Client X

Search Engine Optimization

Client X is one of South Africa’s top discount megastores, based in Gauteng. Renowned for offering the finest merchandise at low prices. Their products are impressive, with a wide variety of bed linen, curtains, towels, blankets, rugs, fabrics, and more. Their online offering is expanding, with thousands of already satisfied customers nationwide through the ecommerce channel.

232.43%

Increase in Conversions

488.6%

Increase in Revenue

77.7%

Increase in Organic Traffic

Client X

Search Engine Optimization

Client X is one of South Africa’s top discount megastores, based in Gauteng. Renowned for offering the finest merchandise at low prices. Their products are impressive, with a wide variety of bed linen, curtains, towels, blankets, rugs, fabrics, and more. Their online offering is expanding, with thousands of already satisfied customers nationwide through the ecommerce channel.

232.43%

Increase in Conversions

488.6%

Increase in Revenue

77.7%

Increase in Organic Traffic

Brief & Objectives

Client X approached Ruby Digital for SEO Services to increase sales through the online store as well as to build bigger brand awareness through the wholesaler & retailer linen industry.

With research, Ruby Digital complied a comprehensive SEO strategy with specific goals and determinators of success, including generating high-quality content based on specific industry-related search terms, improvement in the authority of the Client X domain, setting and improving specific KPIs related to client needs and goals, and lastly, working to close the gap of direct and non-direct competitor keywords.

Challenges

With the client using a challenging web builder as the CMS to sell and market their products, we were already limited to the amount of optimisation that we could perform. This web builder is a closed-source platform, and Ruby was limited to the amount of editing and technical optimising the site user could perform.

Some of the limitations that we saw with the web builder platform included:

Customisation of the URL; we were limited to what could be customised on the URLs, and this made it difficult for Ruby to apply the relevant SEO best practice to Site Architecture.
Page Layouts: We weren’t able to edit page layouts to any of the web pages except for the home page.
Collections (Product categories): Essentially, your category page that holds all your items, cannot be customised to set the needs of a user or SEO best practices, you are limited to what collection you can create and how you optimise them.
Shopify App Reliance: Shopify is very app dependent and a lot of apps that help the website, can be expensive. Many of the free apps only work with certain themes and/or are limited to what they offer.
No SEO-affordable App; Specific SEO apps (plugins) have specific functions to not only help optimise the website for SEO purposes but also help keep website code clean and uncluttered without having to increase specific custom HTML into the backend.
Limited FAQ Sections: With the web builder, you can only add specific and limited FAQs – this is a missed opportunity to not only apply basic SEO principles but also to improve brand awareness through the “People Also Own” section on Search Engines.

Our Solution

Ruby started with a formulated and proven SEO strategy on October 1st, 2022. Looking past the challenges that comes from the web builder used, we began building a strong consistent SEO campaign, ensuring that the technical SEO and user experience was best optimised, as well as understood how competitors were comparing on the search results.
SEO keyword research was fundemental in our approach, as Client X has a large variety of products, with some very big competitors targeting the same industry, meaning that it was important for Ruby to understand all types of long-tail, short tail and exact matched keywords.
We have continued to implement strong optimisations for specific branded keywords and non-branded keywords.
Ruby identified important keywords and referring domains that competitors are ranking for, or have pointing towards their website. With this information, we created a strategy to improve Client X’s domain authority by submitting specifically targeted articles on high-authority domains.

Results

Over the 9-month period (October 2022 to June 2023) since Ruby started the SEO campaign, the results seen from the implementation of our SEO strategy have been positive.

– Organic Conversions have increased by 232.43%

– Organic Revenue has increased by 488.6%

– Organic Traffic has increased by 77.7%

Disclaimer: Client X chooses to remain anonymous in respect of their request and the competitive nature of their industry.