Superloko is an online store selling housewares, kids products and garden supplies. Having gained some experience on the Polish market, the client launched another online shop designed specially for German customers. In September, before we employed our SEO strategy, the organic traffic on superloko.de reached 64. The number of impressions equaled 362.
Optimizing online stores for the German market is a bit tricky. What makes it tricky? Because a regular German customer doesn’t usually trust products that are delivered from other countries than their own. A website that hasn’t got enough reviews or lacks proper certifications is also often ignored. That’s why our SEO strategy for Superloko focused on building authority and trust.
Before we could roll up our sleeves and get on to work, we had to figure out which elements of the client’s website needed to be improved. To do this, we had to integrate basic analytical tools to superloko.iai-shop.com.
For the SEO audit to be carried out correctly, we needed reliable data that only analytical tools are able to collect. That’s why the very first step we took was integrating Google Search Console and Google Analytics to the client’s website. Only on the basis of the reports generated by analytical tools could we plan out the most effective SEO strategy for Superloko.
As the analytical tools were collecting information on Superloko performance, we could work on the meta descriptions. They clearly needed to be rewritten as they weren’t optimized for the German market.
The client operates on multiple markets, having a separate store for each country. All of them are connected by being a part of a bigger multistore.
From what we have discovered, there was just one type of meta description set for all stores. This means that the same meta description was displayed in all language versions of the client’s website.
On top of that, the metadata used to generate the result for the German language website on SERP showed the domain set for the Polish language version of the website: spokoloko.net instead of superloko.de, which was misleading and confusing for the searchers.
Here is what the German searchers had seen before we fixed the meta descriptions:
Here are the meta descriptions created for the German market:
How did we handle that? We focused solely on the .de domain, creating global metadata settings. From that moment, meta description have been generated automatically, following the below pattern:
The misleading meta descriptions made the Superloko phrase take the second place on the search engine result page. When we successfully optimized this attribute, this brand keyword made it to the first place.
Next there was the time to add a Secure Sockets Layer – one of the digital certificates that enables an encrypted connection for the users, and confirms the authenticity of a website.
Using our guidelines, the client installed an SSL certificate to superloko.de. Once it was added, we created the new domain addresses and updated them in Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
When it comes to the German market, there is yet another type of certificate that the majority of users look for when doing online shipping – Trusted Shops. Why does it matter? According to the Trusted Shops: “80% of Germans recognise the Trusted Shops Trustmark, which focuses on e-commerce brands.”
This label indicates that the online store is trustworthy, and therefore has a positive effect on making the purchasing decisions by German customers.
Later, we could focus on the web content, or rather the lack of it.
When the client reached out to us, their website had almost zero texts published on the pages. Knowing that Google likes content, especially when it’s unique, we started working on creating and later filling the website with relevant content that matched the target audience queries.
Our copywriting team was systematically writing more and more copies, at the same time minding the formatting and correct text structure.
We published keyword-rich copies on the homepage and on the majority of category pages. Effect?
Let’s take a look at two graphs:
Having more texts published on the website, we could focus on how the items sold by the client were presented to the customers and, of course, Google bots.
Undoubtedly, the non-optimized product descriptions caused quite a serious problem when it comes to website visibility. More often than not the products were named incorrectly as the keywords used for that didn’t have any search volume. For example, a product was named a bike painted red instead of a red bike. The latter has a significantly higher search volume than the former.
After discovering that the zero-search-volume keywords were used in product names, we rewrote them. Here is an example::
IdoSell automatically changed the URLs (pointing to the product items), making them more SEO-friendly.
Our audit showed that it took a bit too much time for the client’s website to get displayed on a screen properly. Therefore, we absolutely had to speed up the loading process.
Finally, it was time to improve the loading speed of the client’s website. Using the Page Speed Insight tool, we were able to check how serious the problem was. In this case, it sufficed to reduce the image sizes By doing just that, we successfully speed up the loading time of superloko.de.
Here is the loading speed before our modification was introduced:
Here is the loading speed after downsizing the images:
From the start we were expanding the net of referral traffic that pointed to superloko.de from authoritative websites. Naturally, all the websites covered the topic that revolved around the industry our client works in.
The number of backlinks were steadily growing, which helped us minimize the risk of getting a penalty from Google.
The more backlinks we received, the higher the client’s page authority was getting:
Here is the link profile before we carried out the off-site strategy:
Here is the link profile after 6 months of running the continuous off-site strategy:
RESULT 1 462% increase in organic traffic after 6 months
RESULT 2 313% increase in impressions in SERP after 6 months
RESULT 3 Improved visibility in google.de
