This is the first case study we’re publishing on this website – time valuable and most of our clients come from referrals (read what they say about working with us) – so we will keep it short and focused:
The Business
Ledgebay.com is one of the several dozens of e-Commerce sites we’ve grown. The brand is selling high-quality paint by numbers kits and accessories. Thanks to the product quality they really stand apart from the competition and their website converts at a decent rate.
The Challenge
Most blogs on stores selling similar “paint by numbers” kits are all the same. The product is really specific and these blogs all cover a limited array of topics. The blog posts describe how to use the kits, prepare the canvas, apply the paint, dry it up – but that’s about it.
In other words, the store “ran out of topics” pretty fast – which is a pretty common issue that our customers come to us with. Yet there was no Google traffic yet.
Initially the Ledgebay store had under 10 articles, most of them generic – the largest one was “The ultimate guide to paint by numbers”.
The content was obviously underperforming and the owners saw no way around it.
The goal
Well, the obvious goal for any e-commerce store is to simply get more sales.
A more specific goal was to secure long-term organic Google traffic that would be relatively cheap to maintain. The store owners did some keyword research and figured the niche was relatively easy to rank in, so expectations for SEO and organic traffic were high.
Considering the site owners felt like they already ran out of blog post ideas, the situation started to look like they needed to adjust the plan and spend more on ads and influencer marketing.
The Solution & Process
Everything we did for Ledgebay was within our content planning service and our blog traffic audit service.
We started by studying the products, and competitors’ alternatives, as well as running keyword research from the ground up.
Based on the results of our research we decided to expand the semantics of the ledgebay.com domain by focusing the blog on the following areas:
1. Standard product-related topics
This part made sure all product-related queries are covered either by product pages or blog posts. Those were blog topics like
- paint by numbers for SKILL LEVEL
- paint by numbers for AUDIENCE
- paint by numbers CANVAS SIZE
- paint by numbers PAINTING PLOT
2. Topics relevant to aware customers (paint by numbers techniques, best practices, etc.)
These are informational articles that specifically address the interests of people who are about to buy paint by numbers kits or have bought them already before, e.g.
- paint by numbers blending
- paint by numbers light or dark first
- best paint brushes for paint by numbers
- art easels for paint by numbers
etc.
3. Topics that cater to potential customers that are not yet aware
These are people looking for gifts, new hobbies, willing to learn to paint, etc. This angle gave us topics like
- gifts for AGE
- best art gifts for AUDIENCE
- hobbies for X
- painting hobby
and so on.
4. Tangential topics targeting wider audience
These can be both relevant to paint by numbers customers and wider audience –
- general paint & varnish tips
- art framing
- selling art
- interior design & art placements,
etc.
Once published, these blog posts would be used for identifying new post ideas and non-obvious interests and search queries of the target audience.
All in all we’ve created a content plan of 60+ diverse blog posts where every post would be to-the-point and not competing with any other page on the website. We’ve broken down larger topics into shorter dedicated posts for that purpose.
Blogging strategy audit – 6 months in
The company used their freelance writers to produce the posts from our content plan and published them regularly regularly, which is essential.
Blogging consistency is important because it means Google Search Console accumulates a lot of valuable data. GSC is a tech analytics service that tracks, among other things, impressions and positions of your site for ALL search queries.
Best part – GSA takes a couple of minutes to set up and you can’t get this data on any third-party tools.
We offer an exclusive blog strategy audit service with GSC analysis built in, and we suggest every client to run an audit at least once per year.
We ran a GSC audit for Ledgebay about 6 months after they started blogging according to our plan. With the audit we’ve focused on:
- maximizing performance of existing content (find keywords that pages “accidentally” show up for and add them to the respective pages for solid rankings)
- finding new post ideas (well-written articles always pick up unexpected phrases ranking deep in Google’s result pages)
The audit report recommendations were quickly implemented and the store team continue to blog and build links.
The timeline
We signed on Ledgebay in April 2020, and suggested a content plan for them within several weeks. They used a team of freelance writers to produce the content (all long enough and detailed) and published the articles over the summer.
In August we ran Google Search Console audit for them and produced on-page recommendations for the published blog posts based on first-hand ranking data. Additionally, we’ve produced an actionable plan for page interlinking and new post ideas (again, all data-based).
The results came in November, right when most people shop for gifts the most.
Note: you can absolutely get your results faster, if you want – you’d just need to blog more often and spend more initially.
The results
Without providing any confidential sales data, we can proudly say that Ledgebay came to the holiday season with 4 times more traffic they had in May:
Smart content planning, consistent implementation by Ledgebay, and subsequent audit resulted in a 2x organic traffic increase in November 2020, then progressing to an impressive 4x from April’s numbers in December 2020.
That means, they’ve doubled their organic traffic in 6 months, and quadrupled it in 7 months. As a new player in the niche, Ledgebay were able to get a share of the market right during the peak shopping season.
Here’s what CEO of Ledgebay had to say about working with us:
Takeaways
The founders did a great job ordering and publishing the blog posts, and you can expect similar results if you pick a relaxed pace.
If you want to supercharge your content creation and publish 4+ articles a week you can expect amazing results way faster.
It’s essential that you implement all our suggestions consistently, blog without breaks, and run at least one GSC audit yearly to fine-tune the strategy and maximize the effect of the content already published.
Ready for 4x organic traffic growth on your e-commerce store in 7 months?
Get in touch now for results in 2022:
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