The client came to us when they started seeing their website’s visibility go down. This problem started after they switched from Magento 1.9 to Magento 2.0, and the migration didn’t go well. Because of this, the visibility of their website fell by about 30% compared to before the drop. Martes Sport’s main goal was to stop this downward trend and get back to how things were before, as well as to steadily increase traffic and earnings from organic search.
Martes Sport struggled to climb to the top search positions because, among other things, the same content was published on sklepmartes.pl and two other websites the client owns, sklepiguana.pl and fitanu.com. The duplication was caused by the PIM (Product Information Management) system that automatically copied content between the websites. We aimed to make sure each store had unique content adapted to the target audiences.
The idea of attracting more organic traffic to the website appeared after we improved the visibility of the online store. The client wanted to get more organic visits to their website, which is no easy task in such a competitive industry.
We started working with Martes Sport in April 2022. They are great at communication, and always quick to respond to any changes we suggest, new ideas, or our monthly reports. This really helps our work together since making decisions can take a while in big companies.
Martes Sport knows a lot about SEO and understands the challenges that come with their PIM and CMS systems, the industry’s specifics, and how things change in the sports industry with the seasons. Apart from SEO, they also do a lot of other brand-promoting activities like ads and social media. Their marketing isn’t just online; Martes Sport has stores all over Poland. Combining online and offline marketing has proved to work well, making the brand well-recognizable and trusted by sports enthusiasts.
Martes Sport offers products for every season. Our plan was to work in short intervals, focusing on what’s going to be popular in the coming months. We also make sure their all-year products are easy to find on Google, regardless of the time of the year.
Helping Martes Sport improve its ranking is one of the most developmental projects I’ve worked on. We deal with a lot of tech problems because of how big the store is. Plus, we also have to be smart about managing our crawl budget and fixing unexpected errors that keep popping up as we go more advanced with the SEO strategy.
We started the SEO process by running a thorough SEO analysis of the client’s website. This way we could come up with suggestions for improvements. The client’s web development team is responsible for introducing the technical changes because their online store is built with custom solutions and has a complex structure.
When we audited the website, we found several technical and structural issues. The development team and the client are fixing these problems bit by bit, based on what we recommended. We know there’s still a lot to do and that not everything can be fixed overnight.
We also discovered an issue with how the website’s content was being indexed. It turned out that content loaded via a JavaScript pre-loader wasn’t showing up in Google searches. To solve this, we switched to adding content in a static way, which made it immediately visible, even on a website as complex as this one.
I’ve got to say, working with Martes is a pretty exciting challenge for me. Being a shopper there myself, I do enjoy helping well-known brands get noticed. Plus, the client’s website is huge – they manage three stores all under one PIM system, so we had to develop a well-rounded SEO approach. When we first started working together, our main goal wasn’t just about getting good results; it was about stopping the sudden visibility drop, and later improving it, which is no small feat for a big-name brand like Martes Sport.
Since automatic content duplication was a major problem across all three domains, we decided to focus on creating unique texts for each website.
Every website owner should aim to have unique and never-published-before product and category descriptions. There are some exceptions, though. For example, algorithms have come to understand that in certain industries, like online bookstores, content tends to be similar across different sites, and they’re okay with that. However, whenever possible, it’s advised to keep web content unique and appealing to both users and search engine bots.
We put a lot of effort into creating content for sklepmartes.pl, ensuring it’s well-optimized, keyword-rich, internally linked, and reader-friendly.
For the other two stores, we also created web content, focusing mainly on category descriptions that appeared to be the same due to automatic duplication. We wanted each store to have its unique set of texts. A few months back, we worked on a bigger project with the client to sort out the content across the websites, removing any duplicates and consistently adding new pieces of content.
The headings within the Martes Store website, both on the homepage and on other pages, were often duplicated. Their structure wasn’t built properly either. Therefore, sorting out the heading issue was one of the first things we handled.
We rearranged the homepage’s heading structure. First, we optimized H1 by adding important keywords and the name of the client’s online store. This way we helped to increase brand awareness.
Later, we improved the remaining parts of the homepage’s heading structure.
This is how the before and after screenshots:
The screenshot above shows that phrases like: “Your cart is empty” or “Cookie Policy” were used as H1s. Not only do these phrases not use keywords, but they also shouldn’t be marked as headers at all.
Here’s what the header structure on the homepage looks like after the changes we made:
Now, the H1 says “Sports store Martes Sport”. The remaining headers are now optimized for search engines.
We added keywords to categories in the menu so that they do two things: reflect the main topic of each page better and reduce the risk of duplication among the other websites the client owns.
Below is an example of optimized category names for women’s products:
Once that was handled, we also optimized page titles and headings for category pages. We made sure that each of these elements contains the right keywords, like in the example below:
Page title before:
REEBOK – Online Sports Store Martes Sport
Page title after:
[EN] Reebok shoes, sportswear – women’s and men’s – Online Sports Store Martes Sport
Heading structure before:
Heading structure after:
Now the heading structure is well-organized and optimized for the most important keywords.
On sklepmartes.pl, the content used to be located in a small block that mixed in with the products and was loaded with JavaScript. This made it invisible to Google, so it wasn’t indexed.
While this detail might not seem important for SEO, we had to move the content under the product listings for Martes Sport. Why?
When there were fewer than 4 products in a category, the content wouldn’t appear on the website, even though it was there in the PIM system. As a result, pages with fewer products ended up having a lot less content and keywords, making them invisible to Google.
Here’s how the category pages look now:
In category descriptions, it’s always a good idea to naturally weave in keywords and use internal linking (highlighted in red above).
A smart strategy is to go beyond just emboldening keywords. They should include words related to the keyword’s context for even better results.
For example, rather than just emboldening a product name, such as “women’s sports shirt,” it’s better to also point out a few of its qualities like “breathable” and “good at absorbing sweat…” This method pairs the product with its unique features, making the description and the keyword itself more informative.
Our audit helped us discover a few errors on the Martes Sport Store website that had to be fixed.
500 errors are issues that show up on websites when something goes wrong with the server. They’re frustrating for the visitors and can make them leave the website, increasing the bounce rate.
404 errors occur when a user tries to access a web page that the server can’t find. This tells the user that the page they’re looking for doesn’t exist or can’t be currently accessed.
Having an old version of the website indexed can lead to content duplication (ie. bots can find the same pieces of content on the old and the new website). We made tackling this issue one of our first steps in the SEO process.
As the SEO team was hanging on technical aspects of search engine optimization, the content team was preparing some recommendations for the Martes blog.
Martes Store has a blog on a separate subdomain. The client writes the content and posts it regularly. We offer advice on how to make blog posts more SEO-friendly. Now and then, the content team also steps in to do some of the optimizing for the client.
This is yet another factor that affects website ranking, which is often overlooked by website owners.
Product cards didn’t feature keywords. To improve visibility in search results, we added H2 headings to the reviews section on all product pages, making sure relevant keywords are present (eg. the product name):
In the product titles (within the
