Even though the bookstore generated organic traffic, it wasn’t sufficiently high. While designing a customized SEO strategy for Znak, we had to bear in mind the seasonality of the book industry: new releases, sudden increase in popularity of some writers and seasonal sales.
Despite being one of the biggest bookstores in Poland, Znak struggled to get noticed by Google robots. Their official website wasn’t ranked high, and therefore hindered building visibility.
Due to a custom CMS, there were plenty of technical SEO issues that the developer team must have dealt with. We had to find smart solutions to deliver lasting effects.
Too vague category names are not a good choice for both SEO and UX reasons. We needed to take care of it replacing current names on client’s website with more descriptive ones.
While inspecting the website, we noticed that the category names were t . They were barely related to products a shopper could find after clicking on the very button. This served neither crawlers nor people searching for a book of a particular genre. To fix this issue, we designed a new menu, putting some of the focus keywords into the category names.
Here are some exemplary changes we implemented:
Another issue discovered during our initial SEO audit of Znak’s website were incorrect URLs. We rolled up our sleeves to give pages new, both Google robots and user-friendly addresses.
The structure of URL addresses was a major issue that needed to be handled right at the beginning. Instead of hyphens, the words were separated with commas which clearly confused crawlers. Oftentimes, the URLs didn’t feature one of the major keywords – the writers’ names.
We changed the structure completely, adding the right separators and keywords to URLs. Later, we asked the developer team to implement 301 redirection.
Here are some exemplary changes we implemented:
#1
Old address: https://www.znak.com.pl/kartoteka,ksiazka,48590,Jak-wytlumaczyc-Marsjaninowi-co-to-znaczy-pies-czy
New address: https://www.znak.com.pl/ksiazka/jak-wytlumaczyc-marsjaninowi-co-to-znaczy-pies-czy-leszek-korzeniowski-48590
#2
Old address: https://www.znak.com.pl/kartoteka,ksiazka,121352,Nie-daj-sie-rakowi-Wsparcie-zywieniowe-w-chorobie
New address: https://www.znak.com.pl/ksiazka/nie-daj-sie-rakowi-wsparcie-zywieniowe-w-chorobie-brzegowy-maria-maciejewska-cebulak-magdalena-121352
Even when a website has so many pages as our clients did – without keywords, the content on those pages won’t perform. We needed to choose adequate keyword phrases list and optimize the content accordingly.
Even though we added more keywords to categories, their visibility was far from satisfactory.
There were two main reasons for that:
REASON 1: there was no text displayed on category pages
REASON 2: no page had H1 headings
Together with the developer team, we worked on implementing the correct H1 headers. We also kept uploading new content to category pages.
Here’s an exemplary header we added to Religion books (PL książki religijne) category:
Here is a fragment of content added on History books (PL książki historyczne) page:
With such a complex domain as Znak, the sitemap was also of an impressive size. We decided to break it up into multiple sitemaps.
There were two issues with the sitemap. First, we had to update it after modifying the URLs for improved SEO. The other issue was that the Znak website had more than 50,000 pages. Therefore, we asked the developer team to create separate sitemaps, e.g. for images. This way we were sure every single page would be finally crawled and indexed.
At present, there are 4 Znak sitemaps uploaded to Google Search Console:
Equally important for the general effectiveness of SEO strategy as external backlinks, internal linking on Znak’s website required our optimizations.
On the Znak website, the links on the homepage that were leading to the product pages didn’t include book titles. That had to be changed, otherwise crawlers may not have seen connections between the linked pages. This fix also helped users tremendously. They could finally see that after clicking on the title, they would be redirected to the product page.
Before adding book titles:
After adding book titles:
After dealing with the book titles, we noticed another issue connected with product pages. It turned out that one link was implemented to the whole book section (image+title) . We suggested fixing this problem by adding separate links to both elements.
Below is a quick example of the discussed issue: the red frame shows how linking used to be carried out, whereas the green frame represents the new way of separated linking.
Each CMS is different and requires an individual SEO approach. Especially, the custom ones. In this case, we also faced some challenges, but where’s a will there’s a way.
After changing category names, the titles of all category and pages were set up properly. We also contacted the developer team to suggest introducing all necessary changes in the custom CMS. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to add the missing meta descriptions.
When it comes to product pages, they missed one piece of important information that most people searching for books type into a browser – a book author. To fix that, we asked the developer team to include authors of books in each site title. This element was added globally.
No user likes to wait for a website to download – that’s obvious. But so do Google crawlers! The loading speed of Znak’s website needed to be improved.
From what we noticed, the Znak website was too complex to load quickly. To change this, we listed steps that had to be taken to improve the loading speed (e.g. web content and image compression).
Before improving the loading speed:
After improving the loading speed:
Dealing with a complex domain containing thousands of pages, correct site architecture can’t be left out in the SEO process.
The Znak website had no breadcrumbs, which was an unfortunate oversight of the web designing process.
Now, the breadcrumbs are added for improved SEO and UX.
Here’s the result of structured data test that shows the presence of breadcrumbs:
The breadcrumbs also appear in search results:
The importance of breadcrumbs and their positive effect on SEO can be noticed in the below screenshot. The red arrow shows the moment of adding this crucial navigation element to the Znak website:
We knew that znak.com.pl had a strong link profile. For that reason, we could shift our focus and energy to pursue another goal – increase the number of backlinks. We managed to do so by carrying out quality link building supported by sponsored content. Also, we succeeded at having znak.com.pl placed on stronger domains.
Website parameters before we started implementing our link building strategy:
Website parameters after the process:
Undoubtedly, due to its seasonality, the book industry isn’t the easiest one to optimize. December and January are two months that generate a significant revenue income. It’s usually caused by the special offers and discounts that most bookstores offer around the holiday season.
That being said, we’re going to compare the results achieved through a year.
The below graph demonstrates the seasonal changes typical of the book industry:
During the first 2 months, we noted a decrease in organic traffic. It was mainly caused by the customers losing their interest in purchasing books.
Here you can compare March 2018 with March 2019:
After those 2 months – so after introducing our SEO strategy – we spotted that our efforts were gradually bringing the looked-for results. In August 2019, the organic traffic increased by 23% (compared to the previous year):
Even during the low season of July-August, we managed to note a nearly 25% increase in organic traffic:
After implementing the major technical SEO fixes in April, we noted a significant increase in website visibility. In 5 months, the number of impressions went over 2 million!
Here is how the website visibility was growing month by month:
After fixing the internal linking and uploading more sitemaps, the number of indexed pages also grew:
Now, four examples of keyword position change:
starting position: 20, final position: 7
starting position: 10, final position: 4
starting position: 25, final position: 14
starting position: 19, final position: 8
The book industry is pretty competitive, and therefore we had to stay focused to maintain the positive results. We needed to stay up to date with the marketing activities done by Znak’s competitors, and react fast.
Luckily, it appears that our efforts paid off. The graph below shows Znak’s website visibility compared to one of its biggest competitors.
Top 10 keyword phrases:
Top 3 keyword phrases:
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