Recently, we've had the good fortune of helping a major ecommerce selling medicines and OTC products with the rankings of its online store, achieving:
– Milestone 1: Rank 428 new products generating 75,813 clicks in six months.
– Milestone 2: Grow organic traffic from 2,077,619 to 2,775,255 users, a 33.58% jump.
– Milestone 3: Increase transactions on the SEO channel by 59.58%.
Although it's getting harder to crack the top 3 Google results, we're very proud of what we've achieved for this client when it comes to organic traffic acquisition.
You're probably eager to know the details behind this case study.
But first, let us paint the context we stepped into:
Pharmaceutical ecommerce looking for an SEO agency
The non-prescription medicine industry is one of the most competitive in the online world.
Big established players, longtime manufacturers and distributors, fighting relentlessly for a slice of the digital pie.
These online pharmacies invest heavy resources in web positioning.
At iSocialWeb, however, this is the context where we feel like fish in water.
Because:
Despite the huge challenge of working for a pharmaceutical ecommerce, these are the results of the last 12 months:
60% more transactions and 20% more conversions from the organic-traffic channel, according to Google Analytics
As we like to say: "It's not magic, it's SEO".
Claiming a seat at the table of big online pharmacy ecommerces
"We want to hire an SEO agency that guides us, argues for the changes to be made, and prioritizes tasks based on our objectives."
Before taking on the online pharmacy's web positioning, they made two points very clear to us:
Not a promising start…
However, we're used to working in high-demand environments.
So, we got to work starting with an SEO audit of the domain to get to the bottom of things.
SEO audit results:
The project audit confirmed what the client had mentioned:
And, in addition, several added problems:
All of this was dead weight dragging the client's web positioning down too much.
The challenge: getting rid of the legacy
Up to this point, business as usual for this kind of project.
In fact:
Any SEO consultant would have proposed a roadmap tackling the domain's problems with a standard approach:
And then, wait to climb the SERPs for the most competitive terms.
Here comes the fun part.
Our client informs us that due to internal workloads, the development team had very limited resources to devote to SEO, and most of the implementations would have to wait.
Therefore, we have to come up with solutions beyond the ordinary while working within the same tech stack…
In short:
We found a client that was going all in, but didn't have all the development resources available at the start of the project.
These conditions were far from ideal to get to work.
But that was the situation, and we took it at the agency as a personal challenge.
The solution: the SAIL (Scalable Automated Internal Linking) technique
Given the limitations of the client's development team, we felt like we were going into a ball game with one hand tied to our leg.
The day-to-day at our SEO Agency, iSocialWeb, is normally about proposing solutions and moving one step ahead of the client.
But this time, the client's pace and ours were totally out of sync.
And it genuinely put the project's short- and long-term results at risk.
However, the way out came from adopting a compromise solution.
Key 1: Prioritize SEO tasks with business impact
For these reasons, we decided to focus on:
1. Improving the domain's global authority
2. Raising CTR on Top URLs and for the terminology to rank
3. Driving qualified traffic via an external link strategy
4. Impacting sales through automated internal linking
In other words, giving up anything that wouldn't have a direct short-term impact on the business's bottom line.
We communicated this to the client… and got the green light.
But… the question was whether this would be enough to pull the project forward and, of course, to know where to start.
Key 2: Bet on automated SEO
Thanks to iSocialWeb's SEO consultant in charge of the project, we gave a sound answer to this dilemma.
The idea was very simple and barely required development resources from the client, but if done right, it would solve internal linking issues and PageRank distribution in one fell swoop.
In other words:
The client would take minimal risk (low costs and short implementation times) but the potential gains were maximum.
Fortunately, we weren't wrong:
We're talking clearly about the SAIL technique.
Within two months we got what we call iSocialweb's "Boom effect" that sooner or later happens across all our projects.
Though never before in less than 60 days.
But… what is SAIL?
You're probably wondering:
SAIL (Scalable Automated Internal Linking) consists of creating links non-manually that connect your site's different pages under semantic criteria to properly transfer domain authority across your site while improving user experience.
In this case, a small piece of code was enough to associate the most popular categories with each of their peers.
Concentrating 85% of the domain's pages within just 3 clicks from the Home.
SIL linking example:
This, together with proper content curation of the project's most important URLs and fixing some cannibalizations, had a "boom effect" in just 2 months.
In short:
Thanks to this initiative, our hands were free to:
This shift in strategy translated into:
Results: what working with iSocialWeb has meant for this pharmaceutical ecommerce
Beyond the milestones mentioned:
Adopting this strategy has meant that in 1 year we've achieved:
1. Ranked for 11,333 new keywords that brought 40,095 monthly visits gained.
Landing the first position for keywords as competitive as:
2. Improved rankings for 8,447 keywords, gaining 23,645 monthly visits.
3. Held position for 862 keywords, gaining 3,356 monthly visits. Most of them from branding growth, as we see in the image.
In net terms, the project has generated around 40,500 additional monthly visits (Ahrefs data) from keywords much more attractive to the business.
Allowing a considerable saving of resources in paid-traffic acquisition.
In conclusion: the SEO industry is going through a mini revolution.
There are new automated SEO techniques shaping part of the present.
The "SAIL technique" or "Scalable and Automated Internal Linking" is one of them.
Because:
Increasingly, automations are necessary to help execute tasks, shorten times and reduce costs.
Otherwise, bottlenecks are inevitable.
Part of the value we add at an SEO Agency like iSocialweb is avoiding these bottlenecks.
In short:
The path taken proves it, and in this sense it's been exciting, although there's still much to do.
The dynamics of the business and the day-to-day set a tough reality that demands close attention, but at the same time it's exciting.
Still to be addressed and finished off:
At a technical level, solving all these points is straightforward, but things change when development resources are limited, and especially when you have to tackle a project with thousands of URLs.