Magento SEO Success: Recovered From Google Medic Update Penalty, Achieved 110% Organic Revenue

This Case Study is for Respirator Shop – A leading dust masks supplier based in the UK

First, we were contacted by our valued customer to help migrate their existing Magento 1 store to Magento 2 to leverage the benefit of the advanced platform. We successfully migrated their webshop, they benefitted a lot from our capabilities and knowledge about Magento 2 platform.

Respirator Shop experienced a staggering blow from the Google Medic update and they were much worried about a sudden drop in organic traffic and sales which started happening from August 2018.

As a professional SEO company, we analyzed and shared our findings with actual facts on why their online e-commerce business is getting on the back foot. A complete analysis backed by actual facts helped them understand the issue.

The site was already performing well and delivering a good amount of traffic until July 2018.

Now they wanted us to recover their organic traffic back on track. And this was not easy to achieve within a stipulated time frame.

The site was already performing well and delivering a good amount of traffic until July 2018.

Now they wanted us to recover their organic traffic back on track. And this was not easy to achieve within a stipulated time frame.

As you can see in the screenshot above Aug. 1 update came hard on it and suddenly organic traffic went down by more than 50%.

The update affected mostly those industries which are related to health, finance, and anything related that could affect users’ well-being.

They have given the name YMYL to this kind of website (Your Money or Your Life).

We believed that the site didn’t qualify as a trustworthy source and our goal was to rebuild the EAT(Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).

Step #1: Keyword Analysis
We went 6 months back to identify which keywords and pages were delivering the best value and generating high business revenue for them.

During thorough analysis from webmaster tools and our official SEMRUSH account, we got to know about the keywords that were working like top KPIs for them in the past. When we started working with the company, they couldn’t get their category page to rank for the target keywords.

It was a challenging task as the majority of the keywords which were sending huge traffic to their site were short tail keywords with high competition while many of them were not appearing in even the top 100 results on Google.

Step #2: Technical Analysis
After finishing keyword research, we conducted a technical analysis to find out what causes crawling, indexing, and duplication issues. We have done that part using the screaming frog SEO tool which helped us to identify almost all major technical issues such as URL duplication issues, 404 errors, broken links, Canonicals, response code issues, etc.

The major issue we found on their site was.html.html at the end of URLs. Our team of Magento SEO experts and certified Magento developers collaborated together to solve it effectively. It’s an obvious thing that you must have an experienced web development team in place if you want to solve unforeseen issues on an immediate basis.

Apart from that, the URL versions non-www and HTTP were set up onto a single version www HTTPS with temporary 302 redirections which we changed to 301 permanent for link juice advantages.

Pro Tip: Take a look at your top business products before you make a final decision to remove them.

Step #3: Creating Landing Pages
Along with the above 2 steps, we started doing competitor analysis. It helped us to know which keywords are best for business and got some ideas on creating effective landing pages too.

Fortunately, there are tons of SEO tools out there that can help to identify how your competition is driving traffic and catching people’s attention.

We created relevant landing pages on their site which helped a lot.

Step #4: Onpage Optimization
After having a complete set of target keywords on hand, we optimized their business category and product pages with effective meta tags, heading tags, content optimization, image alt and title tags, internal linking, robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and other important elements.

In addition, we found a keyword cannibalization issue on a few pages that we solved and this helped us to improve the CTR of their website in comparison to the last 6 months after we started the project.

Step #5: The Skyscraper Technique
Today’s most useful tactics are to drive organic traffic to your website.

You might be thinking, how does the skyscraper technique work, right?

Well, we found some good blog topics from their competitor’s websites that have performed well in the past for them.

We created a list of them and started creating fresh new content on the same topics with an effective structure and thorough details which can be useful to the target audience.

We found the above topic published on one of our competitor’s websites. It has a 140 monthly search volume which is not a bad thing, right? We have recorded this topic as ideas for the new blog post and written a new post with a little bit more info, updated details, and better structure. And luckily it started ranking on the first page of Google.co.uk within a few days. See the screenshot below.

Unlike others, we don’t churn out post after post. Our SEO professionals take enough time to research & write the most in-depth blog posts and thus our scalable content marketing strategy becomes guaranteed to outperform the original one posted by other competitors.

All the above steps helped us to achieve the below result:

In the above screenshot, you can see we’ve achieved one of the top competitive keywords “dust mask” on page 1. The keyword contains a very high search volume – 6600 / month.

We have achieved this with many other keywords over time and thus, we are able to see good improvements in organic sales.

Step #6: Blog Optimization
When we started SEO on the website, the blog was not available. So, first, we set up the blog with the current design to get the advantage of content marketing and reach out to potential customers.

In terms of blog optimization, we have set up the following features:

Email Newsletter
Effective Font Style
Search Functionality
Social Media Sharing Option
Comment box
Step #7: GTM & Ecommerce Tracking Setup
As the project came in, we got the Google analytics access on our email account from the customer. But there was no e-commerce data flowing since they had missed to setup this essential feature and hence the organic sales were not being tracked, Our developers implemented it well.

You might already have heard about Google Tag Manager. If not, don’t worry. Here’s a brief on it to explain what you can achieve by using it.

It’s a free tool that allows us to manage and deploy marketing tags (like Google analytics, snippets, and other tracking pixels) on our website without having to modify the existing code.

Through GTM (Google tag manager), we set up Google analytics, phone conversion tracking, email conversion tracking, and shopping cart items, as well as other essential tracking that can be helpful in making crucial decisions in your business and SEO optimization.

After setting up this feature, we are now effectively making changes on the site in terms of conversion optimization and which is really generating good results.

Step #8: High Quality and Relevant Backlinks
Of course, backlinks are still effective in 2019.

So, what was the actual process?

The website had no healthy & high-quality backlinks.

We work on many ecommerce sites from different countries, we already have filtered out high-quality backlink data.

But was it enough? No.

When it comes to building high-quality backlinks, we always prefer doing backlinks analysis of top competitors which have been ranking in top position.

Our process is simple and straightforward. We found competitor backlinks using our paid SEO tools which helped us to create the most relevant backlinks for the domain.

Our goal was not just to achieve good keyword ranks but to drive result-oriented traffic to their website which can increase ecommerce sales and profits.

Key Takeaways from This Case Study

This is a proven SEO strategy and can be used to achieve good ranks in any niche.

We have repeated this process on other SEO projects too and we have got success with a similar result. Keep in mind, that consistency is the key when it comes to great results using SEO.

By following the steps outlined in this Case study you’ll be able to recover your website from Medic update and achieve your desired business goals.