UsedGymEquipment.com is an e-commerce site that was struggling with a drop in website keyword rankings due to one-two punch from the Google algorithm in September of 2012. They were hit by the exact match domain update as well as Panda for having a lot of pages that really didn’t have content on them. Once their rankings nosedived, their traffic bottomed out as well. When they came to us, UsedGymEquipment.com was also dealing with a lot of structural SEO issues, and they were changing the platform that their site was built on.
Ignite Visibility was in a consulting role, we provided UsedGymEquipment with suggestions for SEO implementation, warning signs that we saw, and provided documents detailing ways to improve site structure. We cleaned out their backlink profile (we believe they were getting penalized by Penguin as well) and helped them to structurally steer their website towards a course that would allow them to regain the traffic and rankings they once had.
We were able to help them regain their organic website traffic within a couple of months by adding some of the key SEO components to the site, including adding optimized site titles and descriptions, adding blog posts to the site, and building up their healthy external link profile. They implemented a broader variety of search terms, and started working on their social campaign. UsedGymEquipment.com was able to regain around 30% of their original organic traffic volume, and nearly 40% of all site traffic. There was still a missing component however, and this lay in the hundreds of e-commerce product pages and categories that had a dearth of information and content.
Although we were able to regain some of the traffic, keyword rankings never recovered from the update. Although we were able to hang on to some of their most important keywords, rankings continued to dwindle – starved by a lack of content on the website. Then, in May, UsedGymEquipment kicked into gear, and started adding 60 pages of content a week to their site. Within a week of the new content pages being indexed, keyword rankings on the first two pages of Google immediately doubled and then continued to grow. At this point, they are ranking for 800% more keywords than the site was ranking for in May.
This is a true testament to the importance of content for e-commerce websites, and the power that adding descriptive, in-depth, and relevant content to your product pages has for a website. In the same vein, traffic has doubled, and continues to grow. Additionally, UsedGymEquipment.com not only saw growth in their organic US rankings, but explosive growth globally in Google TLDs in multiple countries due to location optimization and the creation of content that was targeted towards a global audience. For example, the number of keywords on the first two pages of Google in Australia increased by 16x.
For anyone who wasn’t completely convinced that providing quality content will absolutely make the difference in a managed SEO marketing campaign – these figures cannot be ignored.
