How I helped a large BigCommerce cleaning & safety supply store overcome technical SEO hurdles and boost results. Then COVID hit.

Opportunity

• Business: improve engaged traffic & generate revenue from organic search with my implementation-based approach and knowledge of the BigCommerce platform
• E-commerce (conversion rate optimization): work out a custom SEO-based development solution (overseeing developer tasks) to display intro content on category pages above-the-fold, helping with onpage engagement
• SEO: identify top performing e-commerce keywords, improve on search targets, resolve product Schema markup errors so that star ratings appeared in search , and lead development solutions where we needed BigCommerce customizations

Pre-COVID SEO Improvements: The Way Forward

July 2019–January 2020: I worked with the safety & cleaning supply e-commerce store Harmony Lab & Safety Supplies on and off from the summer of 2019 through early 2020. As a larger BigCommerce store they were interested in finding an SEO provider like myself who could work to find and implement custom platform-specific solutions, including for:
• Migration SEO: URL mapping (looking at historical data for ranking pages using the tool SEM Rush)
• Page level tweaks to boost keyword relevancy
• Fixing heading tag duplication in BC template files
• A custom solution to re-purpose engaging category “intro” content above the fold

Agencies can’t always provide the level of service or know-how, even, when it comes to being resourceful and finding platform-specific solutions. YES, this is an important question to ask whoever you’re evaluating for your site’s SEO: do you have specific solutions for my specific web platform? I also will mention to prospective clients that it’s very important that whoever they choose for SEO services explains how they will actually get things done. With large e-commerce stores, a big risk I have found is that accountability tends to be passed to and from between people to the point that timelines are habitually extended and work get lost in the shuffle.

With Harmony, we were able to achieve quite a lot over a few months with me, one expert BigCommerce developer, and my simple, transparent project management system that kept the project contained and us both accountable. I also helped on the SEO side with the rebrand of their business name.

This was all coincidental timing with the COVID-19 pandemic that hit the U.S. in March; I’ve broken out the performance data from when I was consulting for them vs. what happened to Google impressions & clicks from “face mask” searches that their product pages were in a good spot for. No one in their right mind would ever look to profit from a pandemic — but Harmony was positioned in the right place at the right time to truly help a lot of people in a time of crisis.

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