Path Digital › Projects › Organic foods website – onsite/offsite SEO (3-4/17)
• Business: position site for organic growth prior to product launch, get a sense of competitive landscape in organic search, do necessary SEO work upfront
• SEO: consult to offer client an SEO roadmap for success using “step 1” onsite tactics (see below)
• SEO: streamline optimization with a spreadsheeted site audit and utilizing Shopify apps
March-April 2018: Serenity Kids was in a unique niche in the organic baby food market, and as a smaller player getting ready to enter the highly competitive organic food space – with products soon to be available for purchase on their Shopify site – they knew that they needed to invest in SEO first.
With my Shopify SEO experience, I know the platform does some things well out of the box, but not others. My SEO site audit is really an ideal way for e-commerce businesses in Serenity Kids’ position to set up as quickly as possible for organic growth, because: A) it’s extremely efficient and prioritizes the actual SEO tactics that will make an impact line-by-line, B) it utilizes platform-specific expertise and leans Shopify apps for things like Google index fixes and Schema (rich snippet) markup.
This was a small, two-week project that delivered the following:
• In-depth keyword analysis (including topical keywords for blog post creation)
• Shopify customer review strategy & recommendations
• Technical SEO efforts, including speed/performance analysis & Shopify work
• Onsite content creation (targeting keywords)
• Page title & meta description optimization (for SEO AND click-throughs)
• Blog content strategy, including for recipe posts based on keywords
• Offsite SEO strategy: competitor backlink analysis & insights
At this point in my SEO career I’ve got the platform ins and outs of both Shopify and WordPress down pat, so when I call myself an “SEO consultant” that doesn’t mean I won’t roll up my sleeves and do implementation work, too. It all comes down to cost. (Sometimes, it’s more cost-efficient to have a developer take the site audit spreadsheet and decide how to implement the tasks I’ve prioritized; but with both WordPress and Shopify, it will typically cost less for me to.)
In addition to the immediate onsite SEO tasks at hand (including some Google index clean-up), the SEO strategy I delivered was designed to also set up Serenity Kids well into the future with recommendations for customer reviews — it doesn’t appear that reviews are going away as a critical part of businesses’ SEO and marketing strategy anytime soon — content creation, backlinks, and lots more.
Not to toot my own horn (too much 🙂 ), but in my experience, you can’t do it more efficiently than this.
If you’ve got a simply amazing business idea that will take off through a PR campaign and/or word of mouth, maybe you can just hope that turns into hundreds of backlinks on its own and you won’t need to hire an “SEO guy” — but in truth, SEO, like design and website development, is just one other essential digital service for small to midsize online businesses in 2018.