Dropshipping is becoming one of the most popular methods for people setting up channels of revenue on their website. It’s easy to form relationships with businesses that want you to sell their products for a cut of their revenue. We have worked with several outdoor gear retailers that have multiple drop shipping relationships. Later in this article, we will go into the successful work we generated for this client.
Why Do I Need SEO for Dropshipping?
Many dropshippers skip over organic SEO when it comes to building a strategy for their website. And that makes sense! SEO is difficult to manage, unruly to set up, and generally doesn’t make sense to a lot of people. So why is SEO important for dropshipping?
SEO helps you generate traffic and energy to your brand without having to spend money on ads. Many drop shippers use complicated ad strategies to bring people to their website, and they manage their ROI really well! But what if you could bring those same people to your website for free? And forever?
This is where SEO is really essential for dropshippers that want to be around for a long time without spending money on ads. The largest dropshipping brands in the world have amazing organic SEO because they understand how important search is for traffic.
Case Study for Dropshipping SEO
One of my biggest clients is a large outdoor gear and outdoor sports store that dropships a lot of their items. About 6 months ago, they came to me and my team with several requests, all revolving around growing their organic traction across Google. Here were the requests:
- Increase organic reach
- Increase organic traffic
- Increase organic sales
Obviously these three requests are quite similar, but we needed to create a unique approach for each element, to ensure we are hitting our mark. Let’s talk about how we did.
We Approached the Client about SEO Work
This is not something I do very often. I only reach out to clients about potential SEO work if I see their organic traction is falling. With this client, I started watching their organic ranks in February of 2019 and started seeing some negative trends in March. Here is a screenshot of their keyword trends in March:
As we started seeing the downward trend, I created an in-depth SEO audit to help their team understand why they are seeing lower ranks. As we moved into May, the client reached out and asked for our services to see if we could counteract the drop in organic ranks. Here are the organic ranks for May of 2019.
As you can see, there was a severe drop in keywords over the beginning part of 2019, and my team and I were on the mission to work against the clock.
After the SEO audit, we found that thousands of pages had been deleted from the website without 301 redirects. We worked with their web development team to ensure that all of these redirects were set in place to maintain the ranks they had lost. Once we had implemented these redirects, we saw a lot of our ranks come back, but not all of them.
Optimize Your E-Commerce Content for Google
As more and more ways to market e-commerce websites show up, it’s important to stay updated on the latest trends in SEO. For this client, it took a long time to develop the best strategies for growing organic traction, but our work was quite effective.
We started the process by monitoring how many organic keywords they are currently ranking for. This is usually the first step I take with any e-commerce website, so we can see where they currently are and seek new opportunities. Here is a screenshot of where their keywords were when we started work in May of 2019:
Align Your Mobile & Desktop Use Experience
Many of the older e-commerce websites I work with use an e-commerce platform called Magento. Magento is great, but it can be hard to work with unless you have developers on hand. As a search engine marketer, it can be hard to work with web developers that I don’t have direct access to. This can make the process a bit slow.
For this group of web developers, they had trouble translating the desktop website to mobile. This was one of the first changes I requested them to make, as it’s important to create a cohesive experience regardless of what device they are using to access.
Make On-Page Optimizations
Once we effectively aligned the mobile and desktop experience, the most important step took place. We went through the entire website as a team and generated over 30 pages of optimizations that could be made across meta tags, title tags, and heading tags on the whole website. We then implemented those changes across the website over a span of 3 months.
Why Is SEO So Slow?
A lot of people who are new to SEO for dropshipping, or are just paying somebody to do SEO work, don’t understand why it takes so long. Sure, we found pretty much all of the updates we wanted to make across a 2,000-page website in about 12 hours, so why don’t we just implement it all at one time?
With SEO, it’s important to make small changes over time and implement tools to monitor and track how those changes are actually affecting the website. If you don’t take this precaution, you could add something or change something on your website and deeply affects your search ranks, and you may not know what it was you did because there were many elements implemented at once.
Our Success with SEO for Dropshipping
Now we will look at how we succeeded in generating traffic for this website. We will show how we increased the following elements:
- Increase organic reach
- Increase organic traffic
- Increase organic sales
Organic Reach – 32.47% Increase
From our implementations across structured data and on-page content, we ranked hundreds of product pages for more keywords. This led to a significant increase in organic impressions across Google search, and the screenshot below is taken directly from the Google search console.
You can see that many of our implementations worked to increase rich results as well as product results. Even though the traction was low, we expect to see these numbers grow more and more as Google recognizes them.
With our implementations in the second half of 2019, we boosted the website by over 400,000 impressions from organic search. That’s amazing!
Looking A Bit Deeper – 300% Increase in Rich Results
Let’s look a bit deeper at how and where we increased traffic. Many SEO companies show that they have increased traffic and exposure, but don’t explain where those people went. As a drop shipper, it’s essential to understand your high-intent pages and how your customers move across your website. We work with you to understand those elements and ensure we are focusing on work on them.
For this client, they have many high priced items like jackets and tents that can be expensive to pay on ads. This is where organic SEO can be a great investment as you can get opportunities for sales that you don’t pay for.
This is a screenshot from rich results that were generated in the past three months. You can see how many of these products were receiving almost no impressions 3 months ago, but now are seeing hundreds of views for relevant and high-intent keywords.
Organic Traffic (Clicks) – 18% Increase
Now let’s move into the actual clicks we generated. Most people believe this is an important metric, but we like to monitor impression growth as an important metric. The clicks will come if your content is good enough.
Without giving too much info about the keywords we targeted, here are the top results for clicks in the past 3 months.
You can see we had some major increase in the most frequent keywords as those were all brand-related. The ones closer to the bottom were for competitive terms that are hard to increase ranks in.
