The Sleep Shop Case Study
Client’s Challenge
The Sleep Shop, a mattress and bedding supply retailer with both an e-commerce online store and a brick-and-mortar location needed help! After implementing a site redesign, the website was losing traffic at record speed: The numbers indicated that they were down to a third of the traffic they previously had. Additionally, the client wanted targeted, organic visibility to bring local foot traffic into the company’s physical location.
The owner knew SEO was important to her business and had even begun a paid search campaign in an effort to bolster traffic numbers. Yet she was skeptical from bad experiences with other companies that were not able to stop the downward plunge, much less increase traffic for her.
It was a challenging time. More and more e-commerce retailers were encroaching on The Sleep Shop’s market. The business did have a content-rich blog, but it was on a domain separate from the main site. Lastly, the client needed to increase local visibility to compete with the big box stores in larger towns. The Sleep Shop’s owner understood this conundrum and was willing to do what was needed to make the difference.
SEO Rocket’s Role
The Sleep Shop contacted SEO Rocket and asked us to identify the reasons for www.TheSleepShop.com’s dramatic traffic plunge. Then, we were to develop and implement an organic visibility strategy for both the e-commerce site and the physical store location.
Objectives
TheSleepShop.com had two main needs:
- Increase traffic to the shopping site, returning the numbers to the peak level from before the site’s redesign
- Establish online visibility for the physical store location to the local market
Strategy Initiated
We started by agreeing upon clear goals for both the site and the business so that all parties knew what we were striving to achieve. We also set up those goals for tracking in Google Analytics. Then, our Rocket team took the initiative to learn the capabilities of the shopping cart software in and out to find the best ways to optimize the products and categories listed. The strategy included the following aspects:- Optimized the site’s current content and set a plan to add to it on a regular basis, starting with its 54 cornerstone content pages and 188 products.
- Consolidated the blog and the main domain; we wanted to make sure that the main domain received all the content-rich power of the blog. We moved the blog from its location on a separate domain over to the main site, making the site more robust and informative.
- Archived and uploaded eight years’ worth of blog posts with 301 redirects for each entry so that any pre-existing links to them would lead to the new site.
- Optimized each existing blog post – all 86 of them!
- Launched a campaign to simultaneously clear up and submit all name, address, and phone data for the physical store location to online directories.
- Claimed and verified all online business directory profiles that were already established. Developed complete business listings on all other influential directories.
- Increased high-quality citations and outside links to the site at engagement and on an ongoing basis.
- Coordinated with the site’s developer to add store hours and address information prominently to the site, making it much easier for site visitors to see.
SEO Rocket Services Used
SUCCESS! (THE RESULTS)
Together, we were able to achieve these outstanding results:
- A complete reversal of the site’s plunging organic traffic leading to a traffic increase beginning in less than a year. Traffic steadily increased and rose from 14,186 sessions in February to 30,416 sessions by the following January
- 13 #1 rankings and 9 first page SERP locations for the brick-and mortar-store
- 9 additional keywords ranking in the 1st page of the search engine results
- Steadily increasing traffic averaging 30,400+ sessions per month in 2018
- Marketing dollars saved by dropping an ineffective PPC plan without any loss in traffic six months after starting the organic SEO campaign
