E-Commerce SEO Case Study
- Colette Nichol
- Nov 25, 2024
- 9 min read
Updated: Dec 18, 2024
Written by Colette Nichol, SEO Expert and Story Strategist, Founder of Story Envelope Media
SEO Organic Traffic Case Study for a Product-Based Business
June Hunter Images: Canadian Product-Based E-Commerce Business with a Focus on High-Quality Art, Designs, and Prints
This e-commerce SEO case study covers our work for June Hunter, a Canadian artist and photographer who wanted to increase her online visibility and sell more art prints from her Shopify store.
Success Highlights
Total organic traffic up 1300% in 12 months (organic sessions)
Total organic traffic up 1500% in 18 months (organic sessions)
Revenue from organic traffic went up 128% in 12 months.
Revenue from organic shopping went up 44% in 12 months.
163% increase in organic traffic (visitors) to the collections pages in 12 months.
Organic traffic from 581/mo in April 2023 to 8,572/mo in April 2024
Page 1 for 413 keywords.
Position 1 on Google for 39 keywords.
Total sales of art prints went up 40% year-over-year.
Total revenue from art prints went up 59.6% year-over-year.
Top Reasons for Success
Use of premium evergreen video to help decision-making and build trust.
Optimization of collections and product listings.
New Shopify theme.
Home page optimization.
Authority-building and traffic growth from strategic blogging.
Important Note about Story Envelope’s Secret Sauce
While this case study gives you a basic overview of what we did to achieve success, I won’t be revealing any of the industry-specific secrets or tactics that allowed us to outperform the competition.
We keep our tactics confidential because we don’t want a client’s competitors to know how to replicate our successes. We offer non-compete contracts to all our clients so they can feel secure that we will not work with anyone who is directly competing against them within the same market.
Our secret sauce is that we are obsessed with deeply understanding our clients’ ideal clients and using great design and high-quality visual and text-based content that’s enjoyable for visitors to read and interact with.
Custom video is another ingredient in our secret sauce. High-end videos that create a connection and feeling of trust with the visitor are often a key element in our website strategies.
We’ve created a process called the Traffic for Experts Method that we use for every client. This method allows us to understand the essence of a business and craft a strategy that helps business owners achieve their goals.
Who & What
This e-commerce Shopify SEO case study focuses on June Hunter Images.
June Hunter is a photographer, designer, and artist based out of Vancouver, BC. She is an award-winning photographer with beautiful designs inspired by nature. June has been in business for over twenty years and focuses on creating crow and raven portraits.
She wanted to grow the traffic to her online store so she could focus more on making art and photography and less on email marketing. She also wanted to increase her print sales, as they are her highest-profit product and have the easiest shipping and packing requirements. And as an artist, prints are one of her favorite products.
I’ve known June for over ten years, so I was excited to see how we could help June increase traffic to her website.
Before Doing SEO
Before getting started with SEO, June was doing what many shop owners do: accidental SEO.
June created lovely product listings with the most important information about her products. She organized collections around her different areas of art and included beautiful photos on all of her product listings.
She was getting traffic to her website but not seeing many organic sales. Most of her sales would occur after she sent out her email newsletter.
June wasn’t getting as much organic traffic to her collections as she should have because they were not optimized for the keywords people were using to search for her type of artwork. The collections' names were creative rather than SEO-optimized.
It’s important to use the right keywords in the right places to get the right traffic.
Goals
The goal of June’s project was to increase organic traffic to her most important products and collections.
We wanted to ensure that she could consistently make sales even when she hasn’t sent out a recent newsletter. Email marketing is a critical part of June’s business. However, she wanted to see sales throughout the month, not just when she had sent out a newsletter.
In addition, June wanted to increase the number of prints she sold as she moved away from selling her hand-crafted jewelry.
Call to Action
We also wanted to increase email subscribers.
Since June was already sending out a newsletter twice monthly, it made sense to increase the potential buyers on that email list. We ensured the CTA page was optimized to capture more visitors so June could grow her email list more effectively. June's email list is now growing consistently where before it had started to decline.
What Worked
We created new collections that were optimized around the keywords people use to search for her particular type of art.
We also created an entirely new Shopify theme that allowed us to craft an SEO-optimized home page.
Having a properly optimized home page is a big deal when it comes to SEO. You need to make sure your home page is complete and allows Google to understand what you do and what your most important pages and collections are if you’re a shop owner.
We also optimized her product listings to have the right structure so that they appear more easily in searches.
Next, we created helpful videos for her prints to help people choose the right print size. These videos increased the number of large-sized prints, which increased overall revenue for prints.
We also created a video that showed June’s process of taking a photograph and turning it into a high-quality art print. This video went on every print listing and helped increase trust and engagement.
Finally, we started a blogging strategy to increase June’s authority for crow and raven topics and art topics.
These blogs support the collections and the website's overall authority, driving traffic to the site.
The winning strategy included the following:
New Shopify theme
Keyword research
Complete upgrade of the home page - turning it from a brief overview to a comprehensive SEO-optimized store page for the business
Nav bar and footer optimization for SEO and user engagement
New collections based on keywords
Product updates based on keywords
Premium evergreen videos for key products
Blogging to support service pages
Desktop and mobile optimization
Results/Wins
June was able to start ranking on Page 1 for several new keywords that she had not ranked before.
This resulted in organic sales that were previously impossible.
In addition, June’s crow and raven art pages went to the top of Page 1 in Canada and to the middle of Page 1 in the USA. This movement resulted in a 163% increase in organic traffic to all collections.
Organic traffic went up 1300% in 12 months (organic sessions)
Organic traffic went up 1500% in 18 months (organic sessions)
Revenue from organic traffic went up 128% in 12 months
Revenue from organic shopping went up 44% in 12 months
Total sales of art prints went up 40% year-over-year
Gross revenue of art prints went up by 59.6% year-over-year
Organic traffic went from 581/mo in April 2023 to 8,572/mo in April 2024; as of November 2024, organic traffic has reached 10,000+ per month.
June now ranks for over 5000 keywords in the USA and over 1000 in Canada
Keyword rankings have doubled in the past 12 months
Keyword rankings have quadrupled in the past 18 months
June has 413 page 1 keywords rankings in the USA
June has 39 position 1 rankings for her product keywords (i.e. BOFU, not informational)
Challenges
The main challenge with this project was to increase traffic on a limited budget for a very visual niche.
The SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) are very, very volatile. E-commerce moves very quickly, and the search results pages move a lot.
We’d never done SEO for an artist before, so there was a learning curve in terms of figuring out what works within this niche.
It’s also a very visual space, so creating engaging pages was critical.
Ultimately focusing on the right keyword, creating strategic collections, and doing supportive blogging and premium videos was the work that made the biggest difference.
The Takeaway
When doing e-commerce SEO, it’s important to focus on creating collections based on the exact-match keywords your customers are searching for online.
In addition, doing premium evergreen videos that help customers make decisions about what to buy and nudge them toward higher-priced products is extremely important.
Video should be a part of every e-commerce strategy. Without it, we wouldn’t have seen such persuasive results.
In addition, top-of-funnel blogging is key to building authority for the website, while bottom-of-funnel collection and product listing optimization are key to increasing revenue. It’s important to focus on optimizing conversions as well as driving traffic. Moreover, if you’re going to be driving tons of traffic, you’ll want to build your email list and make sales, so make sure you have a great pop-up or lead magnet offer.
A discount offer works just fine as a lead magnet. Just make sure your follow-up sequence is optimized.
So, What Would Page 1 of Google Do for Your Business?
If you’d like to find out more about how we can help you, please get in touch.
You may be in a niche where dominating Google isn’t outrageously expensive. Let me be clear: some niches are super competitive, and getting to Page 1 is costly.
However, most local businesses do not fall into that category. In fact, most local businesses can massively increase their organic traffic and walk-ins if they have a solid SEO strategy that’s properly executed.
Schedule a 15-minute Call to Discuss Your Business
If you’re serious about getting on Page 1 of Google with your business, please reach out and schedule a call. We'd love to hear about your goals and see if our services align with your needs.
The Traffic for Experts Method
The Traffic for Experts method is a systematic approach to getting high-quality organic traffic for expertise-driven businesses.
As a service provider whose main focus is to use your expertise to help your clients get results, your marketing requires a thoughtful approach. You can run fire sales or do any “fast marketing” techniques.
Trust and authority are the backbone of your business. If people don’t trust you, then they’re not going to book an introductory call.
The Traffic for Experts Method has 3 pillars:
Connection
Content
Conversation
CONNECTION
In order to connect with your ideal client, we dig deep to understand who exactly your business is targeting.
It’s not just people with $5M or more in investable assets. You offer something that appeals to a very specific type of person. So let’s find out who that is and then target them with precision. When this is done well, you may find perfect-fit prospects signing within just a few weeks of the first call.
CONTENT
When we know who we’re trying to reach and connect with, we can create content focused on engaging that particular avatar.
We’ll ensure that service pages and blog posts are based around the exact type of clients you wish to see more of in your business.
CONVERSATION
Your perfect-fit prospect will schedule an introductory call with your team if they feel a connection to your business.
That first call is a chance to have a conversation with the prospect and see if there’s a mutual fit. But they won’t go out on a limb and book that first call if they don’t feel connected to your business.
How do we create that connection?
We connect by mirroring your ideal client’s hopes, wishes, and dreams while covering their main challenges and the solutions you offer. We make sure to use the right words and imagery to reflect their goals and desired outcomes.
We don’t shy away from discussing their challenges and the problems they want to solve. People don’t seek out a new service provider if they’re totally happy with the current solution.
When your website focuses on solving their problems and reflects who they are and what they want, they will feel a connection to your business.
In other words, when your content is about them and their problems, they’ll seek your services. If you just talk about how great you are, they won’t feel the connection that drives them to schedule a first conversation.
Steps in the Process
Included in the process are the following steps:
Understand your ideal client deeply
Set KPIs and begin tracking
Map out the best website experience for your ideal prospect
Transfer and upgrade your website if necessary
Select page types from our proven framework
Do keyword research for your location and ideal client
Create content for all necessary service pages and execute
Create blog posts that support your service pages
Create a home-page optimization plan and execute
Ensure your call-to-action is optimized to get the best results
Plan a premium-video strategy and execute
Assess progress and add off-page SEO strategies as needed
Following the Traffic for Experts Method, you get the best possible results for your service-driven business.
Get Started with Traffic for Experts
If you’re the owner of a growing wealth management firm, and you want to add a new source of high-quality leads to your sales pipeline, let’s talk.
Traffic for Experts is a service we offer to financial services firms who wish to grow their businesses with organic traffic. We love to work with fiduciaries and premium service providers who care deeply about their clients and want to make a difference in the lives of those they serve.
Read More
Are you interested in growing your financial services business with high-quality digital marketing? Read more of our articles.
About the Author
Colette Nichol is the founder of Story Envelope Media and the creator of the Traffic for Experts Method. As an SEO (search engine optimizer) and Story Strategist, Colette helps successful businesses grow and achieve their goals with high-quality content strategies that include SEO and premium video. Colette is based in Vancouver, Canada, where she lives with her husband and business partner. She’s passionate about using storytelling and high-quality content to help service-oriented, honest, and values-driven business owners grow their businesses with ease.
Next Step: Schedule a Call
Click here to schedule a 15-minute introductory call to learn more about the Traffic for Experts Method and see if it’s a good fit for your business.
