One of my most favorite clients is a company that manufactures and supplies civil construction products in their home country. I have been managing all SEO aspects of their website for the last 6 months.
They are a B2B seller doing upwards of $10 million in revenue. This means their order values are in thousands of dollars. Improving the website SEO steadily to increase just a few conversions per month leads to a huge ROI.
The first order of business for me, after onboarding a client for monthly SEO management, is to understand their business and customers. After all, if I don’t know what my clients are selling, and who they are selling to, how can I help them sell?
Here are the few key elements of their business:
Here are the key aspects of their clientele:
Another important thing to point out here. Since it is a B2B business and the customers know what they are looking for, there was not a lot of content targeting top-of-the-funnel keywords on the site. 95% of their pages were PLPs or PDPs.
As always, I do a site audit to analyze what is going on with the site before I can improve anything.
There wasn’t a negative trend in traffic to the website and I didn’t have anything in particular to start with. So, I audited each and every aspect.
Here are some key findings from the audit.
The traffic to the website had a weekly cycle. The clicks maxed out at the start of the week and were lowest at the end of the week.
This can be explained using the business and audience analysis made previously. The customers were purchasing products at the start of the week for their construction projects so the searches were maximum and since there are no top-of-the-funnel pages, trends are dictated PLP and PDP traffic.
The site had a lot of branded search keywords, explained by the local awareness that they enjoyed. Among the non-branded keywords related to their products, they were ranking in the top 10 for less than half of them.
Most of the product pages were not optimized for on-page. The title tags and H1s were not consistently targeting the same primary keywords. Some pages had multiple H1s, some had multiple title tags, some both. Meta descriptions were not defined for any page. The RankMath SEO plugin was not set up correctly and was leading to inconsistencies such as repeated brand name in the title tag.
The site had it’s share of technical errors but all of them were easy fixes. First, there were issues with the consistency between www and non-www URLs, and with the trailing slashes. Second, there were some broken internal links that needed to be updated. Moreover, there were some redirections leading to redirect chains.
There were also some concerning indexing issues:
There were also some pages with improper canonical URLs, and also pages that should have self-referencing canonicals but were canonicalized to their parent page.
The company had previously hired a freelancer who unbeknownst to them, purchased a ton of spammy backlinks for cheap, and passed them off as earned backlinks. The backlink profile of the site was highly toxic, with 42% of their links definitely coming from spam sites.
The first three months were about auditing the site in depth, finding each and every issue, and then targeting the low-hanging fruits for immediate benefits. With the current state of the website in mind, the initial priority strategy for the website SEO in first two months was to:
To tackle the backlink issue, I made a list of the spammiest backlinks (670 of them) and added them to the disavow tool in batches of 100 with a gap of two weeks. This allowed me to test and see if it had any negative impact on traffic – which it didn’t. I also immediately started a backlink campaign, and I have been earning high quality backlinks (5-7 per month) since.
To fix the indexing issues I had to edit the robots.txt file to block out the plugin pages that we definitely did not need crawled. I also fixed the trailing slash and www-version pages being indexed, as well as the pagination pages being indexed. I also fixed the canonical URLs issue(s) in the same go.
Then I focused to product pages that were suffering from thin content. They had little to no product descriptions, images, or FAQs. I did keyword research for them, aligning them with the target keywords and added optimized content to them. Then I waited for them to get indexed and start ranking.
After this was done, it was time to start prioritizing the next fixes, and also try to improve conversions. For the months 3-4, the SEO strategy was to keep building quality backlinks and to improve the rankings of the product pages with most potential.
For the former I continued with the backlink campaign, and for the latter, I analyzed and found 17 product pages that were ranking in the 5-10 position on the SERPs. I performed SERP analysis and competitor analysis for these pages and used the results to improve their keyword and content strategy. Most of these pages gained 2-3 positions within a month.
Since month 5, I am improving the on-page elements, keyword strategy, and content of the product pages that are not in the top 10. Every week 3 product pages are improved and updated. The strategy after all the product pages have been improved will be to create middle-of-the-funnel pages.
While there aren’t a lot of top-of-the-funnel keywords in this industry, there are some keywords related to product sizing and specifications that can be used to attract potential customers and to stabilize weekly fluctuations in traffic.
The traffic on the website has been increasing slowly but steadily. We clocked the first 8k clicks month in May and we are seeing more than 400 clicks on all Mondays and Tuesdays (the website never had more than 350 clicks/day).
However, the real benefit to the business comes from the increase in conversions. The event ‘add to quote’ which we were tracking since the start, has gone up by 23%.
From the product pages that were moved up from 5-10 positions there have been 43 confirmed total sales in the last two months, where the total sales from those pages were only 12 in the last year.
This increase can be attributed directly to the improvement in content and on-page SEO. The pages now have an improved CTR, leading to more conversion events from users getting there from search. Conversions are also up because the users getting there from website navigation are able to better understand the product and its specifications.
The client disclosed that the order value from these pages was roughly $160,000- they have yet to do the ROI calculations.
Imagine the ROI when we add more content and the remaining product pages that we updated get indexed. A small increase in conversion leads to a large increase in revenue due to high product prices.
If you are a large B2B business looking to increase the conversions you can get from your website, SEO is your best friend. Every day you spend without optimizing your product pages, is thousands of dollars lost is revenue.
It makes zero business sense to let your website rot. You know what to do.
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