NetCube is an online store offering jigsaw puzzles, logic games, cubes, and professional speedcubing accessories. Despite selling their products through an e-commerce platform (Allegro), the client also opened an online store. At the time they came to us (November 2017), the organic traffic on netcube.com.pl equaled 113.
The client also asked us to help them sell more of their puzzle cubes. This meant that apart from getting the NetCube website more visible, we had to improve its domain and page ranks, which were 1 and 0 respectively. Even though the items sold by the client are a bit niche, the keyword competition was pretty high. This required us to adopt a good strategy to outrun the NetCube rivals.
When NetCube came to us, their website was all-new, and therefore it needed to be optimized for search engines. Even though the audit usually takes a month, I decided to act fast. Why did I make an exception? Because it was December – the high season for NetCube. I introduced a few major changes to the website in the first week which quickly translated into a big success – the increased sales.
There were several key things we had to fix to improve NetCube performance in search engines. One of them was the indexing, as only the homepage was crawled and added to the index.
When NetCube contacted us, their website was all-new, launched a few days before we started working on optimization. The thing was that the website didn’t appear in SERP after typing the branded keywords into the search bar. To change that, we added a new XML sitemap to the Google Search Console to get it indexed.
Shortly after that we noticed that there were some elements – results lists and pagination – that shouldn’t be added to the database of NetCube website. We excluded those elements from indexing, adding the appropriate commands in robots.txt.
By December 11th we got the majority of pages indexed properly. On that day, the index contained 552 pages.
Additionally, the branded keywords were gaining in strength, quickly making it to top 10, some of them reaching top 3 and top 1:
With the website indexed, we could focus on rewriting meta descriptions and titles for increased click-through rate. When non-optimized, meta descriptions and title tags are hardly attractive for the searchers.
Meta descriptions and title tags were generated automatically by Shopper. Truth be told, the standard configuration is far from being SEO-friendly. Therefore we had to introduce global changes.
First, we handled the title tags. We created a the pattern that added the word
When it comes to the meta descriptions, originally it was either missing, or was identical to the title tags. To change that, we used global settings again, writing more compelling descriptions to attract more customers.
This is how the meta descriptions looked like for
Another thing that we had to address was the structure of URLs. To help NetCube rank higher, we had to introduce some modifications to make the URLs more SEO-friendly.
Like meta descriptions and title tags, URLs were also automatically generated. They had the standard structure for Shopper, not necessarily useful in terms of SEO. We changed the URL configuration manually. Here are some examples of how the addresses used to be before and after the optimization:
#1Before: https://netcube.com.pl/pl/p/QiYi-MoFangGe-Megaminx-QiHeng-S-sculpture-color/278
After: https://netcube.com.pl/qiyi-mofangge-megaminx-qiheng-s-sculpture-color
Before: https://netcube.com.pl/pl/p/YuXin-Little-Magic-Pyraminx-black/614
After: https://netcube.com.pl/yuxin-little-magic-pyraminx-black
Before: https://netcube.com.pl/pl/p/YuXin-Little-Magic-Skewb-color/670
After: https://netcube.com.pl/yuxin-little-magic-skewb-color
Before: https://netcube.com.pl/pl/p/MoYu-MoFangJiaoShi-MF4-4x4x4-black/643
After: https://netcube.com.pl/moyu-mofangjiaoshi-mf4-4x4x4-black
Before: https://netcube.com.pl/pl/p/MoYu-MoFangJiaoShi-zestaw-kostek-2×2-3×3-color/627
After: https://netcube.com.pl/moyu-mofangjiaoshi-zestaw-kostek-2×2-3×3-color
Once the meta descriptions, title tags and URLs were handled, we proceed to create a heading hierarchy. To do that, we added H2 headings to the website.
From what we could see, the NetCube website had no H2 headings that would help divide the content into subsections for easier understanding. The only headings that could be found prior to optimization were the H1 headings (they were used solely for the product names).
Again, we made use of the global changes to generate the headings automatically. We did it on the product pages, precisely for the product descriptions:
In case there was no description of a cube, the heading wasn’t generated.
This one was the most tricky of all actions we took to get NetCube to the top of SERPs.
It’s typical of NetCube to sell cubes that are available for a limited time. That’s why we had to act fast, and do our best to optimize them quickly.
Thanks to the global optimizations, the new cubes that appeared on the NetCube offer were able to jump right to the top 20. Later, we were working to push them even higher, making them reach the top 10, or top 6.
Apart from that, we also focused on the popular puzzle cubes that belong to the group of best-selling and ever-green items that most people are interested in.
Here are four graphs showing the results we achieved after optimizing specific keywords for higher search engine results:
Here’s another thing that we do to attract more potential customers to the NetCube online store – making the product images appear as a component of the search result.
With no image tag added to the structured data, the product images weren’t displayed on the mobile devices, reducing the potential the rich result could have on the searchers.
After adding the schema manually, the cube miniatures appeared together with the result whenever a user was looking for a puzzle cube.
The images were also displayed in Google Images, which had a positive effect on the NetCube visibility in the search engine.
From the moment we transformed the regular results into the rich results, the click-through rate on mobile devices increased:
The last thing that had to be handled were the alternative texts for the images published on the NetCube website.
Alt text is a key factor that contributes to the search engine ranking, no doubt about it. Since no image published on the NetCube website had an alternative text set, we absolutely had to fix that.
We were manually adding an alternative text to each image published on the website.
It quickly turned out that our efforts paid off. The number of impressions on Google Images increased:
Both the on- and off-site strategies were performed simultaneously. We were gradually expanding the list of referring domains to help NetCube become more credible and trustworthy for Google bots.
Here is the increase of the referring domain and pages for NetCube:
As mentioned above, when NetCube came to us, the website had been launched a few days earlier, therefore its Domain Authority and Page Authority equaled zero. After carrying out the off-site process for almost a year and a half, those two metrics improved significantly:
RESULT 1 Increase in impressions in search engine results
RESULT 2 280% increase in organic traffic each year when comparing two months of the highest season for puzzle cubes (i.e. prior the Christmas holiday season)
RESULT 3 300% increase in revenue generated by organic traffic
RESULT 4 When comparing the results achieved in two years, the traffic increased by 100%, which is especially clear to see during the high season (i.e. December)
