Sortmund was already displayed high in the Search Engine Results Page, but the Client was still aiming for more. Increasing the “well-performing” phrases, however, required perseverance and a dedicated approach. The shop operated in a niche industry, yet, the competitiveness of the phrases was high. A lot of shops selling non-certified clothes and accessories named their products the same way (i.e. “military boots”, even though they were not professional army boots).

We had to be aware of the competitors and their practices. Nonetheless, we decided to aim for long-tail keyword phrases, tailored mostly to product categories, and took a broad-based approach to optimisation.

Problem no. 1. Lack of content on category pages

There was no text on the category pages, which was necessary to increase the visibility of the website for keyword phrases associated with these categories. Since we wanted to focus on such keywords, we added the content to the most important category pages.

An example of the content added:

Problem no. 2. Improper menu structure

The names of categories in the menu should be reflected in the site’s title and H1 heading. These elements actually have an impact on the ranks of the keyword phrases that are included in the category names.

The category names actually didn’t include any keywords before. Here’s a good example:

Police -> badges (changed by us into “police badges”)

Here’s how they initially were displayed in the search results:

We changed the category names so that they included proper keywords. These keywords were automatically “taken from” titles and H1 headings.

Problem no. 3. Wrong structure of meta descriptions

On the image we’ve already shown, it’s clear to see that the meta descriptions were generated automatically and included category names along with the whole category paths.

We implemented the global settings for adding meta descriptions. Even though we optimised the descriptions manually – they were initially added according to the pattern we defined.

The sequence for the categories:

The sequence for products:

The link profile before the start of the cooperation:

The link profile after more than one year of the cooperation:

• Increased visibility of the website, as seen in the Semstorm tool

• A continuous increase in organic traffic

• Increased organic traffic by 34% when comparing the year 2019 to 2018

• Increased revenue from organic traffic by 27% when comparing the year 2019 to 2018
• After the optimisation of category pages, the keyword phrases important for the client started ranking high:

SEO Specialist’s comment

When starting to work with Sortmund, I knew that I was up for the challenge. After all, it was about “sculpting” something that was already functioning well for some years – a recognisable brand with good SERP ranks and proper SEO efforts. But, similarly to the Client, we didn’t want to rest on laurels and find Top10 satisfactory. From the beginning, we simply had to aim higher. Thanks to consistent and broad-based SEO efforts, making it into Top3, and even the first rank in the search results for many important phrases was (and still is) possible. It was not only me who worked for this success, though – the whole team involved in the project contributed to it.

Milena Fietko

Senior SEO Specialist