SEO Team Management

Search Marketing Team Management Case Study – Condomania

Condomania is America’s first online condom store and enjoys a large volume of sales from customers around the world via its ecommerce website and its bricks-and-motar store in the heart of New York City.

The Problem

After a disastrous website migration from their previous ecommerce content management system to the Magneto platform in April 2015, the site’s rankings, traffic and sales plummeted to just a trickle, causing grave concern for the brand’s management team. Profits suffered severely for over nine months, during which time the company was working with an Indian-based search marketing agency that failed to recover the lost traffic. By this stage, Condomania was at risk of shutting down its online operations completely.

The well-meaning offshore team spent the rest of the year trying to resurrect the failing website’s fortunes with a mix of generic on-page optimisation and basic link building. This had little effect and left them at a loss as to how to recover from the drop in Google US search rankings and the daily targeted traffic that the business had once enjoyed.

The Solution

I proposed a six day campaign to audit the domain and resolve the majority of the website’s technical errors and unredirected urls, as well as to identify and optimise meta data and content on the site’s best pages. I drew up an Agile schedule and assigned tasks to the Indian team, whilst planning a whole host of hands-on jobs for myself to implement.

The campaign not only resolved the majority of the hidden problems the site faced, but also ensured the offshore team were better informed about how to properly maintain, optimise and improve rankings once the one-off campaign had been completed.

After a full review of the 23,000 errors created by the previous web developer, I was able to inform the team of the situation and explain the remedies required (I also recommended that the client never use inexperienced staff for website migration tasks again). This ensured all parties were comfortable about their roles in the recovery and able to monitor key performance indicators during the entire process.

Using tools such as Google itself, Screaming Frog Search Spider, Semrush, Moz, Majestic, Ahrefs and others, I was able to identify the key problems that were generating errors, restricting Googlebot and holding the site back. However, because all of the page urls had been changed from a “trailing slash” format to an .html suffix, the solution involved a range of fixes that needed to be done in a particular order. With this in mind, I set a weekly schedule that would ensure each stage was completed before going on to the next.

Both Matt, the owner of Condomania, and the team of offshore specialists were kept informed about what needed to be done, how, and when. And after identifying the causes of all the broken links, I was able to map the hundreds of permanent redirects needed to channel wasted link juice from incoming links from other sites.

Then, having seen the huge drop in errors reported by Moz and Google Search Console, I was able to set the simpler tasks of creating better meta titles and descriptions for key products and pages, as well as training the team on how to optimise the content of the main product pages, categories and blog.

Generating over 50 #1 Rankings in Google

During an earlier phase of the keyword research and meta data review, I realised an array of outdated methods had been implemented by the offshore team, including keyword stuffing and the building of low quality directory listings and other untrusted links. Surprised that they had not developed an SEO plan that was suited to the client’s particular needs, I requested the team halt their previous activities and re-evaluated the methods used on their clients’ websites.

Although this caused initial friction and required a full explanation of how Google discovers, crawls, indexes and ranks web pages, the team were appreciative of the lessons learned. They were especially receptive to further changes once they saw the increase in rankings and traffic these initial fixes had generated.

With further attention paid to better internal linking and another sweep through fixing the remaining site-wide errors and SEO issues, we were able to build up momentum as our rankings increased. Long tail keywords terms, as well as head terms such as “condom store” and “buy condoms”, skyrocketed the site’s traffic to 20 times the volume that the Indian team had achieved. The client’s site was now getting three times more visits per day than the site enjoyed before the botched migration.

As well as achieving top organic rankings positions in the US Google search results for all of our target keyword phrases, I also put aside some time to make recommendations on site layout and design. These suggestions related to conversion optimisation best practices and a number of easy wins that would help increase clickthrough rates, traffic and sales.

These tweaks included rewriting meta descriptions (the biggest area of real estate seen in a Google search result) to feature a few sales psychology tricks, such as using the “AIDA checklist” to ensure that the search result text grabs a searcher’s Attention, keeps them Interested, increases Desire for the product and calls them to Action.

Short, sharp propositions mentioning an offer or a benefit really helped to get searchers to click through to the site, further increasing the number of daily visits to around 3,000. Because these are highly targeted visitors who are searching for the client’s products, sales also increased dramatically.

The Results

Four months after the starting my hands-on SEO campaign and management of the offshore team, the site was generating over 20 times more Google search visits per day than the whole offshore team had achieved in nine months of work. This result translated to 300% more overall daily website visits than the original site generated, whilst pushing our main competitors out of the visible area of the top search results.

• Over 50 #1 positions in Google US
• 20 x more organic visits than before
• 3 x more traffic than previous website
• 90% of on-page SEO errors resolved
• Improved Google Search Console crawls
• Better informed offshore team members
• Increased sales allowing further investment

The increase in sales and newsletter sign-ups allowed Condomania to invest further in an ongoing off-site content marketing and link building campaign, which has since further improved the site’s incoming link profile and boosted sales well beyond what the company had expected. All parties were overjoyed with the results and I too have enjoyed working with Matt and the Indian team since our initial SEO campaign.

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