexable page should have one. And it should include your primary keyword. The TruSEO tool will let you know if you’re missing your keyword in your H1, making content optimizations a breeze.

Steal Our SEO Winning Strategy: A Checklist for Your Website

Want to replicate Threadheads’ organic success on your eCommerce site?

You’ll get everything you need to generate more sales with this traffic-winning SEO Checklist.

Download A Free SEO Checklist

Access our comprehensive SEO Checklist with a single click. We’ll deliver it straight to you, putting actionable items with SEO tools and tutorials right at your fingertips.

Enter your name and email to download a free SEO checklist.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.

Name *

Email *

Get My Free SEO Checklist

Grow Your eCommerce Business With AIOSEO

Are you ready to make 2024 your highest sales year?

SEO is an indispensable tool for expanding your eCommerce business. And with All in One SEO, achieving remarkable results is within reach.

Streamline your SEO efforts with AIOSEO’s comprehensive features and intuitive platform. You’ll get a suite of tools that can help grow your eCommerce’s online visibility and propel your traffic to new heights.

Don’t let the complexities of SEO weigh you down. AIOSEO makes SEO easy so you can empower your business to unlock its full potential.

Here are some of our favorite features:

• Semrush Keyphrase Suggestions: Find new keywords directly in the WordPress editor. AIOSEO connects with your Semrush account to generate keyword ideas for your content.
• TruSEO Score: Get a snapshot view, or go into detail, of your content’s on-page SEO with this innovative tool. TruSEO analyzes your content and gives you actionable insights to maximize its reach.
• Rich Snippet Schema Generator: Choose from various schema types to win attractive rich snippets on the SERP. No coding required. It’s as simple as choosing the schema you want; then, we’ll implement the structured data for search engines.
• Link Assistant: Get link suggestions, edit anchor text, and add internal links to your content in just 1 click. Link Assistant helps you effortlessly build a better linking strategy.
• Social Media Integration: Seamlessly connect and share content on your favorite social media platforms. Available integrations include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and more.
• WooCommerce SEO: Streamline your eCommerce SEO to win higher rankings for your product pages and collections. This time-saving tool helps you customize and automate meta titles and descriptions so your product stands out on the SERP.

Back to Case Studies

How a Fine Jewelry eCommerce Grew Traffic by 1,388% YoY

https://www.melaniecasey.com/

Stats

17.1K to 254.4K Monthly Visits

Industry

eCommerce

Niche

Jewelry

Reporting Date

January 2024

Independent artisans face an uphill battle for recognition in the diamond jewelry industry, where giants like Bulgari, Cartier, and Tiffany & Co. dominate.

Yet, amidst this daunting reality, stories of small business success emerge.

Meet Melanie Casey, a handcrafted fine jewelry brand that recently celebrated 1,388% year-over-year (YoY) traffic growth.

In this eCommerce SEO case study, we’ll explore how Melanie Casey’s growth journey was 13 years in the making and what strategies finally cracked the code to higher rankings.

Plus, you’ll get tips and tools for replicating these wins on your site.

About Melanie Casey

Melanie Casey is a fine jewelry brand based in Andover, Massachusetts.

Its namesake founder specializes in engagement rings, offering delicate and unexpected designs. Customers can also shop for wedding bands, bracelets, necklaces, and more.

While many pieces are ready to ship, Melanie Casey invites users to create one-of-a-kind jewelry through the site’s customization offerings.

Customers can choose from natural diamonds, lab-grown diamonds, and an array of gemstones like opals and sapphires.

They can even go as far as selecting the exact diamond that will go in the ring, unlike many sites that just ask for gemstone specifications.

While Melanie Casey has been an online-only luxury goods provider for most of its lifetime, it recently opened a showroom in Andover, MA. Customers can book in-person appointments to meet with the Melanie Casey team.

Historical Performance

Melanie Casey launched her full-time jewelry profession in 2011.

She started using the domain melaniecasey.com in 2014, and, like many small businesses, traffic was slow to start.

According to Semrush historical data, monthly organic traffic stayed well below 1K visits for the first 3 years.

Then, Melanie Casey started to experience steady growth. The chart below demonstrates an increase in traffic over the next 6 years.

2023 set a new trajectory for Melanie Casey’s online reach, totaling over half a million visits by year’s end.

Then, 2024’s debut month knocked the site’s organic performance out of the water.

Melanie Casey received 254.4K visits in January 2024. That’s more than the total annual traffic generated by most other years—in a single month.

So, what finally clicked at the end of 2023 to soar 2024’s rankings and organic traffic?

And can your small business get the same kind of results?

Let’s find out.

The Catalyst: How Melanie Casey Grew From 17K Monthly Visits to Over a Quarter Million Visits

Melaniecasey.com grew its organic traffic by performing the following:

1. Acquiring high-quality backlinks
2. Going viral on social media
3. Winning higher rankings from Google algorithm updates

Let’s look at each strategy to understand what Melanie Casey did to improve organic traffic and how to replicate it.

1. Acquiring High-Quality Backlinks

In the latter half of 2023, Melanie Casey experienced an influx of new backlinks.

Backlinks, or inbound links, are links that one website gets from another. They’re a hot topic in SEO because they’re considered among the top two ranking factors.

But with backlinks, not just any will do.

Quality matters.

A handful of high-quality backlinks can do more for your site’s rankings than thousands of spam links.

And in the case of Melanie Casey, not only did they reach a record-high 26.8K backlinks in January 2024, but there are some high-quality ones sprinkled in there.

Let us explain.

When we say high-quality, we mean a backlink that is:

1. Natural
2. Relevant
3. And from a reputable source

For Melanie Casey, some new backlinks fulfill these criteria. Here are a few examples:

• Martha Stewart Weddings
• The Knot (a wedding planning website)
• Brides.com

These are well-respected sources in the wedding industry, making them relevant to Melanie Casey. These backlinks are also natural because they fit seamlessly within the context of each mention.

Now, when talking about backlinks, we must also mention the difference between dofollow and nofollow links.

Dofollow links, also called follow links, tell search engines to “follow the link” and crawl the linked website. These links pass “SEO juice” and ranking power from the source site to the linked site. Because of this, follow links are preferred.

Nofollow links, on the other hand, do the opposite. They don’t pass link equity or tell search engines to crawl the linked site. Because of this, they’re traditionally considered weaker.

But that doesn’t mean they’re worthless.

Nofollow links can still generate traffic for your site. This is especially true when the backlink is from a reputable, high-traffic site.

Melanie Casey has a good mix of follow and nofollow links. In general, you want to aim for more follow than nofollow links, which Melanie Casey does.

Why this matters:

Backlinks are a cornerstone of effective SEO strategies. They’re critical in enhancing a website’s authority and visibility in search results.

High-quality backlinks from reputable sources signify trust and credibility to search engines.

Contrary to spam links, which can harm a site’s reputation.

For Melanie Casey, the surge in backlinks could have bolstered the brand’s authority in the wedding space. It could also have contributed to the new organic traffic.

How to do link building on your site:

This tutorial shows you how to get more backlinks.

It’s also important to highlight that an effective linking strategy goes beyond backlinks. You’ll also want to optimize for the following:

• Internal links (from one page on your site to another page on your site)
• Outbound links (from your site to another external site)

This link-building guide has all the steps you need to optimize for each.

Tools for link building:

Link building can be tedious, but what if we told you there’s a way to streamline the process in WordPress?

Link Assistant removes the manual work that goes into finding internal linking opportunities.

Instead of scouring your site for internal links, Link Assistant does it for you.

You’ll get linking suggestions in the WordPress editor, which you can add with the click of a button.

Next, let’s see what other factors were at play to boost Melanie Casey’s traffic.

2. Going Viral on Social Media

When we first analyzed Melanie Casey’s website, it was challenging to pinpoint changes that could have contributed to its explosive growth.

For example, it’s not uncommon to see websites increase their content production. Then, get a wave of new rankings and traffic. Or to perform a domain migration, new website design, etc.

But none of that was the case with Melanie Casey.

So, we took our search elsewhere (aka, the rest of the internet).

And that’s when we discovered Melanie Casey’s booming social media accounts.

Melanie Casey has cultivated a loyal audience on some of the most popular social media platforms.

On Instagram, she has almost half a million followers. And on TikTok, she’s at a cool 146K.

But having a high follower count wasn’t the only thing that caught our eye. No, Melanie Casey had several viral videos on both platforms.

And their dates corresponded with the traffic growth.

Below we see the Instagram account’s top viral reels, with views ranging from 4.9M to 8.5M.

And on TikTok, other videos went viral, ranging from 2M to 6.4M.

Why this matters:

When done right, going viral can mean new traffic for your website.

It’s critical to have your desired next step easily accessible to your followers. And in the case of social media, that’s typically visiting your website and, often, making a purchase.

Like most businesses, Melanie Casey has her “links in bio.” This means users can easily access the website from the Instagram and TikTok account pages.

A strong social media presence, and online presence in general, can also build authority in the eyes of search engines.

Authority is one element of Google E-E-A-T guidelines, which are designed to weed out low-quality content and provide search results from trusted, credible websites.

By taking a holistic approach to building your online presence, you can send positive E-E-A-T signals and win higher rankings.

How to leverage social media for your site:

Sharing content is a huge part of building your social media presence.

Follow Melanie Casey’s lead and start by including your website in all social media bios.

Then, when you share a piece of content, include a link directly in the post when possible.

(This is easier to do with LinkedIn and Twitter. You can put links in comments on Instagram and TikTok, but they won’t be clickable. Users will need to copy and paste, so it’s not as user-friendly.)

You should also know that social media plugins can streamline the content-sharing process. Let’s look at our recommended plugin next.

Tools for social media integration:

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) features a social media integration that makes sharing your content a breeze. You can add up to 11 social media accounts, covering all major social platforms.

Here are a few things you can do with AIOSEO’s social media tools:

• Set up default thumbnail images for Facebook.
• Integrate with Facebook insights.
• Generate post titles automatically using smart tags.
• Customize and preview Twitter cards.

Check out the available network integrations below.

Now that we’ve explored how Melanie Casey bolstered its authority and online presence in 2023, let’s examine how search engines detected these changes.

3. Winning Higher Rankings from Google Algorithm Updates

Google algorithm updates in 2023 were particularly volatile, disrupting the search landscape and causing a stir among SEOs.

But for Melanie Casey, these updates were a breakthrough for its online visibility.

We’ll use the chart below to demonstrate how these updates impacted Melanie Casey’s keyword rankings.

When we look at the chart, total keyword rankings have stayed relatively consistent over the past year. On average, Melanie Casey had 21.1K rankings per month.

But starting in August, we begin to see a change in the position distribution of keyword rankings.

Pay attention to the yellow sections in the columns below.

Do you see how they’re growing each month?

This yellow section represents keyword rankings in the top 3 positions of the search engine results page (SERP).

This distribution change means that even though Melanie Casey wasn’t winning new keyword rankings, it was ranking higher for existing ones.

Semrush also hints that Google had something to do with it, thanks to the G marker, which signals activity from algorithm updates.

August through November were busy algorithm update months, as outlined here:

• August 2023 Broad Core Update
• September 2023 Helpful Content Update (HCU)
• October 2023 Broad Core Update
• October 2023 Spam Update
• November 2023 Broad Core Update
• November 2023 Reviews Update

And while it’s impossible to pinpoint exactly which updates sparked the change in Melanie Casey’s position distribution, the higher rankings reflect an overall positive impact.

Why this matters:

According to SEO statistics, the top 3 organic search results get 68.7% of all clicks.

This metric highlights how critical it is to secure top-ranking positions. And the increase in Melanie Casey’s organic traffic proves it.

By consistently appearing at the top of search results, you:

• Maximize your visibility.
• Boost brand awareness.
• Drive more traffic to your site.

How to win higher rankings for your site:

There’s a lot that goes into optimizing your site for higher rankings. There’s too much to fit it all in here, but we won’t leave you hanging.

Here are some helpful resources for improving your SEO and keyword rankings:

• How to Create an SEO Content Strategy That Boosts Rankings
• 50+ SEO Checklist for WordPress – The Complete Guide for 2024
• SEO Best Practices (20+ Proven Tips)
• How to Set SEO Goals That Improve Rankings
• How to Track Keyword Rankings in WordPress

You can also find hundreds of easy-to-follow tutorials and articles on the AIOSEO blog and YouTube channel.

Tools for higher rankings:

The best WordPress SEO plugins streamline optimizations for maximum impact.

With AIOSEO, you get a suite of tools to make the most out of your content and online presence.

And while they all work together to support a robust SEO strategy, we have two favorites that directly impact your keyword rankings.

1. The TruSEO Analysis tool gives you actionable insights on your on-page SEO. This includes checklists for your primary keyword (as shown below), readability checks for improved user engagement, and custom social media titles and descriptions.

2. The Search Statistics module helps you stay on top of your site’s SEO performance. This tool is key for monitoring the effects of your optimizations and the impact of Google algorithm updates. The dashboard shows you a timeline view with algorithm update markers. These markers allow you to pinpoint when an update could have affected your site. You can also generate user-friendly and comprehensive reports for your keyword rankings.

Standout SEO Wins

Before we wrap up, there’s an additional SEO technique we’d like to highlight at melaniecasey.com.

1. They provide a seamless user experience with a custom 404 page.

Page not found errors are inevitable when running an eCommerce site. Items sell out, products change, collections are discontinued, etc.

To create a seamless user experience, Melanie Casey uses a custom 404 page when a user tries to access a URL that is no longer available.

In place of a dead-end “404 page not found” message, users find an on-brand image that invites them to shop other areas of the site. This creates a more positive user experience and can improve bounce rates.

Tool: The Redirection Manager can help you redirect page not found errors to your custom 404 page. This tutorial walks you through the steps for redirecting 404 content.

Takeaways

In our analysis of Melanie Casey, we’ve seen how strategic online tactics and algorithm updates can transform a site’s visibility and traffic.

Now, let’s review which strategies you can use to grow your website’s performance and others to reconsider.

Top 3 Strategies to Emulate

1. Invest in a well-rounded linking strategy. Develop a robust linking strategy that targets internal links and backlinks. Internal links help search engines understand your site structure and guide users to relevant content. Backlinks from reputable sources can improve your site’s traffic and authority. Combined, they can enhance your content’s discoverability and boost overall visibility.
2. Leverage social media to build your online presence. Social media is a powerful venue for connecting with your audience. You can share content, interact with followers, and foster long-term growth. Social media is also a great way to build brand awareness and drive new traffic to your site.
3. Master keyword optimizations and monitor ranking performance. It’s crucial to master keyword optimization techniques to improve your online visibility. Perform keyword research to identify relevant keywords you want to rank for. Then, integrate them into your website with content that fulfills search intent (and includes those keywords). Once content is live, you’ll want to monitor keyword rankings. You can stay agile for opportunities and sustained growth by tracking their performance.

Bottom 3 Strategies to Reconsider

1. Neglecting image title tags when performing image SEO. Image title tags play an important role for users and search engines. They appear when users click or hover over an image, providing additional context. They also help search engines understand the image’s content, which makes it easier for the image to rank. Plus, when a tool like AIOSEO’s image SEO can automatically create them for you, there’s no excuse not to have them.
2. Not writing a meta description for every indexable page. Some of Melanie Casey’s pages do not have meta descriptions. This oversight can have negative effects on clickthrough rates and traffic. Instead, you should have a meta description for every indexable page. This copy compels users to visit your page, increasing your CTR and organic traffic. You can even use a meta description generator to write them for you.
3. Excluding author bios on its blog. Melanie Casey’s blog could benefit from an author bio on each post. Author bios are a great way to establish credibility with your audience. For example, a blog visitor would likely trust an article from Casey more than a blog without an author listed. Search engines also like to see your expertise. By showcasing your experience in your bio, you send strong E-E-A-T signals. AIOSEO can help you build and show strong bios with its new Author SEO feature.

Steal Our SEO Winning Strategy: A Checklist for Your Website

Growing your site’s visibility starts with strong SEO.

Get your exclusive SEO Checklist to learn which tasks can ignite your growth journey,

Download A Free SEO Checklist

Access our comprehensive SEO Checklist with a single click. We’ll deliver it straight to you, putting actionable items with SEO tools and tutorials right at your fingertips.

Enter your name and email to download a free SEO checklist.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.

Name *

Email *

Get My Free SEO Checklist

Boost Your Rankings and Organic Traffic With AIOSEO

You don’t have to create and implement a winning SEO content strategy alone.

Let All in One SEO (AIOSEO) do the heavy lifting for you so you can focus on what matters most: growing your business.

AIOSEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market. With thousands of 5-star reviews and trusted by over 3 million website owners, you’ll get the tools to put your site at the top of the SERP.

Here are some of our favorite features:

• Link Assistant: Get link suggestions, edit anchor text, and add internal links to your content in just 1 click. Link Assistant helps you effortlessly build a better linking strategy.
• Social Media Integration: Seamlessly connect your social media platforms and share content with your audience. Available integrations include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and more.
• TruSEO On-Page Analysis: Get an in-depth but easy-to-understand analysis of your optimizations. We’ll let you know where you’re hitting it in the ballpark and give you actionable items to make your content a home run.
• Search Statistics: Keep an eye on your website’s organic performance with comprehensive and user-friendly reports. This tool makes it easy to monitor your keyword rankings and see when Google algorithm updates potentially affect SEO performance.
• Image SEO: Turn on automatic image alt text and title attributes with just 1 click. You’ll save time from manual entries while helping users and search engines understand your images.
• Author SEO: Create powerful author bios that showcase your experience and expertise. This addon aligns your content with Google E-E-A-T guidelines and helps readers trust what you’re sharing.

Back to Case Studies

How a Refurbished Tech Marketplace Grew Traffic by 2,040% in 6 Months

https://reebelo.com/

Stats

5K to 106.5K Monthly Visits

Industry

eCommerce

Niche

Tech

Reporting Date

December 2023

The global refurbished electronics market was valued at USD 48.29 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $94.10 billion by 2030.

And with business booming comes competition.

Enter Reebelo, an online marketplace for refurbished tech and lifestyle products.

They’ve recently skyrocketed website traffic from 5K to 106.5K monthly visits, and we’re telling you exactly how they did it.

Join us as we decode this SEO success story and share insights for replicating their growth on your site.

About Reebelo

Reebelo is an online marketplace for refurbished technology and lifestyle products. They sell mobile phones, laptops, gaming consoles, cooking appliances, and more.

While most products are refurbished, some are new.

Apple is their most popular brand. They offer iPhones, Airpods, Macbooks, and other Apple products.

Rebeelo follows a business-to-consumer (B2C) model, selling used products at a discounted price. They partner with local vendors to ensure the trustworthiness and quality of goods.

Today, Reebelo has over 29K reviews on Trustpilot and averages a 4.7-star rating.

Historical Performance

Reebelo was founded in October 2019.

2020 was the website’s first full calendar year, bringing on average 3.4K organic visits per month.

This number quadrupled in 2021.

Then, in 2022, Reebelo experienced its first real traffic spike. April 2022 was the highest traffic to date, with 24.3K visits.

Unfortunately, it was short-lived.

Traffic fell to 147 visits in August.

For the next 7 months, Reebelo’s organic traffic stayed below 3K visits per month.

Spring and summer of 2023 brought a slight uptick in traffic. Then, September marked the beginning of unprecedented growth.

By December 2023, Reebelo had reached a new level of online popularity. They experienced an all-time high of 106.5K organic visits.

This surge more than quadrupled their previous traffic peak (April 2022, 24K visits).

So, what happened to finally unlock the 100K monthly traffic milestone?

Let’s find out.

The Catalyst: How Reebelo Achieved 2,040% Growth in 6 Months

Reebelo.com grew its organic traffic by performing the following:

1. Expanding its product catalog and collections
2. Leveraging images to stand out on the SERP
3. Winning product snippets

We’ll explore each of these strategies in detail, starting with Reebelo’s new content.

1. Expanding Its Product Catalog and Collections

In 2022, Reebelo operated with less than 1,000 live pages on its site at any given time.

January 2023 was rather low, with a mere 343 pages.

However, the following months highlight a remarkable shift in Reebelo’s SEO content strategy.

By August, the page count had surged to approximately 1.2K pages. Then, it doubled the following month.

This push in content production set the stage for December’s explosive growth. The numbers below demonstrate this strategic move and its effect on organic traffic.

As for the content of these new pages, Reebelo built out its product catalog and collection pages.

Here’s an example of one of the collection pages for Apple iPads:

And a closer look at one of the product detail pages (PDP) for a refurbished iPad Mini 6:

Adding new product is to be expected from eCommerce businesses, but it’s what Reebelo did with these pages that won more traffic.

Reebelo went beyond the standard SEO best practices, like optimized H1s, title tags, and URLs.

They also included additional copy to dive deeper into product specs.

In the screenshot below, we see how Reebelo discusses the iPad Mini 6’s improvements over past models, display features, and chip performance.

As for their collection pages, we noticed that Reebelo frequently implements FAQs. This approach addresses common user queries and adds depth to the content.

Take the screenshot below as an example.

Here, we see how Reebelo guides users on their buying journey. They provide context to the collection as a whole and highlight specific products to help users decide which is best for their needs.

Why this matters:

For online businesses, the number of pages on a website might seem like a mere statistic.

But in reality, growing your site is one of the best ways to:

1. Provide a comprehensive user experience.
2. Show authority to search engines and users.
3. Rank for more keywords and win more traffic.

After all, every page is an opportunity to introduce your product to new users and rank.

Reebelo used this tactic to offer its customers more products. And it won them more rankings in search engines.

We see this growth in the chart below.

In December, Reebelo ranked for 58.4K keywords. That’s an incredible 1,055% increase over 6 months prior (June).

How to find new ranking opportunities for your site:

Identifying new content opportunities starts with keyword research.

This keyword research guide demonstrates how to do it using popular SEO tools.

Here’s a quick overview of the process:

1. Start your search with a broad term. (For example, if you’re an apparel eCommerce, you may start with “jackets.”
2. Find related keywords.
3. Export all keyword ideas into a spreadsheet.
4. Rinse and repeat steps 1-3 for new terms.
5. Organize keywords using topic clusters to build your content strategy.

Then, once you’re ready to start creating your content, you’ll want to optimize it for users and search engines.

This SEO Checklist has 50+ items you need to optimize for maximum reach.

Tools for keyword research and content optimizations:

As we just saw, ranking for new keywords is a two-fold process. Let’s look at two WordPress tools that streamline both parts.

1. All in One SEO (AIOSEO) Keyphrase Suggestions make it easy to do keyword research in WordPress. This tool connects with your Semrush account to generate keyword ideas directly in the WordPress editor. It uses your focus keyphrase (primary keyword) to select results.

Here’s an example of keywords it generated for the focus keyphrase “wool coat.”

2. Next, the TruSEO Analysis tool will check your content optimizations for your new keyword. You’ll get easy-to-understand checklists that help you see how your content stacks up against critical SEO checks.

The image below shows the Focus Keyphrase Checklist, which lets you know if you’re using your keyword in the right areas.

Now that we understand how Reebelo created and optimized new pages for its site, let’s look at how it uses images to rank higher.

2. Leveraging Images to Stand Out on the SERP

One of the most impressive transformations on reebelo.com regards its presence on the search engine results page (SERP).

At the end of 2023, Reebelo experienced significant growth in rich snippets.

Most notably, they ranked for 22.4K keywords with image rich results in December.

Rich snippets are enhanced search listings that display more information than standard search results.

These results can include star ratings, breadcrumbs (site hierarchy), images, and more.

For Reebelo, images were the most frequently occurring rich results. Below is an example.

Why this matters:

Rich snippets take up more space on the SERP, earning more attention from users.

They boast a higher clickthrough rate CTR at 58% compared to standard listings with a 41% CTR.

Because of this, they’re a powerful way to drive more organic traffic to your website.

How to optimize images for rich snippets:

Now, here’s the thing with Reebelo: they didn’t exactly optimize all that well for these rich results.

However, they do follow some basic image SEO guidelines.

For example, they adhere to the following optimizations:

• Include your focus keyword in the image file name.
• Write SEO-friendly alt text.

Their on-page SEO is also relatively strong, which provides additional context for search engines to rank their images.

For your site, we recommend using more thorough image optimizations, such as:

• Use image title tags to provide users and search engines with more information.
• Implement image schema markup to better your chances of winning a rich snippet.
• Prune image file names to be search-friendly.

Tools for image SEO:

Image SEO can be labor-intensive when you don’t have the right tools.

At AIOSEO, our Image SEO feature minimizes the manual work of image optimizations. You can use smart tags to automate the following image attributes:

• Title
• Alt text
• Caption
• Description
• File name

See the example below for setting the image title in AIOSEO.

As for schema markup, our Schema Generator can implement image schema for you.

It’s as simple as uploading your image in the schema settings, answering a few easy questions, and we’ll format it for search engines.

Next, we’ll look at another type of rich result recently acquired by Reebelo: product snippets.

3. Winning Product Snippets

In October 2023, Reebelo received its first product snippets (1K ranking keywords).

November and December multiplied this number by sixfold.

Our earlier screenshot of an image rich result was also a product snippet, but let’s take a look at another example.

The image below points to specific attributes exclusive to product snippets. This includes the following information:

• Average seller rating
• Shipping and returns

(It also includes an image and breadcrumbs, but these are not exclusive to product snippets)

Now, typically, you get this type of result when you use product schema markup on your website. However, we were surprised to learn that Reebelo doesn’t use it.

In fact, the only type of schema markup we found was website schema.

As it turns out, Reebelo is a Google Merchant. This suggests that they likely uploaded their product information into their Google Merchant Center account, making it accessible to search engines without relying on traditional product schema.

Why this matters:

All eCommerce businesses should implement product schema markup on their websites. It’s a core component of SEO and helps you win rich snippets.

And even though Reebelo is a Google Merchant, we were surprised to find out that they didn’t use the appropriate structured data on its site.

Google also recommends using structured data markup for Merchant Center.

Luckily, Reebelo still received new product snippets. And that’s the most important. These results contribute to a stronger presence on the SERP and more traffic.

How to implement product schema on your eCommerce site:

This tutorial demonstrates three methods for adding schema markup to WordPress without a plugin.

Each requires some coding knowledge and uses JSON-LD.

You can also read Google’s directions for implementing product structured data.

Finally, for Google Merchants, here are Google’s guidelines on how to set up structured data in Merchant Center.

Tools for product schema:

Schema generator plugins are the easiest way to add schema markup to your WordPress site.

Plus, you don’t need any coding knowledge to use them.

AIOSEO’s Schema Generator automatically formats structured data for you. All you have to do is pick product schema (or any other desired schema markup) from the Schema Catalog.

Click the + button, fill out a few information fields, and that’s it!

Standout SEO Wins

Before we conclude, we’d like to highlight an additional SEO technique at reebelo.com.

1. They use canonical tags on product variation URLs.

When browsing a product, users can customize settings to shop items with their desired specs.

Below, we see how users can choose from the following criteria:

• Carrier
• Storage
• Color
• Condition

Each time a user changes one of the options, it generates a new URL.

For example, the above selection generates the following URL:

https://reebelo.com/collections/apple-iphone-13-pro?serviceProvider=Unlocked&storage=128GB&color=Gold&condition=Pristine&mvno=&replacedFromCondition=

However, if we change the color to silver and the condition to excellent, we get the following URL:

https://reebelo.com/collections/apple-iphone-13-pro?serviceProvider=Unlocked&storage=128GB&color=Silver&condition=Excellent&mvno=&replacedFromCondition=

This is standard practice for eCommerce websites that have product variations.

The problem?

They can come with potential duplicate content issues.

When multiple URLs point to the same page, search engines don’t know which one to prioritize or rank.

A canonical tag allows you to tell search engines which URL is your preferred version. This helps the primary URL rank in search results and avoids issues with duplicate content.

Reebelo implements canonical tags generously on its site.

Let’s look at an example.

In the image below, we see how the gold variation has the URL with the customized criteria. And just below it, we see the canonical tag pointing to the main version of the URL (/apple-iphone-13-pro).

This means Reebelo is telling search engines to index the main iPhone 13 Pro URL and not the gold variation specifically.

Tool: Canonical tags tend to confuse new website owners, but they’re not hard to set up. In WordPress, you can customize canonical URLs easily in the AIOSEO settings. Just enter the preferred URL of the page, save, and you’re done!

Takeaways

In our analysis of reebelo.com, we’ve uncovered how new content and rich snippets contributed to its explosive organic growth.

Now, let’s recap which strategies you can replicate on your site and others to reconsider.

Top 3 Strategies to Emulate

1. Target more ranking opportunities with new content. Reebelo continued to add to its product catalog and collections. This keeps the website fresh and relevant, earning the attention of users and search engines. If you’re not an eCommerce owner or don’t have a steady flow of new product, look for other ways to build out your content. You can add a blog, glossary of industry terms, tutorials, etc.
2. Use image SEO to create eye-catching search results. While Reebelo uses some image optimizations, we recommend being more thorough with image SEO on your site. You should optimize file names, alt text, titles, captions (when appropriate), and more. (Don’t forget image schema, too.) Strong image SEO improves your visibility with attention-grabbing rich results. It can also help you rank in Google image searches.
3. Implement product schema to win product snippets. For eCommerce businesses, product schema is indispensable. It allows search engines to show product details like average rating, price, and shipping information directly on the SERP. This helps you claim more SERP real estate, earning more clicks and organic traffic.

Bottom 3 Strategies to Reconsider

1. Not setting a meta description on every page. Many of Reebelo’s pages are missing meta descriptions. This oversight can have negative effects on clickthrough rates. Instead, you should have a meta description for every indexable page. This copy acts like a preview of your content, compelling users to visit your page. When done well, it can boost your CTR and traffic. Plus, you don’t even have to write them on your own. You can use a meta description generator to write them for you.
2. Some pages exceed metadata character limits. Some of Reebelo’s pages have meta titles and descriptions that exceed character limits. This can lead to truncated and incomplete copy on the SERP, diminishing its effectiveness. Optimize your metadata to align with search engine guidelines to get the most out of valuable SERP real estate. A SERP snippet tool can help you check how your page looks in search results before going live.
3. Not leveraging schema markup on your website. Reebelo’s limited use of schema markup presents an opportunity to boost its online presence even higher. Schema markup communicates important details about your page to search engines. It can also help you win rich snippets on the SERP. These results get more clicks than standard search listings, making them ideal for websites chasing more traffic. Use AIOSEO’s rich snippet schema to easily add structured data to your site.

Steal Our SEO Winning Strategy: A Checklist for Your Website

Want to win the winning ranks of eCommerce sites like Reebelo?

This exclusive SEO Checklist has the steps to get you there.

Download A Free SEO Checklist

Access our comprehensive SEO Checklist with a single click. We’ll deliver it straight to you, putting actionable items with SEO tools and tutorials right at your fingertips.

Enter your name and email to download a free SEO checklist.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.

Name *

Email *

Get My Free SEO Checklist

Grow Your eCommerce Website’s Traffic With AIOSEO

What if we told you that you could become your own SEO expert? No courses required.

That’s the power of All in One SEO (AIOSEO), the ultimate SEO plugin for WordPress.

With AIOSEO, you’ll get a suite of tools that empower you to optimize your site.

And they’re easy.

We don’t think a winning website should only be limited to the pros. That’s why we want to help you get the most out of your content with optimizations that actually make a difference. AIOSEO takes the guesswork out of ranking higher. Instead, you’ll get actionable insights to improve your content and win more traffic.

Here are some of our favorite features:

• Semrush Keyphrase Suggestions: Find new keywords without ever having to leave WordPress. AIOSEO pulls keyphrase suggestions from Semrush and serves them to you directly in the WordPress editor.
• TruSEO On-Page Analysis: Get an in-depth but easy-to-understand analysis of your optimization efforts. Each page includes an actionable checklist to help you maximize your content’s reach.
• Image SEO: Turn on automatic image alt text and title attributes with just 1 click. You’ll save time from manual entries while helping users and search engines understand your images.
• Rich Snippets Schema: AIOSEO offers various schema markup options to help you claim more rich results on the SERP. It’s as simple as choosing the schema you want; then, we’ll format the structured data for Google.
• AI Title & Description Generator: This time-saving tool creates compelling metadata for any page on your site. With the click of a button, you’ll harness the power of AI and get options for unique meta titles and descriptions.
• SERP Snippet: See how your metadata looks before publishing with the help of a SERP snippet preview. You’ll see if your content is the optimal length or needs tweaking.

Back to Case Studies

How a UK Food Blog Grew Organic Traffic by 188% in 3 Months

https://www.tamingtwins.com/

Stats

261.6K to 754.2K Monthly Visits

Industry

Food & Drink

Niche

Food Blog

Reporting Date

December 2023

2023 brought a wave of Google algorithm ups and downs. As many website owners tackled a drop in rankings, some food blogs emerged stronger than ever.

Among them, we discovered Taming Twins, a UK food blog dedicated to family-friendly recipes.

Not only did they wear the storm, but they found a new level of success.

Join us as we delve into the SEO strategies that propelled Taming Twins to 188% organic growth in just 3 months.

We’ll reveal how they did it and share tips for navigating algorithmic uncertainties on your website.

Let’s get started.

About Taming Twins

In 2013, UK-based Sarah Rossi embarked on a blogging journey following the birth of her twins.

She initially created Taming Twins as a parenting blog but pivoted to food, recognizing the need for easy, hassle-free meals in her own busy life.

Today, Taming Twins continues to serve its equally time-strapped audience with family-friendly recipes. Sarah is budget-conscious and aims to provide affordable options to her 1+ million followers.

She also provides meal plans that streamline weekly planning and grocery trips.

In 2023, Sarah published two cookbooks, further establishing her authority in the food blogging space.

Taming Twins has been featured in The Telegraph, BBC, BuzzFeed, and more.

Historical Performance

The end of 2023 brought unprecedented traffic to Taming Twins.

Compared to the site’s historical performance, December 2023 was more than double (754K) its previous peak in January 2021 (337K).

This older traffic spike coincided with the COVID pandemic when 65% of shoppers admitted to cooking more at home.

When we zoom in, the organic growth becomes even more apparent in the latter half of the year.

Between July 2021 and September 2023, Taming Twins averaged 241.3K organic visits per month.

In the last 3 months of 2023, this average was 553.5K.

So, how did Taming Twins more than double its monthly organic visits?

And what lessons can we learn from Sarah’s SEO strategies to apply to your website?

You’re about to find out.

The Catalyst: How Taming Twins Reached 754K Monthly Visits

Tamingtwins.com grew its organic traffic by performing the following:

1. Optimizing in-depth recipes for readability
2. Implementing image SEO
3. Leveraging recipe schema
4. Winning higher rankings from Google algorithm updates

Let’s look at each strategy to understand how they impacted Taming Twin’s growth in 2023.

1. Optimizing In-Depth Recipes for Readability

Food blogs often contain a wealth of information beyond the recipe itself.

From ingredient substitutions to storage information, the most successful food bloggers realize their audience has questions. So, they answer them before readers even need to ask.

This means food blogs can be long.

To make this content easier to digest, Taming Twins optimizes for content readability.

Readability measures how easily users can read and understand your content. It’s particularly beneficial when you’re covering comprehensive topics.

Optimizing for readability ensures your audience stays engaged as they explore your content.

Let’s use one of Taming Twins’ recipes as an example.

Here’s a blog for a baked camembert recipe:

To help users navigate the blog, Taming Twins uses the following readability techniques:

1. Use descriptive subheadings.

Subheadings help users and search engines understand the content of your page.

Authors should break down complex recipes or articles into manageable sections. This gives users a clear roadmap for the cooking process or related information.

Here’s a preview of some of Taming Twin’s subheadings in the camembert blog:

Just by looking at the above subheadings, users know exactly what to expect from this blog.

2. Incorporate multimedia.

Images are critical for food blogs. They entice users with the final product and guide them through each step to reach the same result.

Taming Twins applies this practice below by using images to enhance how-to steps.

You can also use videos to engage your audience.

3. Break up text with bullet points, bolding, and white space.

Nobody wants to read a block of text.

Taming Twins uses bullet points, bolding, and white space to make content engaging.

These elements can keep users on your page for longer and improve scannability.

Here’s an example of how Taming Twins uses all three elements to make its content scannable.

4. Include FAQs.

FAQs work well for various websites, including blogs, online stores, SaaS sites, and more.

Taming Twins ends many recipes with FAQs to provide more information or helpful tips.

Why this matters:

Optimizing for readability can improve important user engagement metrics, such as:

• Session duration (how long users stay on the page)
• Bounce rate (the percentage of users who leave your site after visiting only one page)
• Clickthrough rate (CTR – the ratio of clicks on a link to the number of times users viewed the link)

How to optimize for readability on your site:

Let’s recap how Taming Twins optimizes its blogs for readability:

1. Use descriptive subheadings.
2. Incorporate multimedia.
3. Break up text with bullet points, bolding, and white space.
4. Include FAQs.

You can also:

1. Use simple language.
2. Write short sentences and paragraphs.
3. Weave in transitional words.
4. Implement active voice.

For a full list of items, check out this article on improving your content’s readability.

Tools for readability:

Nailing content readability can be tricky, especially when you don’t know where to start.

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) simplifies the process in WordPress with the help of TruSEO Analysis.

TruSEO analyzes your content and lets you know exactly where your content needs improvement. You’ll get a checklist highlighting what needs adjusting, plus actionable tips to improve readability.

Here’s an example of the TruSEO Readability Checklist:

Next, let’s look at how Taming Twins optimizes its images for SEO.

2. Implementing Image SEO

As we saw, images are integral to Taming Twin’s content. This is true for all food blogs.

And while having high-quality photos is critical for a positive user experience, it isn’t enough for search engines.

Search engines can’t understand images like you and me.

Instead, it relies on readable text to interpret the image’s content.

That’s why Taming Twins uses image SEO.

Image SEO is the process of optimizing your images for search engines. A large portion uses text elements to communicate the image’s content, such as:

• Image alt text
• Image title tags
• File name
• Caption
• Image schema markup

Here’s an example of how Taming Twins uses some of these elements for the following image:

• Image alt text: Sliced Lemon Drizzle Cake with icing topping running down the side.
• Image schema markup: Taming Twins uses ImageObject schema.

And here’s what we would have liked to see (Taming Twins did not optimize these elements):

• An optimized file name: For example, lemon-drizzle-cake.jpg
• Image title tag: For example, “Lemon Drizzle Cake.”

Why this matters:

Image SEO is an integral part of a robust SEO strategy.

It also plays an important role in standing out on the search engine results page (SERP).

Sites with optimized images have better chances of winning image rich results. These enhanced search listings drive more clicks and traffic to your site.

Here’s what one looks like on the SERP:

And here’s the effect on Taming Twins’ keyword rankings for image rich results:

In December 2023, Taming Twins ranked for 37K keywords with images.

How to do image SEO on your site:

In addition to the optimizations mentioned above, there are several other ways of implementing image SEO on your website.

This article shows you 18 tips for image SEO, but here are just a few more:

• Choose the right image format.
• Create an image sitemap.
• Lazy load your images.
• Compress images to reduce file size.

Tools for image SEO:

Streamline image optimizations with the help of AIOSEO’s image SEO tool.

This innovative feature allows you to automate image titles and alt attributes with smart tags. These customizable variables generate important image SEO elements without you having to hand-write each one.

You can also use the Schema Generator to implement ImageObject schema for you.

You upload your image, and we’ll format the structured data for search engines.

Want to learn more about schema markup?

Our next strategy will explore this technical SEO element in greater detail.

3. Leveraging Recipe Schema

Schema markup is a form of structured data. It uses your web page’s code to communicate its content to search engines.

In our previous example, we revealed how Taming Twins uses image schema, but several different types exist.

Recipe schema is the most prevalent on food blogs, including Taming Twins.

When a website uses recipe schema, search engines can use this information to create a recipe snippet on the SERP.

These search results include information like cooking time, rating, and an image.

The example below showcases all these schema attributes.

In December 2023, Taming Twins ranks for 8.3K keywords with recipe snippets.

Why this matters:

Rich results are a powerful means of securing more traffic.

The statistics speak for themselves:

• Rich results get 58% of clicks compared to non-rich results.
• They also boast a 40% higher clickthrough rate (CTR).

Because of this, schema markup should be a part of every website’s SEO strategy.

How to implement schema markup on your site:

Recipe schema is ideal for food blogs, but you can choose from several schema markups.

This article shows you how to implement schema markup without a plugin.

It covers three different methods, each uses JSON-LD and requires coding knowledge.

Tools for schema markup:

Schema generator plugins are the best way to implement schema markup on your WordPress site.

They eliminate the need for coding knowledge since they automatically format it for you.

AIOSEO’s Schema Generator offers several schema types, including recipe.

Finally, let’s see how Taming Twins’ commitment to high-quality content and SEO influenced their performance in the face of Google algorithm updates.

4. Winning Higher Rankings From Google Algorithm Updates

2023 was a challenging year for website owners and SEOs. But while some scrambled to recover from a drop in rankings, Taming Twins won a boost.

We believe these updates were responsible for an increase in rankings:

1. September Helpful Content Update
2. November Reviews and Core Update

Let’s look at each closer.

1. September Helpful Content Update

• This update rewards websites with high-quality, people-first content.
• From Google: “The helpful content system aims to better reward content where visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience, while content that doesn’t meet a visitor’s expectations won’t perform as well.”

Resource: Google’s recommendations on how to write helpful, reliable content.

Taming Twins: The months following this update reveal increased keyword rankings. They also show more SERP Features, which include rich results and featured snippets.

2. November Core Update

• Google released two updates this month: Reviews and Core. We’ll focus on the latter for Taming Twins but will include information on the reviews update for those interested.
• Google said the following for reviews: “The reviews system works to ensure that people see reviews that share in-depth research, rather than thin content…” This system evaluates blog posts, articles, and other stand-alone content.
• They also released a broad core update, which occurs several times throughout the year. These updates aim to continue refining the search algorithm and improve its ability to present helpful results.

Resource:

• Google’s guidelines on how to write high-quality reviews
• Q&A on November’s updates

Taming Twins:

November’s broad core update could explain the dramatic increase in Taming Twins’ traffic.

December received 158.9K more organic visits than the month prior, bringing total traffic to 754.2K.

Why this matters:

Taming Twins’ sudden increase in rankings suggests a correlation with 2023’s algorithm updates.

What can website owners learn from their growth?

Remain steadfast in your content creation strategy. Prioritize users and high-quality content above all else.

This approach can help you navigate search algorithm updates that aim to remove low-quality results.

How to monitor performance after algorithm updates:

There are several metrics to track when assessing your site’s performance after an algorithm update.

This article shares the 10 must-have key performance indicators (KPIs) to follow, and this tutorial shows you how to monitor your SEO in Google Analytics.

WordPress users, we recommend reading how to monitor the impact of a Google algorithm update in WordPress. This tutorial uses the SEO plugin that we’ll be recommending next.

Tools for monitoring SEO performance:

AIOSEO’s Search Statistics makes staying in the loop of your site’s SEO performance easy.

You’ll get a timeline view that shows your site’s impressions and clicks. You’ll also see Google algorithm markers that allow you to pinpoint when an update could have affected your site.

Each marker also has a read more option to learn about the update.

Standout SEO Wins

Before we conclude, we’d like to highlight an additional strategy Sarah Rossi uses at Taming Twins.

1. Taming Twins has an active social media presence.

Taming Twins has a far reach, thanks to Sarah’s commitment to engaging her audience on social media.

With over half a million followers on Pinterest alone, Sarah has cultivated a loyal following of like-minded cooking enthusiasts.

She posts almost daily on various platforms and sometimes hits the jackpot with a viral video.

Some of her TikTok videos have won multi-million views each, as demonstrated below.

Overall, Sarah meets her audience on each of their preferred social media platforms. Here’s a breakdown of each with the number of followers:

• Pinterest: 503K
• Instagram: 424K
• TikTok: 341K
• Facebook: 224K
• Twitter: 4K

Tool: Bloggers know the importance of social media. But it’s easy to get bogged down with content creation and run out of time.

That’s why AIOSEO’s social media integration connects with your favorite platforms to share your content seamlessly.

Connect with 11+ social media platforms and preview your posts right in the WordPress editor.

Takeaways

In our analysis of tamingtwins.com, we’ve uncovered how a commitment to helpful recipes and user engagement has been pivotal in its success.

Sarah has navigated a challenging year of algorithm updates and highlighted how high-quality content still stands strong.

Now, let’s review which strategies to use on your website and others to reconsider.

Top 3 Strategies to Emulate

1. Craft comprehensive content and optimize for readability. Cover a topic in detail, then optimize for readability to ensure your content is digestible. This combination enhances the user experience and can help boost your rankings from search engines.
2. Apply image SEO to help search engines understand your images. Optimize image file names, alt text, and title tags with SEO-friendly text. This helps search engines better understand the content and context of your images. It can also improve your page’s rankings for your target keywords and win image rich results.
3. Implement schema markup to win rich results. Search engines can use schema markup to display rich results on the SERP. These search listings have higher CTRs and boost organic traffic to your site.

Bottom 3 Strategies to Reconsider

1. Overlooking image title tags and file names. Despite some strong image optimizations, Taming Twins leaves some details overlooked. Best practices dictate that you should also optimize image title tags and file names with your primary keyword. This can help them rank in Google Images and improve the page’s overall SEO. Use a WordPress image SEO tool to streamline these optimizations.
2. Writing page titles under 30 characters. Your page title, or meta title, should be between 50-60 characters. This text is displayed on the SERP, meaning it’s valuable real estate for driving traffic to your website. Consider it like a first impression, and craft your meta titles with care. You can also use an AI title generator to write them for you.
3. Missing some meta descriptions. A handful of Taming Twins’ pages are missing meta descriptions. Like meta titles, this text is vital to winning users’ attention. Meta descriptions allow you to provide more context and compel users to click through to your website. You can use an AI generator to automate your metadata writing process.

Steal Our SEO Winning Strategy: A Checklist for Your Website

Do you want to win higher rankings and drive more traffic to your site?

This SEO Checklist has everything you need to dominate the SERP.

Download A Free SEO Checklist

Access our comprehensive SEO Checklist with a single click. We’ll deliver it straight to you, putting actionable items with SEO tools and tutorials right at your fingertips.

Enter your name and email to download a free SEO checklist.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.

Name *

Email *

Get My Free SEO Checklist

Maximize Your Content’s Reach With AIOSEO

You put in the work to create content your audience is going to love.

Now, All in One SEO is here to make sure it gets seen.

AIOSEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin, trusted by over 3 million website owners to enhance the performance of their content. You’ll get a suite of tools and easy-to-follow optimizations that make SEO work for you.

Here are some of our favorite features:

• TruSEO On-Page Analysis: Get an in-depth but easy-to-understand analysis of your optimizations. We’ll let you know where you’re hitting it in the ballpark and give you actionable items to make your content a home run.
• Image SEO: Turn on automatic image alt text and title attributes with just 1 click. You’ll save time from manual entries while helping users and search engines understand your images.
• Rich Snippets Schema: AIOSEO offers various schema markup options to help you claim more rich results on the SERP. It’s as simple as choosing the schema you want; then, we’ll format the structured data for Google.
• Search Statistics: Keep an eye on your website’s performance with in-depth and easy-to-understand reports. Search statistics include content decay tracking, so you know exactly when a page starts to slip, allowing you to fix it.
• Social Media Integration: Connect and share content across your social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and more.
• AI Title & Description Generator: This groundbreaking tool uses AI to generate distinct and highly clickable metadata for any page on your website.

Back to Case Studies

How a Workflow Solution Grew Traffic by 1,164% in 3 Months

https://www.process.st/

Stats

76.72K to 969.6K Monthly Visits

Industry

SaaS

Niche

Process Management

Reporting Date

December 2023

The Software as a Service (SaaS) market is set to hit USD 908.21 billion by 2030.

With a booming digital landscape, companies are making big moves to get noticed in this growing domain.

In this SEO case study, we’ll explore how one process management platform took a creative approach to stand out in search results.

Meet Process Street, a SaaS solution set to break 1 million monthly visits.

Join us as we reveal the strategies behind their success and share tips for replicating their growth on your website.

About Process Street

Process Street is a leading process management tool for teams. It leverages the power of AI to streamline workflows for greater operational efficiency.

With its user-friendly interface, teams can easily create, manage, and execute complex workflows.

It also helps teams improve essential tasks like document creation and data management.

Process Street offers collaborative features tailored for teams of all sizes.

Overall, its scalability and flexibility make it an invaluable tool for organizations seeking to boost productivity.

Historical Performance

Process Street was founded in 2014.

Semrush historical data reveals that traffic stayed below 30K monthly visits for the first 3 years.

They experienced an impressive growth phase from 2019 to 2021. This coincides with the COVID pandemic when many organizations were adopting cloud-based solutions.

Unfortunately, traffic fell shortly thereafter.

Traffic-wise, 2022 was a challenging year. However, Process Street experienced unprecedented growth in 2023.

September 2023 marks the beginning of growth, with monthly traffic jumping from 76.7K to 255K in October.

Traffic doubled the following month, with Process Street reaching over half a million visits in November.

And now, as we look at their explosive growth in December, Process Street is just shy of 1 million visits.

So, how did they do it?

And what strategies can you use to replicate this growth on your website?

Let’s find out.

The Catalyst: How Process Street Reached 970K Monthly Visits

Process.st grew its organic traffic by performing the following:

1. Creating new entry points to boost brand awareness
2. Optimizing its content structure for People Also Ask results
3. Targeting featured snippets

Let’s investigate these strategies to understand how they affected Process Street’s performance.

1. Creating New Entry Points to Boost Brand Awareness

In 2021 and 2022, Process Street averaged 3.6K pages on its website.

However, they amped up their content production in 2023.

Process Street added over 6K pages in just a few months.

The chart below shows how they increased the number of pages live on the site and the organic traffic that coincided with this growth.

So, what did they add?

Tutorials and templates.

Tutorials became the main traffic drivers of the website, so we’ll focus on those first.

In the latter part of 2023, Process Street took a creative approach with its content strategy. Instead of creating tutorials for its own software, Process Street tapped into tutorials for other related SaaS tools.

We identified three main brands:

• Microsoft
• Workday
• Oracle

In these tutorials, Process Street addresses common questions related to the product.

For example, here are some of their best-performing articles:

• How to Log-In to a Workday Employee Account (see screenshot below)
• How to Remove Section Break in Microsoft Word
• How to Make the “N” in Spanish on Microsoft Word

These tutorials are straightforward and comprehensive. They often include a series of steps or actionable bullet point items.

In December 2023, these how-to tutorials generated 95.6% of all US traffic.

Templates were another endeavor for 2023.

Between September and December, Process Street added over 3.5K new templates to its website. These pages cover a variety of industries and needs.

Users can edit them using Process Street.

Templates generate minimal organic traffic but account for 24.8K ranking keywords in December 2023.

Why this matters:

Introducing third-party tutorials was pivotal in boosting Process Street’s traffic.

It was also a clever way to introduce their brand to potential new customers.

By choosing software products related to their own, Process Street engages with an audience that may have a need for their product. These users are already familiar with cloud-based platforms commonly used in workplace settings.

The tutorial is an entry point for users to discover Process Street, thus boosting brand awareness.

Combined with templates, these new pages have contributed significantly to Process Streets’ ranking keywords.

The chart below demonstrates impressive growth, with them ranking for 261.1K keywords in December 2023.

How to find new ranking opportunities for your site:

You need to know what type of content people want before you can create new pages for your website.

Keyword research will help you find these ranking opportunities.

Keyword research is the process of identifying what words and phrases to target in your content. It tells you exactly what users are looking for in search engines and helps you tailor your content accordingly.

This guide shows you how to do keyword research using popular SEO tools.

Once you’ve collected a list of keywords, you can use them as the foundation for your content strategy. Topic clusters can help you with this process and keep you on track as you build out new pages.

As for boosting brand awareness, you can use creative ways to introduce your product or services to website visitors. Process Street uses banners and images with calls to action (CTA) to encourage users to try their product.

Tools for keyword research:

Did you know you can perform keyword research in WordPress?

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) connects to your Semrush account to make this possible.

After setting a focus keyphrase in the Keyphrase Suggestions tool, you can fetch relevant terms from Semrush. You’ll receive a list of keyword ideas, like the one below.

Once you add and optimize for a specific keyphrase, TruSEO will check your optimizations and let you know how your content performs.

Alternatively, you could add these terms to an ongoing keyword list and save them for future use.

Next, let’s look at how Process Street uses strategic subheadings in these tutorials to dominate search results.

2. Optimizing Its Content Structure for People Also Ask Results

Process Street uses smart optimizations in its content structure to stand out on the search engine results page (SERP).

One tactic is to organize tutorials using optimized subheadings.

Subheadings play an important role in the user experience. They guide readers through your article, dividing the information into digestible sections.

They’re also important to search engines.

Like users, search engines use subheadings (among other things) to understand your page.

In Process Street’s case, they use many question-based subheadings in their tutorials.

Here’s an example from their article on How to Log-In to a Workday Employee Account:

• What Is Workday?
• Why Do You Need a Workday Employee Account?
• How to Create a Workday Employee Account?
• How to Log In to Your Workday Employee Account?
• What to Do If You Forget Your Workday Password?

You can also see how these questions are supported by other subheadings, as shown below.

Why this matters:

By incorporating question-based subheadings, Process Street aligns its tutorials with common user queries. This positions its content to appear in Google’s People Also Ask (PAA) box.

The PAA box is a SERP feature that aims to answer users’ queries right on the SERP.

Here’s an example of one:

These search results provide various benefits, including:

• Higher clickthrough rates (CTR)
• More organic traffic
• Greater visibility
• Enhanced authority

For Process Street, they ranked 37K keywords in Google’s PAA box in December 2023.

How to optimize your content for PAA results:

This article shows you how to optimize for Google’s PAA box.

Here’s a quick overview of the process:

1. For WordPress site owners, use an SEO plugin.
2. Perform keyword research for question-based queries.
3. Craft high-quality content that answers the user’s query.
4. Implement FAQ or HowTo schema.

Process Street uses 3 out of 4 of the optimizations above.

We would like to see them implement HowTo or FAQ schema to see how many more PAA results they could get with this simple change. (We’ll show you how to do this next.)

Tools for winning PAA results:

You already learned how to perform keyword research in the previous how-to, so let’s focus on schema markup tools.

AIOSEO’s Schema Generator makes adding schema markup easy. Search engines can then use this schema markup to create enhanced search listings on the SERP, including PAA results.

To add FAQ or HowTo schema to a page, scroll down to the Schema Catalog when you’re in the WordPress editor. You’ll see various schema types and can click FAQ or HowTo, depending on your content.

AIOSEO will implement the schema markup on the backend of your website, and that’s it!

Next, let’s look at how these optimizations also helped Process Street win featured snippets.

3. Targeting Featured Snippets

PAA results aren’t the only type of rich result Process Street won in December.

They also saw a dramatic increase in featured snippets, ranking for 5.3K keywords.

Featured snippets are enhanced search listings that appear near the top of the SERP.

They appear after ads and sponsored posts (when present) and before organic results. They also feature more information than standard search results.

Below is an example, with Process Street’s result outlined in red.

Search engines generate featured snippets from the content on your website.

Here we see how the above featured snippet was pulled directly from the bullet points in Process Street’s Microsoft Word tutorial:

Why this matters:

Featured snippets boast an incredible 42.9% CTR. This is the highest CTR of all search results.

They’re also used to generate 40.7% of voice search answers.

Overall, featured snippets are one of the most valuable search listings you can get.

They boost your online visibility and drive significant traffic to your site.

How to optimize for featured snippets on your site:

While optimizations can’t guarantee featured snippets, there are tactics to increase the likelihood.

The steps are similar to the ones discussed above when optimizing for rich results.

Here’s a recap of the steps discussed in this featured snippet optimization tutorial:

1. Use an SEO plugin.
2. Implement schema markup.
3. Optimize content structure for featured snippets.
4. Use a table of contents.
5. Craft high-quality content.
6. Scope out your competitors.

Tools for featured snippets:

At its core, winning a featured snippet is about creating the best piece of content that fulfills search intent.

AIOSEO’s TruSEO Analysis can help you understand your optimization efforts to maximize your content’s potential.

TruSEO gives you a score and checklist that make it easy to understand how your content stacks up against important SEO checks. You’ll also get recommendations for making any improvements.

Here’s an example of the Focus Keyphrase Checklist with a score of 90/100:

(TruSEO is a game-changing tool for winning PAA results, too. It streamlines all your content optimizations, maximizing the reach of every post or page you publish.)

Standout SEO Wins

Before we conclude, there’s an additional technique we’d like to highlight at Process Street.

1. They have an RSS feed.

RSS, short for a simple syndication or rich site summary, is a web feed. It allows users to curate a list of their favorite websites and see their latest content in one place.

RSS feeds also play an important role in proving content ownership. They tell search engines you’re the original author to prevent malicious attempts at content scraping.

RSS sitemaps also help your new content get crawled and indexed faster.

Tool: AIOSEO automatically generates RSS sitemaps for you. It can also help protect your content with RSS footers. These are added to the end of each RSS feed post, ensuring you get credit for your work.

Here is an example of how you can automatically set RSS tags to appear after your content:

Takeaways

In our analysis of Process Street, we were impressed with their use of on-page SEO and technical optimizations to create a robust online presence.

Their new content is undoubtedly responsible for 2023’s increased rankings and organic traffic.

Now, let’s review which strategies you can replicate on your website and others to tweak.

Top 3 Strategies to Emulate

1. Add new landing pages to boost brand awareness. Process Street connected with its audience by tapping into queries on products they already use. While this approach won’t work for every business, it highlights the importance of thinking creatively when building a content strategy. Keyword research can inspire and support any ranking opportunities you consider.
2. Leverage question-based subheadings to win PAA results. Organizing a clear content structure helps users and search engines understand your page. By using question-based subheadings, you align your content with common search queries. This makes it easier for search engines to identify your page as a source for a relevant answer.
3. Target featured snippets with high-quality content and SEO. Featured snippets hold the key to standing out on the SERP and boast a 42.9% CTR. While there are no guaranteed strategies to win them, crafting helpful content is critical. You can support this content with SEO to increase the likelihood of winning these covetable search results.

Bottom 3 Strategies to Reconsider

1. Crawlers flag some pages for reading difficulty. Content readability is an important metric that affects user engagement. It measures how easily users can read and understand your content. Some of Process Street’s pages are flagged as difficult or very difficult to read. TruSEO Analysis can help you catch readability issues and gives you actionable insights to fix them.
2. Some page titles exceed character limits. Page titles, or meta titles, are the blue hyperlink text on the SERP. When your title exceeds character limits, it gets truncated. It’s best to keep these titles under 60 characters. You can use an SEO title tag generator to write them for you or check them using a SERP snippet tool.
3. Not leveraging the power of social media. We would love to see Process Street leverage its social media accounts to extend its reach. While they do post occasionally, it’s infrequent. With all their new content, they could boost engagement by promoting their templates and tutorials. AIOSEO’s social media integration makes it easy to customize how your content looks on 11 different platforms.

Steal Our SEO Winning Strategy: A Checklist for Your Website

Ready to turn your site into an SEO success story like Process Street?

Our SEO Checklist has the steps to jumpstart your journey.

Download A Free SEO Checklist

Access our comprehensive SEO Checklist with a single click. We’ll deliver it straight to you, putting actionable items with SEO tools and tutorials right at your fingertips.

Enter your name and email to download a free SEO checklist.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.

Name *

Email *

Get My Free SEO Checklist

Grow Your Visibility and Organic Traffic With AIOSEO

Want a direct route to replicating Process Street’s winning formula?

AIOSEO holds the key to unlocking your next level of growth.

All in One SEO is the best SEO WordPress plugin on the market. With thousands of 5-star reviews and over 3 million users, you’ll be in good company as you take on the SERP. With a comprehensive suite of tools and easy-to-follow recommendations, you’ll streamline optimizations for maximum results.

Here are some of our favorite features:

• Semrush Keyphrase Suggestions: Streamline your keyword research and find question-based keywords in no time. AIOSEO connects with your Semrush account to serve keyphrase suggestions in the WordPress editor.
• Rich Snippets Schema: AIOSEO offers various schema markup options to help you claim more rich results on the SERP. It’s as simple as choosing the schema you want; then, we’ll format the structured data for Google.
• TruSEO On-Page Analysis: Get an in-depth but easy-to-understand analysis of your optimization efforts. Each page includes an actionable checklist to help you maximize your content’s reach.
• RSS Content: RSS sitemaps are an invaluable tool for sites that produce a lot of content. AIOSEO automatically generates them for you, helping your content get crawled and indexed faster. We can also help you claim original authorship of content with RSS footers.
• AI Title & Description Generator: This game-changing tool uses AI to automatically craft unique, compelling, and click-worthy metadata for any page on your site.
• SERP Snippet: See how your metadata looks before publishing with the help of a SERP snippet preview. You’ll see if your content is the optimal length or needs tweaking.
• Social Media Integration: Seamlessly connect your social media platforms and share content with your audience. Available integrations include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and more.

Back to Case Studies

How an American Food Blog Grew Traffic by 195% in 7 Months

https://alexandracooks.com/

Stats

249.8K to 736.6K Monthly Visits

Industry

Food & Drink

Niche

Food Blog

Reporting Date

December 2023

In 2024, food blogs remain the most lucrative niche in the blogging world.

Why?

People love food. And it’s one of the easiest subjects to monetize.

But standing out in a crowded digital kitchen isn’t easy for even the most experienced bloggers.

In this SEO case study, we’ll explore the growth journey of Alexandra’s Kitchen, a US-based food blog that’s been around for over 17 years.

They ended 2023 with a bang, boasting 736K monthly visits, and we’re sharing they did it. Plus, you’ll get tips for replicating their success on your blog.

Let’s get started.

About Alexandra’s Kitchen

Alexandra Stafford started her food blogging journey in 2006.

In her personal and professional life, Alexandra was no stranger to the kitchen.

She grew up in a home with a vibrant kitchen and from-scratch recipes. After college, she went to culinary school and spent several years working in restaurant kitchens. She was also a regular contributor to Food52, a popular online community for foodies worldwide.

Alexandra’s Kitchen is a place to share all her favorite recipes, seasonal ingredients, and love of bread.

Like most food blogs, Alexandra organizes her content by recipes. Users can also filter them by:

• Type
• Season
• Diet
• Ingredient

She also has a convenient Recipe Index, which organizes all her content into one place. (It’s also a great spot for internal linking!)

Alexandra, or Ali for short, has written two cookbooks since launching Alexandra’s Kitchen.

Both are available to purchase on her blog, alongside her favorite cooking products (many of which are affiliate links).

Historical Performance

Despite its 17-year online presence, Semrush only stores historical metrics for 10 years. For this reason, we’ll focus on the last decade of Alexandra’s Kitchen.

From 2012 to mid-2019, Alexandra’s Kitchen averaged 18K monthly organic visits.

Traffic started to pick up near the end of 2019 and took off in 2020.

From 2020 through 2021, Alexandra’s Kitchen experienced its first real growth in traffic. They averaged almost a quarter million monthly visits (242K) during this time.

This growth aligns with the COVID pandemic when many people cooked at home.

If you remember the baking bread trend, it was also in full swing at this time. (And Ali’s blog had several bread-making blogs ready to appease these new home bakers.)

In May 2020, her beginner’s guide to making sourdough bread was her website’s #1 visited page.

Once the pandemic had subsided and ovens cooled down, traffic averaged 270K monthly visits from 2022 to April 2023.

Then, in May, Alexandra’s Kitchen began entering its next phase of growth.

Organic traffic has been steadily increasing, with December 2023 reaching a new record high: 736K organic visits.

So, how did Alexandra’s Kitchen finally crack the code to take her blog to the next level?

We’re revealing those strategies next.

The Catalyst: How Alexandra’s Kitchen Reached 736K Monthly Visits

Alexandracooks.com grew its organic traffic by performing the following:

1. Generating fresh recipes for fresh content
2. Optimizing for recipe and review snippets
3. Engaging with her social media audience

Let’s explore each point to understand how they contributed to the blog’s growth (and how they can help yours, too).

1. Generating Fresh Recipes for Fresh Content

In 2023, Ali added 32 new recipes to the website.

These were easy to uncover since Ali uses dating conventions in her URLs.

Here’s an example:

https://alexandracooks.com/2023/04/15/simple-no-knead-rye-bread/

This cadence is a steady output when you’re running a blog solo. That’s 2-3 blogs every month.

In these articles, Ali goes into great detail.

The image below shows how she organizes her content into different sections, making it easier for readers to digest and follow along.

(For bloggers, this is a great strategy for optimizing your content for readability. This tactic encourages users to stay on your post for longer.)

In these comprehensive posts, Ali leverages multimedia to keep her audience engaged.

Images help users visualize the cooking steps, and Ali demonstrates what the food item should look like.

She also embeds helpful YouTube videos to aid users in the baking process.

For example, the video below demonstrates how to shape the dough for a loaf pan.

After guiding her audience through the full recipe, Ali ends each post with a recipe card.

Comments are enabled below the post, and Ali responds to almost all of them. She answers queries about ingredient alternatives, helps users troubleshoot any issues, and provides general appreciation to those sharing positive feedback.

It’s a refreshingly honest exchange that’s genuine and engaging.

Why this matters:

Ok, so you may be wondering why we took you through all that, but it’s important to understand how much work goes behind each of these blog posts.

Ali is incredibly thorough in her approach and focuses on high-quality, helpful content above all else. (And good, seasonal ingredients!)

Her content output aligns with the effort that goes into each recipe.

As for search engines, Ali’s fresh, new recipes are critical for maintaining content freshness.

Content freshness measures how new or recently updated your content is.

Search engines love fresh content.

And the more search engines like your content, the better your chances at ranking.

That’s why it’s important to keep your website fresh and relevant with updated posts or new content at all times.

How to maintain freshness on your site:

You need to combat content decay to maintain freshness.

Content decay is the natural decline in the performance of old content.

This in-depth tutorial shows you how to prevent content decay, but here’s an overview of the process:

1. Refresh old content.
2. Maintain and add internal links.
3. Check posts for changes in search intent.
4. Prune irrelevant pages.
5. Consolidate content.
6. Expand your existing content.
7. Promote your content.

Tools for content freshness:

One of the easiest ways to maintain freshness and monitor content decay is by using the All in One SEO (AIOSEO) plugin.

The Search Statistics module helps you catch performance slips. Then, you can take the necessary steps to reinvigorate your content.

With Search Statistics, you’ll get two reports that make this process seamless:

1. The Content Performance Report tells you which page is dropping in performance.

2. The Keyword Rankings Report tells you which keywords are on the decline.

Both reports provide quick and comprehensive insights to stay on top of your content’s organic performance, so you don’t have to chase after their metrics.

Next, let’s look at Ali’s technical optimizations to make her blogs stand out in search results.

2. Optimizing for Recipe Snippets

If you’ve ever browsed for a recipe online, chances are you’ve encountered a recipe snippet.

Recipe snippets showcase helpful cooking information on the SERP, like cooking time, nutritional information, and more.

Below is an example of a recipe snippet from Alexandra’s Kitchen.

And here’s the same recipe featured in Google’s recipe carousel:

At the end of 2023, recipe snippets were Alexandra’s Kitchen’s most prominent SERP feature.

They won 18.3K recipe snippets in December.

It’s also important to note that these recipe snippets are also considered review snippets.

Alexandra’s Kitchen implements recipe and review schema markup (we’ll show you how shortly) and wins rich results for both.

Review snippets show the average rating of scores from users. You’ll most often see this on the SERP as stars, as shown below.

In December 2023, Alexandra’s Kitchen won 185K review snippets.

Why this matters:

Rich results boast an impressive clickthrough rate (CTR) of 58%.

This is significantly higher than non-rich results, which have a 41% CTR.

Given their performance on the SERP, prioritizing rich results is crucial. Any blog aiming to secure increased visibility and more traffic should optimize for them.

Now, let’s get to the part you’ve been waiting for—how to get these kinds of rich results.

How to win recipe snippets for your site:

Schema markup is the #1 thing to do to win rich results (plus having killer content, of course).

Schema markup is a type of code that lives in the backend of your website. It communicates important details about your page to search engines.

Search engines can then use this information to generate a rich result on the SERP.

There are many types of schema markups, each with a different purpose.

Alexandra’s Kitchen uses the following:

• Recipe
• Review
• HowTo
• Image
• And more

As for implementing it on your website, there are a few different ways to do it.

If you choose the manual route, this tutorial shows you how to implement schema markup without a plugin. The tutorial gives you three different methods, each requiring you to obtain code snippets. Then, you’ll paste them into the appropriate fields in WordPress.

For a streamlined route, we recommend using a schema markup plugin.

Let’s look at which one we recommend next.

Tools for schema markup:

AIOSEO has rich snippet schema that makes formatting structured data a breeze. In fact, you don’t have to format it at all.

Just pick the schema type you want, and we’ll format it for search engines for you.

Below is the AIOSEO Schema Catalog, which includes recipe schema.

Once you’ve clicked the Plus button, we’ll walk you through easy-to-fill-in fields. You can set your dish type, add an image, and include details like nutritional information and cooking time.

Now that we know how Ali (1) creates great content and (2) supports it with technical SEO, let’s look at how she promotes it.

3. Engaging With Her Social Media Audience

Once Ali has a new blog post, she doesn’t wait for search engines to bring the traffic.

Instead, she takes a proactive approach and promotes her latest content to her followers.

Here’s a breakdown of her most popular social media platforms and their follower count:

• Instagram: 970K (multi-million videos – 1 has over 14M)
• TikTok: 606.8K (lots of videos have multi-million views)
• Pinterest: 184.9K
• YouTube: 59.1K
• Facebook: 36.8K

Instagram and TikTok are her most active accounts, and she posts videos regularly on both.

Many of Ali’s videos go viral.

It’s not uncommon for them to get multi-millions of views. In fact, on Instagram, they’re the regular.

With that said, she still has some recipes that stand out against the rest.

This Instagram reel for a lemon-blueberry Dutch baby recipe got 50.9 million views.

Ali links the recipe in her bio, driving traffic to her blog.

Another unique approach by Ali is incorporating a page dedicated to links for her social media accounts.

For example, the page below organizes all her TikTok links in one place (hello, more internal links!).

She does the same for Instagram, as well.

Why this matters:

For website owners, social media is a powerful tool to extend your reach. It allows you to stay connected to your existing followers and meet new users. This helps boost brand awareness and build a stronger online presence.

How to promote content on social media:

Follow Ali’s lead and promote new content on your social media accounts. You should also link to this content in your profile.

You can share a link in bio in Instagram and TikTok or share a link in the post on a Twitter card, LinkedIn post, etc.

Social media plugins can streamline this process, so let’s look at our recommended plugin next.

Tools for social media integration:

AIOSEO features a social media integration that makes sharing your content a breeze. You can add up to 11 social media accounts, covering all your social needs.

Here are just a few things you can do with AIOSEO’s social media tools:

• Set up default thumbnail images for Facebook
• Integrate with Facebook insights
• Generate post titles automatically using smart tags
• Customize and preview Twitter cards
• And more

Check out the available network integrations below:

Standout SEO Wins

Before we wrap up, there’s another technique worth highlighting at alexandracooks.com.

1. They have XML and RSS sitemaps.

Search engines use sitemaps to understand your website.

XML sitemaps list all your pages. It acts like a roadmap for search engines, guiding them through all of your website’s content.

On the other hand, RSS sitemaps list the URLs of all new or recently updated pages. This means it will be a shorter list than the XML sitemap. It’s also faster for search engines to crawl.

Google recommends both XML and RSS sitemaps for optimal crawling.

Alexandra’s Kitchen follows this SEO best practice.

Tool: AIOSEO generates both XML and RSS sitemaps automatically for you. This is the default setting, meaning you don’t have to do anything to get them.

You can also view each sitemap (as shown below) and alter their settings if you wish.

Takeaways

In our analysis of alexandracooks.com, we’ve been impressed with Ali’s comprehensive recipes with a focus on seasonal ingredients. She’s cultivated a rich community of followers and has earned recognition from The New York Times, Bon Appetit, Saveur, and more.

Now, let’s recap which of her strategies can be used to grow your blog traffic and others to reconsider.

Top 3 Strategies to Emulate

1. Fight content decay with fresh content. Search engines love fresh content. You can ensure your site stays relevant by updating existing content and publishing new content. This proactive approach keeps users engaged with up-to-date information and helps your rankings.
2. Implement schema markup to stand out on the SERP. Search engines use schema markup to display rich results on the SERP. Food blogs should implement recipe and review schema, like Alexandra’s Kitchen. There are also several other types to create attractive search listings that win more clicks and traffic.
3. Leverage social media to connect with your audience and new users. Ali actively engages with her audience across several platforms. This helps her build meaningful connections with her followers and boost brand awareness. You, too, should promote new content on your social media accounts and share their links to drive more traffic to your site.

Bottom 3 Strategies to Reconsider

1. Some URLs are very long. Some of Alexandra’s Kitchen’s URLs are very long and include dates. You should future-proof URLs by not including dates. You’ll also want to simplify them for clarity. In general, the shorter, the better. Don’t forget to include your keyword, too! The TruSEO tool checks your URLs for optimizations and lets you know if you forget your primary keyword.
2. There are missing meta descriptions. Every indexable page on your site should have a meta description. This text acts like a preview to users viewing your search result and lets them know what to expect from your page. The more compelling it is, the more clicks and traffic you’ll drive to your site. You can use a meta description generator to write click-worthy text automatically.
3. Neglecting image titles. Image titles appear when users click or hover over an image. They can be helpful for users looking for more information or context. They also help search engines better understand your image, thus increasing its chances of ranking in Google Images. With the Image SEO tool, you can streamline image optimizations and generate titles automatically.

Steal Our SEO Winning Strategy: A Checklist for Your Website

Are you ready to get your blog noticed?

This SEO Checklist has all the optimizations you need to take over the SERP and get more eyes on your content.

Download A Free SEO Checklist

Access our comprehensive SEO Checklist with a single click. We’ll deliver it straight to you, putting actionable items with SEO tools and tutorials right at your fingertips.

Enter your name and email to download a free SEO checklist.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.

Name *

Email *

Get My Free SEO Checklist

Win Higher Rankings and More Blog Traffic With AIOSEO

What if you could skip some of the legwork and enjoy streamlined optimizations that work?

AIOSEO helps you do just that—rank higher and faster.

All in One SEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market. You’ll get a full suite of tools that are easy to use and make a difference. Whether you’re a brand-new blogger, a seasoned pro, or somewhere in between, AIOSEO was designed to make SEO easy so you can get back to doing what you do best—creating great content.

Here are some features you’ll love:

• Search Statistics: Keep an eye on your website’s organic performance with comprehensive and easy-to-understand reports. Search statistics include content decay tracking, so you know exactly when a page starts to slip, allowing you to fix it.
• Rich Snippets Schema: AIOSEO offers various schema markup options to help you claim more rich results on the SERP. It’s as simple as choosing the schema you want; then, we’ll format the structured data for Google.
• Social Media Integration: Seamlessly connect your social media platforms and share content with your audience. Available integrations include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and more.
• XML and RSS Sitemaps: Sitemaps help search engines understand and navigate your website. XML sitemaps include all your pages, while RSS sitemaps list new and updated content for faster crawling. AIOSEO generates both sitemaps for your website automatically.
• AI Title & Description Generator: This time-saving tool creates compelling metadata for any page on your site. With the click of a button, you’ll harness the power of AI and get options for unique meta titles and descriptions.
• Link Assistant: Get link suggestions, edit anchor text, and add internal links to your content in just 1 click. Link Assistant makes your internal linking strategy more effective than ever and keeps your blog interconnected.

Back to Case Studies

How a Western Apparel eCommerce Grew Traffic by 279% in 3 Months

https://schaeferoutfitter.com/

Stats

13K to 49.2K Monthly Visits

Industry

eCommerce

Niche

Apparel

Reporting Date

December 2023

eCommerce is one of the most challenging landscapes for businesses to stand out and thrive.

After all, money is to be made, meaning everyone wants their share.

Enter Schaefer Outfitters, a Western ranch apparel company that faced the same hurdles but emerged victorious by the end of 2023. They experienced a remarkable 279% surge in organic traffic in just 3 short months.

We’re here to unveil their secrets so you can apply these SEO strategies to grow your eCommerce.

Let’s dive in.

About Schaefer Outfitter

Schaefer Outfitter is an American manufacturer of premium Western apparel. It was founded in 1981.

Made for the ranchers, farmers, horsemen, and cowboys of the world, Schaefer Outfitter designs are functional and high-quality.

With an ode to Western ranch living, every product is designed to keep up with a good day’s work and last a lifetime.

Schaefer Outfitter is also one of the last American brands to make every garment and its components in the U.S.A.

In recent years, Schaefer Outfitter gained widespread recognition for its designs featured in the popular American series, ‘Yellowstone.’

Today, fans can shop the Yellowstone Collection directly on Schaefer Outfitter’s website.

Historical Performance

Despite its 40+ year standing, Schaefer Outfitter didn’t open its eCommerce store until 2001.

Semrush historical data reveals that it first started generating traffic in 2018.

We’ll focus on the last 5 years of its performance to understand why its recent growth is so impressive.

During most of its online lifetime, schaeferoutfitter.com received an average of 10.2K organic visits per month.

February 2021 was the website’s first traffic spike, with 17.9K visits. This was surpassed in January 2023, with 19K visits.

Then, as the end of 2023 approached, a remarkable thing happened: organic traffic skyrocketed.

December traffic beat its previous traffic record (January 2023) by more than 2.5 times.

Schaefer Outfitter closed out the year with a remarkable 49.2K organic visits.

So, what sparked this unprecedented traffic after 5 years of low monthly 10K averages?

You’re about to find out.

The Catalyst: How Schaefer Outfitter Grew Traffic by 279% in 3 Months

Schaeferoutfitter.com grew its organic traffic by performing the following:

1. Building out its product collections to go beyond branded keywords
2. Implementing product schema to stand out on the SERP
3. Mastering the art of storytelling through videos

We’ll look at each strategy in detail to understand how Schaefer Outfitter transformed their online presence in such a short amount of time.

Let’s get started.

1. Building Out Its Product Collections to Go Beyond Branded Keywords

Between September and December, Schaefer Outfitter added over 20 new product listing pages (PLPs) to its website.

These pages feature product collections like:

• Wool vests
• Men’s fleece
• Henley overshirts
• Denim jackets (as shown below)
• And more

They also started using more descriptive product names like “shearling coat” instead of creative naming conventions (e.g. “The Herd.”)

By opting for clarity, this transformation had a quick impact on keyword rankings.

The chart below demonstrates how Schaefer Outfitter experienced a rapid growth of non-branded traffic.

Non-branded traffic is exactly what it sounds like. This traffic comes from keywords that do not include the brand (in this case, “schaefer”). Instead, they’re more generic terms.

Here’s another perspective that compares the recent influx of non-branded traffic to its previous state:

In September, non-branded traffic accounted for 22% of Schaefer Outfitter’s total website traffic.

By December, this figure soared to an impressive 83%.

Why this matters:

Branded keywords are an integral part of your business. However, they aren’t the best at introducing your brand to new customers.

After all, they can’t search for you if they don’t know you exist.

That’s where non-branded keywords come into play.

These general search queries are a great way to boost brand awareness and expand your customer base.

By optimizing its website with new collection pages and broader product names, Schaefer Outfitter tapped into new ranking opportunities. This brought increased traffic from a wider audience, thus growing their reach and online presence.

How to find non-branded keywords for your site:

Keyword research will help you discover non-branded terms for your content. This process reveals what users type in search engines, so you know exactly how to tailor and optimize your content to their needs.

This keyword research tutorial shows you how to do it using popular SEO tools.

It’s important to know that non-branded keywords often have higher competition than branded terms. Because of this, you’ll want to be smart with which keywords you target.

This article shows you how to find low-competition keywords. These are like low-hanging fruits, ripe for the taking. They have high conversion rates, making them ideal for eCommerce.

Tools for keyword research:

Did you know you can do keyword research in WordPress?

The All in One SEO (AIOSEO) plugin makes this possible by connecting to your Semrush account. It uses your focus keyword to generate more keyword ideas for your content.

When looking for non-branded terms, we recommend using a non-branded focus keyword to get similar results.

Here’s an example of generated keywords for the focus keyword “wool coat”:

If you Add Keyphrase, you’ll want to update your content to include your new keyword. Then, the TruSEO Analysis tool checks your optimizations. It will give you tips and actionable insights for maximizing your content’s reach.

Now, let’s look at how Schaefer Outfitter uses technical optimizations to win clicks for its new pages.

2. Implementing Product Schema to Stand Out on the SERP

Schaefer Outfitter implements schema markup on its website.

Schema markup is specialized code in the backend of your website. It communicates important details about your page to search engines.

Search engines can then use this information to generate a rich snippet on the SERP.

Rich snippets are more visually attractive search results than standard listings. They feature additional information on the SERP, taking up more space and catching users’ attention.

Here’s an example:

In the above image, we see several different types of schema markup:

• Image – displays images from Schaefer’s vest PLP.
• Product – tells users about shipping and returns.
• Breadcrumb – shows the site hierarchy of the page (collections > men’s vests).

Product and image schema markup stand out the most. For eCommerce, they’re a must.

As for Schaefer Outfitter, the results were dramatic. This was particularly true for images. (You can set images when using product schema.)

At the end of 2023, Schaefer Outfitter skyrocketed its rich snippets with images. They received 2.6K rankings for this enhanced search result in December 2023.

That’s a 205% increase over September.

Why this matters:

Rich snippets have higher clickthrough rates (CTR) and generate more traffic than standard search results.

Because of this, they’re extremely valuable to your website.

Beyond driving more traffic to your site, schema markup can help search engines better understand your content. And if Google understands your page better, the better your chances at ranking.

That’s why it’s critical to optimize for rich snippets in any SEO strategy.

How to implement product schema on your eCommerce site:

This guide demonstrates three methods for adding schema markup to WordPress without a plugin.

Each uses JSON-LD and requires some coding knowledge.

You can also read Google’s directions for implementing product structured data.

Tools for product schema markup:

Schema generator plugins are the easiest way to add schema markup to your WordPress site.

And you don’t need any coding knowledge to use them.

AIOSEO’s Schema Generator automatically formats structured data for you. All you have to do is pick the type of schema you want.

The Schema Catalog comes with several different schema markups, including product. Just click the + button, fill out a few information fields, and you’re done!

Next, let’s look at how Schaefer Outfitter uses film in its content strategy.

3. Mastering the Art of Storytelling Through Videos

In September, Schaefer Outfitter added a new corner of its website: Schaefer Journal.

On this page, they share recent stories from the West.

Sometimes, these articles feature a specific person, like American photographer Beau Simmons. And at other times, they artistically capture the Western lifestyle.

For example, its debut film and article highlight the tradition of branding at Stuart Ranch in Waurika, Oklahoma.

In addition to a creative writing style, Schaefer Outfitter leverages the power of film to resonate with its audience.

They upload YouTube videos of each featured story. These videos are also embedded into each article on the website.

This multifaceted approach resonates with its audience and creates a lasting impression. The debut film was met with positive feedback in the YouTube comments.

Why this matters:

A well-crafted SEO strategy extends beyond written content, encompassing diverse media like video.

In Schaefer Outfitter’s case, they create and optimize for multiple search engines (Google and YouTube.) This strategy creates a more well-rounded online presence that builds authority in the eyes of users and search engines.

Furthermore, we commend Schaefer Outfitter’s approach to video content.

The emphasis on storytelling, rather than a sales pitch, provides a refreshing and authentic take on typical eCommerce content. This strategy allows them to forge genuine connections with its audience that resonate.

How to embed and optimize videos on your site:

WordPress makes it easy to embed YouTube videos into posts and pages.

Simply navigate to the WordPress editor of your desired post or page and paste the YouTube link. WordPress will automatically find the embed code and display the video in your content.

This article has screenshots of the process and gives you two more methods for embedding YouTube videos in WordPress.

As for optimizing your videos, video SEO is key to ranking.

Video SEO is the process of optimizing your video content for search engines. Since they can’t watch videos like you and me, video SEO translates their content into data they can understand.

Here are 5 tips for optimizing your videos to rank higher and get more views:

1. Write a compelling video title and description.
2. Design eye-catching video thumbnails.
3. Implement video schema markup.
4. Link to your video pages.
5. Create a video sitemap.

Tools for video SEO:

You’ll get a suite of video SEO tools when you use the AIOSEO plugin.

You can easily add video schema markup using the Schema Generator. This will help you set important details like the title, embed URL, thumbnail, and more.

Link Assistant also makes it easy to find and internally link to your pages with video content.

Finally, the Video Sitemap tool helps search engines crawl and index your video content.

Standout SEO Wins

Before we wrap up, we’d like to highlight an additional SEO technique at schaeferoutfitter.com.

1. They have a strong backlink profile.

When we looked at Schaefer Outfitter’s backlink profile, we noticed they’re doing several things right. Here are some of the insights we uncovered:

• Relevant sources like Art of the Cowgirl, Tejas Rodeo Company, and Men’s Journal
• Natural but descriptive anchor text
• More follow vs nofollow links
• Properly implemented 301 redirects from their old domain (schaefer-ranchwear.com)

Tool: You can use an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush to find your site’s backlinks.

It’s also important to note that a strong linking strategy goes beyond backlinks. You should also optimize for internal and outbound links. This link-building guide shows you how to optimize for all three types of links.

Link Assistant is one of the fastest ways to find internal links. With linking suggestions that populate directly in the WordPress editor, it’s as simple as clicking Add Link.

Takeaways

In our analysis of Schaefer Outfitter, we uncovered the reasons behind their recent SEO success.

If you want to achieve the same organic growth on your website, here are the top strategies to replicate and three to reconsider.

Top 3 Strategies to Emulate

1. Target non-branded keywords for a broader reach. With its new collection PLPs and products, Schaefer Outfitter strategically targeted non-branded keywords. This approach introduces their brand to users with more generic search queries who may be unfamiliar with their brand. Target both non-branded and branded keywords for a well-rounded SEO keyword strategy.
2. Implement product schema on eCommerce sites. Online retailers should include product schema markup on product detail pages (PDPs.) Search engines can use this information to create attractive product snippets on the SERP. These enhanced search listings display additional information like customer ratings, shipping and returns, and product images. Product snippets have a higher CTR than standard listings and drive qualified traffic to your site.
3. Optimize for multiple search engines and include various media. Google and YouTube are some of the leading search engines for video content. You should create and optimize video content for both platforms, like Schaefer Outfitter. This strategy ensures visibility on different areas of the internet and resonates with users who prefer video content.

Bottom 3 Strategies to Reconsider

1. Some pages are missing H1 tags. An H1 tag is the title of your page. They tell users and search engines the primary topic of your content. When your page doesn’t have an H1 tag, it can hinder overall SEO performance and user clarity. Luckily, the TruSEO Analysis tool helps you catch missing H1 tags. It will let you know when your title is missing your focus keyphrase, allowing for easy optimizations.
2. Not all pages have meta descriptions. Meta descriptions act like previews of your content on the SERP. The more compelling they are, the higher CTR and traffic you’ll get. A meta description generator can help you write this important text automatically.
3. They’re not using image title tags. Despite the uptick in image rich results, Schaefer Outfitter doesn’t use image title tags on its site. Image title tags appear when users click or hover over an image. They help users and search engines better understand the content of the image. You can use smart tags to create image titles automatically in AIOSEO’s image SEO tool.

Steal Our SEO Winning Strategy: A Checklist for Your Website

Are you ready to win more traffic and generate more sales for your eCommerce business?

This exclusive SEO Checklist has everything you need to get noticed in search results.

Download A Free SEO Checklist

Access our comprehensive SEO Checklist with a single click. We’ll deliver it straight to you, putting actionable items with SEO tools and tutorials right at your fingertips.

Enter your name and email to download a free SEO checklist.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.

Name *

Email *

Get My Free SEO Checklist

Grow Your eCommerce Site’s Visibility With AIOSEO

What if you take a direct route to replicating Schaefer Outfitter’s winning formula?

AIOSEO has the tools to help you do just that.

All in One SEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market. With thousands of 5-star reviews and trusted by over 3 million website owners, you’ll be in good company as you take on the competition. You’ll get a comprehensive suite of tools to help you win more real estate on the SERP and boost your rankings.

Here are some of our favorite features:

• Semrush Keyphrase Suggestions: Find new keywords without having to leave WordPress. AIOSEO pulls keyphrase suggestions from Semrush and serves them to you directly in the WordPress editor.
• TruSEO On-Page Analysis: Get an in-depth but easy-to-understand analysis of your optimizations. We’ll let you know where you’re hitting it in the ballpark and give you actionable items to make your content a home run.
• Rich Snippets Schema: Choose from various schema types to win more rich results on the SERP. You pick it; we implement the code for search engines.
• Video Sitemaps: Sitemaps help search engines understand and navigate your website. A video SEO sitemap makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your video content. It can also earn you a rich result in Google’s video carousel.
• Link Assistant: Apply internal linking best practices with easy linking suggestions and reports. These tools will help boost content discovery and prevent orphan pages.
• Image SEO: Save time on manual optimizations by turning on automatic image alt text and title attribute. It only takes 1 click.