Cosmetics SEO Case Study: An Online Store Success

In this case study we describe a situation where a cosmetics online store had already been built but was still closed off from search engine indexing. At that point the site was getting only direct traffic from Instagram and Facebook.

The cosmetics online store was built on Bitrix CMS with a fully stocked product catalog and a dedicated brands section. When we started working together, the store's domain was new with no prior history. The site was closed off from search engine indexing and effectively had no rankings or organic traffic at all.

What was working:

• a clean domain with no history;

• a broad product range;

• an in-house dev team;

• the site hadn't been indexed yet with its errors in place.

What needed work:

• slow site loading speed;

• a lot of duplicate catalog pages;

• no schema markup;

• no way to optimize site categories and subcategories;

• page markup issues.

After analyzing the current state of the site and going through the client's goals in detail, we put together a detailed action plan that covered:

• technical audit;

• structural analysis;

• usability analysis and recommendations;

• SEO optimization of catalog categories and brand pages;

• product page optimization recommendations;

• link building for the store.

We ran a technical audit of the site and logged 24 critical issues. The analysis ran in two passes:

• 1st pass - manual review against our in-house checklist;

• 2nd pass - automated site check with an SEO crawler.

Once the technical audit was done, we put together a document where we logged every issue and wrote out detailed instructions for fixing each one.

Working with the dev team, we fixed every issue on the site.

The main issue with the site's structure was the lack of third-level categories. The site was being populated by content managers, and along the way they hadn't paid attention to the quality of the store catalog. As a result, the catalog was effectively unfit for SEO optimization on a broad semantic core.

The second part of the work at this stage was site usability analysis. On our side, we put together recommendations for improving the category, product, and home pages.

We put together a broad semantic core (over 1,500 queries) and distributed them across landing pages.

For the priority categories, we prepared briefs for the copywriters to write SEO copy. For all the other categories, we wrote out title and description and built metadata templates for the product cards.

Through the on-page SEO work, we got around 500 pages handled in the first months plus template-based optimization of the products.

The link campaign started with building up crowd links in the first months - we were placing around 30 links per month. Starting from the third month of the partnership, we added guest post link buying on quality donor sites.

Over the course of the partnership our team managed to achieve solid growth in organic traffic: