Promoting Online Tire Store: How Webcom Doubled Website Traffic In One Year

The screenshots below show traffic data by search engines for similar periods:

Based on the data, we can conclude that we chose an effective promotion strategy, which allowed us to quickly prepare the site for the first season. Thanks to this, it was possible to increase the number of site visitors by 50%, and further promotion increased organic traffic by 249% during the second season (March-May 2019).

Below is a graph comparing traffic from the organic channel for the year of work with the project.

The first thing was to analyze queries and competitor sites: the keywords for which competitors are ranked, as well as their website structure and backlinks profiles.

Competitors were selected on the basis of Serpstat data (Domain Analysis → SEO Research → Competitors) as well as based on the results of manual analysis of Google and Yandex SERP for high, middle and low-frequency queries.

The results of the analysis revealed the following points of traffic growth to the website:

The implementation of our recommendations allowed the client to increase revenue from the site. The following describes the work that has been done.

We have added functionality for creating pages by product parameters and their intersections in the CMS:

At the first stage of work, we collected semantics and created pages for queries with a frequency of 10 or more per year. The link to the page is placed on the corresponding page, depending on the selected parameters.

Pages were created if at least 1 product is available in stock. Otherwise, the pages were not created.

As a result, more than 1,100 pages were created along with separate sitemap.xml files for each page type. Sitemaps were added to Yandex Webmaster and the Google Search Console for detailed tracking of indexing of each page type.

Since the task was to attract regional traffic, it was decided to create 112 pages to directly target the largest cities in Belarus with a wide range of products, which had a positive effect on traffic from those areas. The business has delivery throughout Belarus, which makes it profitable to attract traffic from the targeted regions.

The actions taken to improve the backlinks profile are described above.

The result of working with the link profile appears in the graph below (using the graph from Serpstat for the number of referring domains/pages. The arrows indicate the start of work).

Distribution by SQI of referring domains in the graph below

The site quality index indicates how useful your site is for users according to Yandex.

The quality index is based on the size of the site's audience, the degree of user satisfaction with the site, the level of trust that users and Yandex place in this site, and other criteria. The calculation uses data received from Yandex services. The index value is updated regularly.

From the point of view of the SQI the reference profile is diverse. There are sites with both SQI 0 and SQI 1000. The largest part of sites is included in the SQI range from 110 to 1000.

Map of domains is presented below.

The .ru domain zone dominates. Then there are the .com and .by domain zones. (Remember that the site is promoting in Belarus.) Sites in the .ru domain zone are mostly thematic blogs.

The distribution of backlinks by Dofollow/Nofollow indicators is in the ratio of 279/57 according to Serpstat, there are no links from .edu and .gov sites .

The anchor list contains mostly non-anchor links (links where the anchor is the page URL), anchor links take a smaller part and in most cases, anchors have the following types:

During the season, we actively worked with forums and groups.

The work on building links from forums gave good, but not outstanding results. Working with Facebook groups, on the other hand, turned out to be very fruitful, as it allowed us to attract targeted traffic with good behavioral indicators and led to several conversions.

The image below shows the results of working with a social network during the spring season.

This increase in traffic from socials gave a significant increase in the average position of the queries in Yandex and Google (it was also affected by the delayed effect by links and content edits).

Optimization of the title, H1 and description meta tags was done for the site using the template generation functionality.

An example of page templates for tire sizes is presented below:

It should be noted that the greatest effect in the short term was provided by the optimization of tags and meta tags of product cards, which made it possible to significantly improve visibility on low-frequency queries, which led to an increase in traffic to the site.

During the analysis of the technical condition of the site, 2 fatal problems were identified: the content of the pages of product cards was closed from indexing; and loading speed and correct operation of the cart. It was almost impossible to place an order due to constant bugs and low page speed (the cart directly affected the page speed of the entire site, so this problem was crucial).

After opening the content for indexing and fixing the cart, we have noticed significant improvements in traffic from search engines and behavioral factors.

The content of product card pages is generally not unique, but useful. This did not prevent the growth of traffic to the product card pages for low-frequency requests.

Other optimization work was standard:

• configuring sitemap.xml and robots.txt files;

• setting the rel="canonical" attribute of the <link> tag;

• setting the redirects from duplicate pages;

• setting the correct server response for non-existent pages.
  

The main problem we faced was the lack of words and phrases which were necessary for optimization on the pages. To add keywords to the pages we have changed the product card preview:

Also on the site there are pages of tire models, where all information about these tires and a listing of tires of this model with sizes are displayed.

The preview of such pages also displayed a price in the From-To format.

There was a very good increase of Google search traffic after this modification.

Read other our use cases!

Good results were obtained during the year of promotion, but we do not stop there, as there are new growth points for the project. For example, the development of the site structure by car brand, the development of internal linking for the sale of sets (tires with wheels), crowd marketing, etc.