How I secured top-10 rankings for my small business client with a major experience boost leading into the holidays.

Opportunity

• Business: Increase e-commerce revenue via SEO & conversion-rate optimization tactics (simple, right? 🙂 )
• UX: Fix banner formatting (HTML) and redesign banners using consistent brand style, fix CSS/HTML errors with responsiveness
• SEO: Increase organic traffic (search interest) and preserve rankings for brand-specific keywords, boost rank for #1 traffic-generating keyword (“swiss chocolate”) and geomodified keywords

The Way Forward

October-November 2016: Unlike previous agency work for ArtLiveMedia, this conversion rate optimization work I undertook for Teuscher Chicago was solely for a small business owner, so it involved going above and beyond SEO strategy into…

• CSS & HTML customization (fixing CSS margins, errors with responsive display)
• Banner design & branding
• E-commerce technical SEO (Robots.txt, XML sitemap, 301 redirects, rel=canonical tags)

All of these I saw as fixes to improve the experience, and thus reduce bounce rate & cart abandonment. I’m not a developer, but part of the agility needed to be a small-business digital consultant does involve diving into technical issues, as needed — so I was happy to use HTML/CSS knowledge for quick fixes here, including improved display for smaller devices.

Next, banner design (pictured) & brand CSS selection was made possible with the help of Canva.com, a great design creation tool I’d recommend for small business purposes.

Certainly — though my specialty is SEO — to get results for small business you need to be able to think “on your feet” from a design & UX perspective as well… and respond quickly.

You can see the results per SEM Rush data, with e-commerce traffic projected to rise even post–holiday season. Organic traffic via keyword ranks continues to be an SEO success story.