Almost everyone who has a general knowledge of digital marketing and has even been in contact with the digital world somehow is now familiar with the concept of SEO and how necessary it is. Indeed, SEO is extremely important and imperative not only for a website to rank high in search engines, but also for it to fulfill its purpose, to act in accordance with a certain strategy, to plan for the future and to maintain its existence in a healthy way.
SEO is a long-term process that involves a lot of technical details and requires meticulous planning of multi-layered, comprehensive work to be carried out: especially when it comes to e-commerce sites, where new products and content are constantly added.
However, even though this is the ideal scenario, brands may prefer short-term work due to budget planning or concerns about achieving the desired results. The authorized dealer of luxury watches brands, whose project we realized, is one of them.
In this article, let's discover the project we realized together without mentioning the brand of the dealer company due to confidentiality request and the brand of luxury watches due to copyright issues.
Just before we start exploring the project, let’s boost the excitement with a small sample of the successful results we have achieved :). As of today, the number of keywords that the website takes place in the top 100 results is 1,500 and 91 of them are in the top 3. Likewise, the website’s organic traffic reached 7,500 visits per month. The average monthly value of this traffic is close to 1.000 dollars…
The key to success lies in the right planning
For the on-site SEO works of the luxury watches authorized seller, we collaborated with the software development agency that developed the e-commerce site. As aforementioned the firm is an authorized dealer of luxury watch brands and serves with 5 different stores across Turkey as well as online catalog type, non-sales e-commerce web site.
The company has a web site structure where only the products are comprehensively displayed and sales are carried out in the store, as the watches they sell have an extremely high monetary value and they appeal to luxury consumers.
The agency that developed the e-commerce website noted that their organic search traffic was below expectations and that they were not ranking as high in keyword searches as competitors' sites.
The watch sales company had a designated limited trial period for SEO and a limited budget allocated accordingly, as they were concerned about their success in this competitive industry. Since we had to act accordingly, we planned an on-site SEO strategy for a 3 – 6 months period.
In this framework, we meticulously prepared our business plan due to limited opportunities. Our scope and goals were as below.
- Fixing all technical SEO issues on the site,
- Raising the quality score of the site,
- Preparing genuine, highly qualified content for the product categories,
- Creating a blog and drafting several articles for it that are of interest and provide quality answers to the topics that potential customers are searching for,
- Preparing a comparative analysis of competing sites,
- Increasing the visibility and keyword volume of the e-commerce site in organic searches with peripheral keywords without compromising quality,
- Creating a permanent increase in the organic traffic volume
In our analysis, we came across a critical issue that needs to be solved immediately, as it was going to affect all other steps: The general lack of infrastructure and service quality in the hosting services offered in Turkey.
The hosting service you choose can determine the fate of your site!
Unfortunately, inadequacies such as the fact that hosting services in our country are mostly sold as standard package services and do not allow flexible resource optimization poses a serious problem, especially for large-scaled sites.
In our initial analysis, we found that many problems on the e-commerce site were caused by this problem. Since the standard resources offered by the hosting package were not sufficient for the needs of the site, the site frequently experienced server errors with the 500 extensions. This problem was so serious that during the analysis, we were not even able to crawl and analyze many pages in more detail due to these 500 errors.
It is true that moving large-scaled sites to other servers is a difficult operation. However, an e-commerce site that aims for success unfortunately has no other alternative in such a server failure scenario. Within the framework of our communication, the software agency agreed with our proposal to move the site and successfully carried out this challenging operation. We monitored the structural status of the site throughout the migration process through comparative analysis.
After this critical threshold was crossed, we had the opportunity to move much faster and prepared a detailed guide that included both page-based critical errors and comprehensive explanations on how to fix them. We closely followed the technical updates realized by the software development agency on the site in line with the guide we prepared. In a process spanning approximately three months, we completely fixed the critical errors on the site.
From December 2023 to February – March 2024, the number of organic pages (yellow line), the monetary value generated by organic traffic (orange line) and the views in search results (burgundy line) increased rapidly with the technical work we carried out and the content we carefully prepared. Impressions, in particular, experienced incredible breakthroughs that increased 5 times on average
High quality, engaging and compelling content always wins
How should a content strategy be determined?
Another issue that is at least as important as on-site technical tasks in SEO efforts is the creation of high-quality content in line with the SEO strategy. For this reason, we conducted a comprehensive competitor and keyword analysis simultaneously with the technical works we carried out.
While we are on this subject, let's open another small parenthesis for “SEO content”. The first observations about the Google core update released this month (August 2024) are that the expectation of keyword density has decreased even more, and the importance given to the quality of the content has increased.
Maybe it may seem a bit old-fashioned to say this for those who know the subject, but it is always useful to remember the basics from time to time. For this reason, when it comes to “SEO content”, we need to remember that technical texts that focus more on keywords but remain superficial in providing information will not provide the expected benefit.
Another important point is compatibility with the brand’s communication language or tone of voice in other words. This issue is important for brand perception and brand communication rather than the technical side. Content prepared without paying attention to the use of a language suitable for brand communication does not have the desired effect in reaching consumers and can also damage brand perception.
Platypus approach
As a highly ambitious agency in inbound marketing, our approach to this subject is a bit different for these and similar reasons:
It is a great pleasure for us to get to know the industry dynamics of the companies which we work with and the projects that we realize, and the services and products they offer, closely and deeply. We also believe that this is imperative to produce more successful results.
Through each company in our portfolio, we gain a different know-how in many different fields, enriching our own knowledge base and establishing a much closer bond with our customers. This approach brings many benefits to us and the company we serve. In the light of the in-depth knowledge we have gained, we become able to bring out-of-the-box suggestions to our customers and accurately analyze the expectations and needs of the target audience. This enables us to identify the issues that the target audience is in search of solutions and to produce spot-on outputs during the production of genuine content.
We can say that this is why we are assertive in inbound marketing. While preparing product and category content and blog posts, we do not act only with a keyword-oriented or technical approach. We are aware that every piece of content we create is important to connect with the target audience and offer them an engaging universe. We make sure that the content we create is useful at every stage of the conversion funnel and that it is of a quality that can be distributed through all digital marketing channels such as websites, blogs and social media.
Building a rich universe of content for an e-commerce site with a stepwise approach
For this reason, our content manager Gülay dived into the deep world of luxury watches, of which the watch sales company is an authorized dealer, and went through comprehensive research and learning process about the brand's history, product groups and individual products.
With a meticulousness that can be likened to finding the pearl in a single one among countless mussels, she prepared valuable content about the products and product categories, taking into account our keyword analysis, containing very enjoyable, nuanced details.
The same meticulous work was carried out for the articles to be included in the new blog. For example, in our research, we found that internet users frequently search for how to determine whether a luxury watch is genuine or not. Accordingly, we prepared a comprehensive guide on the subject and at the end of the article, we emphasized the importance of choosing authorized dealers such as the company whose project we are carrying out.
Keyword positions that gradually increase with high-quality content efforts
And the road to success
The meticulous approach we applied in this project paid off and as a result of our work, we increased the quality score of the site to 99 and the site became much richer and more satisfying in terms of keywords.
At the end of three months, we completed our work and moved on to the follow-up and reporting phase to see the results of the work done during the next three months.
At the end of six months, we tripled the site's organic search traffic in line with the project we realized and managed to outperform multiple competitor sites in keyword volume, search results and organic traffic figures.
Not only did we increase our position in many keywords to the top 10, but we also made significant gains in broad search results and peripheral keywords.
From December 2023 to February – March 2024, with the technical work we carried out and the content we carefully prepared; total impressions (first graph – purple line) and clicks (first graph – blue line) have settled on a new level and started to hover in the range of up to 3-fold increases compared to the previous period. Our average position in keywords became 10.7. Organic traffic continued to increase rapidly and gradually, climbing 3x compared to the previous period (second graph – orange line)
Platypus says;
This short-term SEO project, which we realized for a watch sales company, achieved its targeted goal by the company in the first phase, as we proceeded with the right planning. In the following periods, we are sure that it will achieve much better results with a long-term and systematic SEO work.
But there is an important point to mention here. This success does not belong to us alone: The fact that the company and the software agency that collaborated with us on behalf of the company approached SEO with realistic goals enabled us to achieve the goals together.
Miraculous results can be expected from SEO work performed with limited budgets and/or by people who are not sufficiently specialized in the subject. But on the contrary, this type of work often brings more harm than good.
Mistakes to be made in SEO works or practices that may benefit in the short term but cause serious damage in the long term can lead to destructive and difficult-to-recover results for companies.
Let's give an example from another project: A company we provide strategic consultancy services to had requested us to create a PBN (Private Blog Network) setup for SEO work.
We tried to explain that such a structure would bring more harm than good, that if this situation is detected by Google, we will not be included in the search results in any way, and that much larger investments will be required to compensate for such a loss. We tried to explain that it would be a much healthier approach for them to invest in a good inbound marketing strategy and produce valuable content instead of investing in such a structure.
Afterwards, we could not find the opportunity to continue our relationship with that company due to the differences in perspective.
For these and similar reasons, SEO work needs to be carried out in a highly ethical, future-oriented, transparent and professional manner. The source of the results produced should be explainable with analyzes and reports.
A few examples of the results we obtained...
