Protech Composites, Inc. sells carbon fiber products. So do countless other manufacturers and distributors. The game is a little different for Protech, and they needed an organic digital marketing strategy to reflect that.
To them, carbon fiber and the finished products that can be made with it constitute a passion. They deliver exceptionally high quality, low tolerance carbon fiber products, made with UV-resistant resin, suitable for a wide range of applications in engineering and manufacturing.
It only takes a five-minute stint going through their “About Us,” and “Resources” pages to see how seriously they take their business. It would almost make sense to assume that with such a unique business model, they face little enough competition that they wouldn’t need to invest heavily in organic digital marketing strategies, such as eCommerce SEO. One might almost correctly assume that marketing “does itself.”
Well, yes and no. It’s not necessarily wrong to assume that a niche market will be faced with a lower volume of competition than those dealing in broader consumer markets, but the competition that is present is often much fiercer. It’s also often the case that businesses operating in specialty markets serve loyal fanbases that are very well educated on their products and processes and not as easy to sway.
So, while the overall competitive landscape might be different, that doesn’t mean the challenge isn’t there. There might be fewer rungs in the ladder to the top, but it’s harder to reach each one.
This is one of the areas in which an organic digital marketing strategy, search engine optimization specifically, can be executed to great effect. Because much of the results attributable to a successful eCommerce SEO campaign are the result of content production, the best results go to the most conscientious researchers and content producers.
This is an area in which we knew we could deliver for Protech Composites. Here’s how we did it.
Our seasoned SEO project managers knew they were working in a specialized industry from the start. Sometimes we suggest highly aggressive campaigns for clients that are positioned advantageously for rapid growth, but that’s not always the best path forward.
Sometimes, less can be more. To be specific, that means that optimizing a campaign for a few select, highly targeted keywords can make more sense than simply going after as many reasonable keywords as possible. The former is calculated, the latter is a tactic of brute force.
We took the former approach, working with Protech Composites to determine a carefully curated list of 25 target keywords that we would use to line the foundation of our keyword strategy, and which would underscore all of our pursuant optimizations.
The keywords selected are proprietary to the strategy, but our project managers took great pains to ensure that they represented a delicate balance on the following points of search volume, competitive density and difficulty, and carefully aligned search intent. There are many keywords that are in some way or other relevant to the carbon fiber industry, but not all of them are directly relevant to Protech Composites or its customers..
First Steps
Once we settled on a cohort of target keywords, there were a few things that our technical team needed to accomplish before the efforts of our content production team would really start to take effect.
First, our technical team conducted a thorough SEO audit of ProtechComposites.com. The initial audit revealed quite a few promising signs that would bode well for our SEO campaign. First, there were no crawler errors detected. The initial audit also concluded that Protech’s website had no broken links or toxic backlinks.
Some other features were already found to have been in an SEO-friendly state. For example, Protech’s URLs and images were already optimized, along with certain metadata.
Google Analytics (GA) and Google Search Console (GSC) had already been set up, so our technical team created a proprietary dashboard for the client, optimized 20 target pages, and began running ongoing scans in order to be ahead of technical or crawler errors.
With the canvas prepared, our content and technical teams began optimizing content and sewing the seeds of link-building strategy to increase domain authority and organic rankings.
The Role of Content in eCommerce SEO
Content plays a key role in the optimization of eCommerce websites, both for SEO and other organic marketing efforts like content marketing and social media marketing. One of the great things about optimized content is that there are multiple different forms of it. There are also multiple ranking factors associated with it, and it can be used for a wide range of purposes.
To be specific, our content producers put Protech Composites on a schedule that included the delivery of a variety of different blog posts and offsite guest posts, in addition to optimized category and product descriptions.
By regularly delivering optimized on-page content (blog posts and product or service descriptions) we were able to accomplish a few goals. One is that we showed Google that Protech Composites was active in publishing keyword-optimized content, both long and short form, on a regular basis. This alerted Google that Protech Composites was an authority in its industry and should be recognized by allotting higher organic rankings to it for keywords and search terms present in our optimized content and for which potential customers were searching.
Our on-page content also gave our technical team the ability to improve the internal linking structure of Protech Composites’ website, which improves both user experience through improved navigability as well as the technical SEO aspect of site structure.
On the same topic, our content production team also began regularly distributing content (in the form of offsite posts) to third-party websites for the purpose of generating backlinks to ProtechComposites.com.
Digital Marketing By the Numbers: Keyword Movements and Organic Traffic Increases
The unique thing about the SEO campaign for Protech Composite’s eCommerce site is that it started to produce positive shifts in organic keyword standings after only a few months. We typically tell our clients not to expect significant results for at least six months, since eCommerce SEO is a long-term digital marketing strategy and the efforts compound on
themselves.
In this case, however, our project managers started to note positive movement within only a few months after the beginning of the project. At the right, you can see some of the keyword movements that occurred only recently, in January of 2022. Positive shifts began much earlier, but the current standings reflect some of our progress to date.
As you can see, the target keywords we’ve selected have a healthy range of search volumes, ranging from less than 100 to over 1,000 per month. Protech Composites ranks for many of them on page one or two, but as you can see, movements are still positive, up a few positions for each keyword.
This on its own bodes well for an eCommerce SEO campaign. It corresponds to higher impressions, but that doesn’t necessarily guarantee higher traffic or conversions. Luckily, in both cases, Protech has seen positive trends, even though the campaign has only been ongoing for a few months.
The image below shows a few organic metrics corresponding to the period from October 2021 to January 2022, as compared to the previous period. Notably, organic pageviews are up, as is the session duration, significantly. Despite modest growth in sessions, the average time on page’s substantial increase is an indication that our targeting techniques have been working.
The following image presents a more compelling picture. It also shows organic metrics for all pages for the same period. This time, however, the jump is more noticeable. Three metrics, in particular, being the conversion rate, transactions, and revenue were all up considerably. Conversion rate and transactions both grew by more than 10%, with revenue more than doubling.
We can hardly take credit for the big jump in revenue, but the fact that conversions and transactions both grew noticeably is also an indication that we were attracting the right audience. Despite the mild boost to organic traffic, our efforts were successful in attracting traffic with the most intent to purchase – a claim that can be underscored by Protech’s growing conversion rate.
Finally, to illustrate the success of our joint efforts so far, we need to point your attention in the direction of some organic figures associated with content pages on Protech Composites’ website. The following figures apply to organic users during the same period but only to their content pages.
As you can see below, growth in page views and time on page was also modest. The bounce rate even increased a little, which is actually to be expected when encountering a jump in traffic. What’s telling is the impressive increase in page value, up more than 74%, almost double, from the previous period.
This is, once again, a strong cue that our targeting is working. Even with mild growth in traffic figures, users were increasingly navigating through content pages and converting at a higher percentage of the time than they had been previously. In other words, more qualified traffic was landing on ProtechComposites.com, and the proof is in the pudding. Conversions and transactions are both up.
Ramp Up Your Organic Digital Marketing Efforts
Those of you reading this who operate your own businesses in competitive, niche industries: these are results you too can replicate.
Contact our eCommerce SEO experts to learn more about how you can optimize the pages on your site, generate backlinks, and attract more qualified organic traffic to your eCommerce store. We’ll build a custom SEO project for your company that will optimize your website to attract new business.
We’ll even get you started with other supporting organic and paid marketing efforts, such as content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and PPC management, taking advantage of a balance of digital channels to expand your customer base. Consult our collection of eCommerce case studies to learn more or contact us today at 888-982-8269 or at [email protected] to get started.
The post Organic Digital Marketing and Overcoming the Challenges of a Niche Market appeared first on 1Digital® Agency.
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