SEO Case Study

Retail: E-Commerce

Company Name: Houseplant Resource Center
Size: 7 Employees
Location: California, USA

Search Engine Optimisation

About the Client

Our client has built a strong social following as a houseplant specialist, author of numerus gardening books, and retailer of gardening products. Claire and her team have developed a large number of their own brand gardening products, as well as offering a membership scheme and plant care training courses to her audience.

Project Goal

Increase organic search traffic to the e-commerce website, using a combination of top of funnel ‘question’ search terms as well as ‘high intent’ product based search terms, with the objective of converting organic traffic into product sales.

The Results

When we started the site had circa 530 page view per day (15k per month). Over the first four months we worked on optimising the existing content and site structure, before we began building new content and backlinks. The site averages 91,000 page view per month (3k per day), with season peaks hitting 121k. That’s a 574% increase in organic traffic in just under 18 months.

How We Did It

SEO Audit: First, we conducted a comprehensive audit of the client’s website to identify technical SEO issues, including no HTML sitemap, 303 errors, missing meta data, poor Core Web Vitals. Over 300 low quality backlinks were disavowed.

Keyword Research: Reverse engineered all traffic to five main competitors, to uncover over 1,000 new keyword topics, including plant care advice, houseplant products and split them into top of funnel and bottom of funnel. Identified all low competition search terms to go into content production.

Content Creation: Created over 142 high-quality keyword-optimised blog posts, product pages, and landing pages that provided value to users and addressed common search queries. This focused on product roundup reviews, how-to guides, and product searches.

On-Page Optimisation: Improved over 200 pages with meta data, header tags, then we introduced an improved internal linking strategy by de-optimising over 300 anchor texts. Blog posts had citations included from high authority botanical sources. Product page content was increased to add more product synonyms.

Link Building: Implemented a white-hat link-building strategy to acquire over 50 high-authority backlinks from authority websites including homesandgardens.com, dailymail.co.uk, and thespruce.com, by responding to Journalists requests, and guest posting.

Performance Tracking: Used advanced analytics tools to monitor website traffic, keyword rankings, and conversion rates. Regularly adjusted strategies based on performance data to ensure continuous improvement.

Founder’s Comments

“Ben and his team know how to deep-dive into data to find pearls that I could not have imagined existed. In peak season we hit well over 120k organic page views per month now. ROI is more than satisfactory, allowing me to keep reinvesting to improve the traffic over a long term basis”.

Campaign Results

Organic Traffic: Daily clicks increased from 530 to 3,000 per day, a +574% increase in organic traffic from the point that we started working on the project.

Link Building: Over 50 new high authority backlinks, from major online publications.

Keyword Ranking: 271 keywords ranked in position #1 on Google

Content: Produced 142 high-quality blog posts, and optimised 200 pages of existing content