Table of Contents
What happens when you optimize all of the existing content on a website in the right way?
You get a 316% increase in monthly organic traffic and an 493% increase in monthly revenue from $6.3k to $37.3k:
And if you want to do the same for your site…
…I’m going to show you exactly what we did, and how we did it below!
A Closer Look At The Case Study Site
Our client is an online confectionery store based in the United States, catering to customers all across the country.
They carry out nationwide deliveries to individuals and corporations, as well as offer a monthly subscription service with different sweet treats delivered right to their subscribers’ doorsteps.
When they joined Search Logistics, the client struggled with their site’s visibility for a number of important keywords at various stages of the search journey.
Their main goal?
To drive more traffic to their core service and product pages.
We set out to achieve this by optimizing the content on these pages for transactional keywords.
The Biggest Challenges We Had To Overcome
We focused on identifying the major challenges that had to be addressed in order to get their core pages to rank higher on search engines.
Upon careful analysis, we determined that these challenges were:
- Optimization of service and product pages
- Capturing users at the bottom of the funnel through identifying long-tail, informational keywords
- Improving the client’s domain authority by way of a blogger outreach campaign
We have faced similar problems in our other SEO case studies in the past so we were pretty confident we could help.
Creating A Plan Of Attack
Once we’ve established exactly what needs to be done in order to achieve the results that our client hired us to achieve, we devised a comprehensive strategy to bring about these changes.
Below, you can find a complete, detailed breakdown of all the steps we’ve taken to boost our clients rankability and authority in their niche.
If you’re struggling with similar issues in your own business, feel free to implement this process for your own website or contact us for help.
Step #1: Product Page Optimization
You can learn more about product page optimization with the free 7 Day Ecommerce SEO strategy.
Boosting visibility and site visits is definitely one of the main goals of SEO, but when it comes to product and service pages, it’s only a stepping stone towards achieving their main goal: REVENUE.
This is where optimization for such pages differs from other types of content.
They require convincing, appealing copy that entices potential customers to click that “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” button.
When working on our client’s product pages, we focused primarily on the following:
- Search intent
- Buyer awareness
But you can learn more with the full 7 Day Ecommerce SEO strategy here.
Search Intent
Product descriptions need to be written in a way that convinces users that the item you’re selling is, in fact, the item they’re looking for.
Our client’s core service and product pages were lacking in that regard.
Understanding the user’s search intent is crucial when optimizing any piece of content.
In the case of product pages, the intent would be transactional, (i.e. the user is looking to buy a specific item).
When using a search engine with transactional intent, people generally type in keywords like “winter boots for sale,” but also highly specific phrases that describe the product, such as “brown leather winter boots.”
Thus, optimizing your product descriptions should entail using transactional keywords in a natural, organic way.
Aside from containing transactional keywords, your copy should be in equal parts compelling and informative.
Here’s an excellent example from the Adidas online store:
Buyer Awareness
Keep your target audience in mind when writing copy for your website.
Your product pages should correspond with the general awareness of your niche amongst consumers.
For example, high buyer awareness niches include:
Most people know how to use shoes and what purpose they serve. They don’t need to read lengthy descriptions that go into unnecessary detail.
A concise paragraph and a list of the key design features should suffice.
Fast fashion brands are a good example of companies that sell high buyer awareness products.
Their product pages generally follow the outline we described above.
Here’s a product description of a hoodie from the H&M website:
However, in most niches, the awareness levels tend to vary from buyer to buyer.
Here, consumer electronics come to mind.
If you have an online store selling desktop PCs, your customer base will include highly knowledgeable programmers or gamers, but also countless individuals who aren’t as tech-savvy.
In this scenario, you’ll want to cater to both kinds of buyers by including a run-down of your product’s key features, followed by more detailed, approachable explanations of what it has to offer.
Below, you can see how Dell handled that challenge in their product page for one of their gaming laptops.
First, they offer a full list of the computer’s technical specifications:
Followed by detailed explanations of how this laptop’s main features affect the user experience:
That way, buyers who know a lot about computers will be able to make a decision based on the list of specifications, whereas those who need a bit more guidance can find it by scrolling further down.
You can learn how to create perfect product pages with our free 7 day Ecommerce SEO strategy.
Step #2: Informational Keyword Targeting
Our client wanted to boost their site’s visibility across all the stages of the buyer journey.
This means that aside from optimizing the product and service pages for transactional keywords, we also had to focus on targeting informational, long-tail phrases to capture customers who are only starting to seek out information on the products our clients are selling.
Targeting such keywords builds topical authority of the site, helping it stand out from competitors.
In order for this strategy to work, though, it is necessary to find the right topics to discuss in your articles, and write this informational content in a compelling, authoritative, but also SEO-friendly way.
Finding Topics To Cover
Ahrefs has proven to be an indispensable tool when it comes to identifying the right long-tail keywords to target, among other things.
As long as you know where to look, finding new content ideas with Ahrefs is as easy as it can get.
Let me show you:
#1 – Enter the Keyword Explorer tool and type in a broad seed keyword that pertains to your niche. Let’s use “sweaters” as an example.
#2 – Scroll down to the “Keyword Ideas” section and take a look at the “Questions” subsection.
You’ll see a few of the most popular queries on display.
Click on “See All” for a full overview.
#3 – Once you’re in the “Matching Terms” view, make sure that these long-tail keywords are grouped by parent topic.
That way, all the similar terms will be placed next to each other, making it easier to formulate a strong content plan.
You should end up with a report that shows all the question-based keywords.
#4 – To see all of the long-tail queries that belong to a single parent topic, select a topic from the list on the left.
In our example, we’ve chosen “how to wash knit sweater,” and got a list of 15 keywords that have a total search volume of 1.9k in the United States.
With this information, we can go ahead and write a comprehensive article about washing sweaters, all the while making sure that it’s optimized for search engines by scattering these keywords throughout the text.
You can also use Google to come up with highly searchable topics for your informative articles.
Just follow these steps:
#1 – To do it, simply type your broad seed keyword into the search engine.
#2 – Scroll down to the “People Also Ask” section to see the questions that users look up in the context of your seed keyword.
#3 – Click on one of the questions to see the top result for that particular long-tail keyword, as well as more questions you can later use in your content plan.
To get the most out of your long-tail keyword research, we’d recommend you use Ahrefs and People Also Ask in tandem, so that your content plan is as comprehensive as possible.
Writing Informational Content
Now that you have all the informational keywords you want to target, it’s time to get writing.
Creating informational content for your website or blog is fairly straightforward, especially if you’re an expert in your niche.
Still, there are a few SEO considerations you should take into account when putting together your articles.
- Research your competitors: Look for the articles that rank for your chosen long-tail keywords and see how they’ve gone about writing their content. What other questions have they answered? How was their article structured? Did they supplement the text with other types of content, like infographics or videos? Competition articles can serve as a baseline for your own piece.
- Be clear and concise in answering the core questions: If you take a look at Google’s featured snippet for any kind of long-tail keyword, the answers Google chooses are clear, concise, and easy to understand by someone who has no expertise in a given topic. You want your blog post to end up in such a snippet, so keep your answers as simple as possible.
- Use internal links: You can make your informational content contribute to conversions by cleverly adding internal links guiding users to your money pages throughout the article. For example, our client’s informational blog articles linked to relevant products and service pages.
- Structure your headings properly: Your H1 should contain your long-tail keyword. You might also want to try using its variations and any other secondary keywords in the H2s and H3s.
- Show off your expertise: Both readers and search engines value articles from authoritative sources, written by knowledgeable, experienced authors. Demonstrate expertise in your texts by including author bios with headshots, adding external links to respected websites, and a bibliography at the bottom of the page.
Step #3: Link Building Strategy, Powered by AI
Link building is one of the core fundamentals of any strategy that has the goal of improving a website’s rankability.
For this particular client, we deployed a blogger outreach campaign to build high-quality links, improving their:
- Domain authority
- Search engine rankings
Finding the right blogs to get links from manually can be a very time-consuming, exhausting task.
Thankfully, there are tools that can help you significantly speed up the process, all the while retaining excellent results.
Automation is the name of the game right now.
Using generative AI tools to expedite your blogger outreach effort, if done correctly, can change the way you go about link building for the better.
Below, we’ll show you how we used AI tools to build high-quality links to our client’s website.
Link Prospecting
In this blogger outreach campaign, we used Chat-GPT with the WebPilot plugin to scan live websites.
Here’s a brief guide on how to do this yourself:
First off, go to Settings and enable plugins.
Then, open the Plugin menu and choose WebPilot, which will enable the AI tool to scan online content beyond the default 2021 cutoff date.
Once WebPilot is active, all that’s left to do is typing in the prompt and letting GPT work its magic.
Here’s the prompt we used to find reputable websites we would later reach out to:
“Using the WebPilot plugin, please give me a list of 20 popular blog and websites within ”
ChatGPT should then come up with a list of sites to target with your blogger outreach efforts.
Here’s an example:
As is the case with most AI-generated research, we’d recommend that you personally go to each site and assess them for legitimacy.
Gathering Contact Information
Now that you’ve got your list of websites, it’s time to get their contact details.
While many sites publish those on their “Contact Us” or “About Us” pages, it isn’t the case for all of them.
This is where Hunter.io can come in handy. It’s a tool that automates the process of finding contact information by scouring domains for email addresses.
The free version allows for up to 25 monthly searches.
Once you create an account with Hunter, enter one of the website’s domains into the Domain Search bar and press “Enter”.
In this example, we looked up the contact details of a popular blog within the barbecue niche and received 8 email addresses to send pitches to.
Pitch Creation
Drafting the perfect pitch is often one of the most difficult parts of the blogger outreach process.
A good pitch needs to be compelling and showcase your website as an attractive partner to work with, but at the same time, it shouldn’t sound overly pushy or salesy.
The three key elements to include in any pitch you send out are:
- Brief explanation of your business, i.e. who you are
- The reason you’re reaching out to a given blog/website
- What you can offer to the blogger and their readers
When you’ve got dozens of different sites to pitch to, manually writing a 150-200 word email to each one of them can take up an entire day.
Once again, ChatGPT and WebPilot can help you get that done in a fraction of the time.
Of course, it isn’t as simple as asking GPT to provide you with a pitch template you can mindlessly copy and send out to individual bloggers.
You still need to make your pitches sound unique and personalised. With that being said, there are some common elements to include in every pitch:
- Brief subject line that encourages the receiver to open your message
- Clever or humorous, niche-related opening sentence to break the ice
- Three different guest post topics you can write for their site with a short description of the unique value they’ll provide
ChatGPT, combined with WebPilot to scan the target website to make your pitch relate to its content, is more than capable of writing such pitches.
Here’s the prompt we used:
“Using the WebPilot plugin, write a blogger outreach pitch to with the goal of writing a guest post on the site. Include a subject line, a clever opening sentence to break the ice, and three guest post topics with an explanation of their unique value to the blog. My website is and it’s focused on.”
Here’s an example of a pitch written by GPT:
As with anything generated by GPT, you should still always proofread and verify that the information provided is accurate and relevant to your website.
Monitoring Progress
Keep monitoring your outreach progress after you send out all the pitches.
Keep tabs on your messages with the bloggers to assess which pitches worked best, and which ones were met with a negative response (or no response at all).
Remember that not all publications will reply right away.
Some of the more popular bloggers’ inboxes are drowning in similar requests, and they may only be able to get to your pitch in a few days’ time.
There’s no shame in sending a follow-up email, either!
All in all, monitoring the performance of your pitches and making the right adjustments based on your findings will help improve the outreach process for the future.
Without this crucial last step of your blogger outreach campaign, you’ll risk making the same mistakes with each new pitch.
The Results Are In
Since the start of the campaign, the site’s organic traffic has seen a significant increase of 316%, from 8,862 to 36,878 sessions per month.
During this period, the site’s monthly revenue grew from $6.3k to $37.3k – an increase of 493%.
On top of this, the number of keywords that the client is ranking for in the top 10 positions of the search results has increased by 86% from 697 to 1,133.
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