Welcome to our 7 figure B2B Ecommerce SEO Case Study.

In this case study you’ll learn the holistic strategy we used to:

• Increase revenue from $2.322.984 to $4.057.505 for a B2B eCommerce business
• Generate 717 leads that converted into 511 sales (403 sales were from new customers)
• Increase Average Order Value from $2.525 to $5.130
• Drive 30.603 organic sessions from google search

To make things better, instead of just showing you how we did it, you’ll learn how to do it for your business too including how to:

• Map the ideal website structure
• Create money pages
• Build topical clusters (content silos)
• Improve UX
• Create new assets to support the customer journey and
• Increase conversions.

In summary, this B2B eCommerce SEO Case Study is your chance to get a peak under the hood on how 7 figure businesses are built and scaled with SEO.

You ready? Let’s go

The Client

Our client is an established Australian Manufacturer in the Office Furniture Industry that’s been in business for 8 years.

The Results

12 months after executing our ‘B2B Ecommerce Foundations Strategy’ we drove 30.603 organic sessions to the website from google search

That organic traffic created 717 leads that converted into 511 sales which increased revenue by 75% when compared to the previous 12 months.

79% of those sales were from new customers and only 21% of sales were from repeat customers, which led to revenue from new customers being higher than all revenue from the previous year.

Return of investment for this project was 20x within the analysed time frame. This raw ROI value calculated by dividing revenue by the cost of the campaign doesn’t include:

• The lifetime value of the new customers acquired for the business
• The ongoing acquisition an organic campaign sustains after the 12 months analysed.
• The increase in conversions for paid channels for website optimisations and redesign
• The future proofing and risk reduction value for the website’s performance overtime.

Among other metrics, after 12 months the campaign achieved:

• 71% increase in Organic traffic from google (not including direct): from 459 sessions/week to 787 sessions/week (with peak of 858 sessions/week during the 12 months).
• 82% increase in Organic traffic value: from $102/session value to $186/session
• 71% increase in revenue from leads increased: from $1.994.393 to 3.408.018
• 105% increase in Ecommerce revenue: from $328.591 to 649.487 and
• 103% increase in Average Order Value: from $2.525 to $5.130 when compared to the previous year.

By executing this strategy we learned that:

• Attracting high value traffic is more important than overall traffic volume.
• Traffic potential is wasted if not attracted to a high converting website
• Any B2B business can benefit immensely from a similar strategy.

So how did we do it?

The Strategy: 3 steps to target organic traffic that converts into sales

There are three main steps to execute our B2B Ecommerce Foundations Strategy successfully.

Step 1: Keyword Research and Mapping the ideal Site Architecture

Step 2: Create Money Pages and Topic clusters to drive niche organic traffic

Step 3: Create conversion focused on page content, assets and functionality to increase traffic conversion.

Usually the better you execute each of these steps the better results you will get.

Step 1: Keyword Research & Mapping the Ideal Site Architecture

Website Architecture is the blueprint for your store and is one of the most impactful and overlooked parts of building a money making website.

Your site architecture is what’s going to make sure every piece of content works together to get new potential customers aware of your business.

Here’s how to do it:

1.1 Category Pages

If you run an ecommerce site, first, do thorough keyword research to plan out your product category pages.

Act as if you didn’t have an existing site architecture and find all the variations of keywords that people use to search for the products you sell and then cluster them by intent/relevance.

Let’s say you manufacture office chairs. A quick search on SEMRush Magic Tool gives us over 640.000 keywords related to “chairs”.

By looking at these first 35 results we immediately realise that people search for the same product in different ways. For example people search by

• Brand (ikea, office works)
• Industry (Office chairs)
• Design (ergonomic chair, high chair)
• Location to be used (desk chair, lounge chair)
• Designer (Eames chair)
• Features (arm chair)
• Combinations (ergonomic office chair)

By looking at this list I can also imagine that people probably search by material (leather, fabric), colour (black, white), location (office chair sydney), qualifiers (luxury, cheap), etc.

Then you can further explore these queries to find longer tail versions to get further insight into the market.

For example, searching for “desk chairs” lets us discover other features like “No wheels” or “Comfortable”, and qualifiers like “best” or colours like “pink and grey”.

All these are different ways people search for the same thing: chairs that can be used for working purposes or inside an office.

The goal is to do this recursive process for every angle you’ve found for your product and brainstorm for more features, locations, industries, etc you might be missing.

At this stage don’t worry if the same products could be found in different categories, just find all possibilities. You should end up with a spreadsheet that clusters keywords according to the different topics you’ve discovered.

To do this properly consider the following rules:

• Keep these clusters mutually exclusive, meaning no keywords should be assigned to more than one cluster
• Cluster location keywords separately from the rest and only consider those locations that you can ship your products to.
• If you serve different industries, cluster industry related keywords separately from feature related keywords. For example, keep all keywords that contain office together. You generally don’t want “ergonomic office chair” and “leather office chair” to be in separate clusters.

1.2 Topic Clusters

Do the same process to find informational keywords related to what your customers could search for before deciding what chair to buy and map your research on a spreadsheet.

Consider that sometimes it’s easier to start by brainstorming ideas on your own and then search for keywords to support your findings.

These keywords can be directly related to chairs themselves like for example

• How high should and office chair be
• How to choose an office chair
• How to pick an ergonomic office chair

Or they can be related to problems your customer has that could be partially solved by their chair selection

• How your office space impacts employees wellbeing
• How office space affects productivity
• Best chair for productivity
• What is the best office chair for posture

After doing this, identify main topics you could organise content around like for example:

• Workplace productivity
• Workplace wellbeing
• Office chair guide

Cluster related keywords in groups and assign them to the main topics you’ve identified.

Don’t worry about assigning keyword clusters to more than one topic as long as the topics are sufficiently different by making sure each topic is at least 51% unique compared to another topic.

1.3 Building your Site Architecture

Once you’ve done your initial research it’s time to put everything together. The goal is to create a structure so both users and search engines can easily find and navigate your content.

For a good ecommerce experience I like giving customers the option to search for products however they want. Common options are to search by brand, by industry, by application, by location or product feature.

Start by organising your category clusters under these navigation categories and map what your main navigation menu and drop down options could look like.

Following our example, a way of organising the relevant keywords shown above in different categories could be the following*:

*This example is for illustration purposes only. To decide the actual site map a mix of business goals, customer research, keyword research and website authority should be considered.

After organising your category pages into a clean structure, repeat the process for the blog site architecture.

Finally, start mapping how the blog will link to different product categories and which articles are relevant to mention on product categories. Also map how product categories can link to each other.

An example of how blog articles can support our proposed category and subcategory pages.

Step 2: Create Money Pages and Topic Clusters to drive niche organic traffic

With your site architecture blueprint in hand it’s time to start creating content. Start with money pages as there is no point in creating blogs without money pages to promote.

2.1 Money Pages

If you have an existing website, you probably already have category and product pages on your site. In this case, start by comparing the ranking performance for their most important keywords for the last quarter. If they have lost rankings or if you have found additional keywords that are relevant to those pages, update them and optimise.

Once you’ve updated your existing category pages it’s time to start creating the new money pages you’ve planned.

2.1.1 Choose the keywords you’re optimising for

These are the keywords you’re going to use for your SEO title, H1, H2’s and throughout your text on each page.

For each product category keyword cluster, check the volume and difficulty of the keyword with highest volume and difficulty against other keywords your site is ranking for.

If you have a new site, choose on-page keywords with less than 250 monthly search volume and difficulty lower than 30, but choose the most tempting keyword for your URL. This will age the best possible URL and you can climb the volume/difficulty ladder as your page starts performing.

For existing sites, I’ve found excellent results by publishing new pages that don’t try to exceed the general site authority by aiming for a selection of keywords that have similar monthly search volume and difficulty than the best keywords the site already ranks for (that are somewhat related to the subject).

For example if the best keyword your site already ranks for is

You probably won’t quickly rank new pages that target:

But, better options (respectively) would be:

Consider it’s faster to rank new pages when they target keywords that are in the same ballpark as the ones your site already ranks for. Once that new page ranks, you can climb the keyword ladder and target more ambitious keywords.

The only exception to this selection approach is the URL keyword, which should be the keyword with the highest volume that describes the category well, regardless of how ambitious it is.

Once you’ve done your selection of keywords for each category page from your original research, write the pages including the keywords in headers and text paragraphs.

The more ambitious keywords you don’t use at this stage can be incorporated once the new pages start to rank.

2.2 Topic Clusters

Once you’ve created your money pages it’s time to create the blog topic clusters we planned.

Following the same logic as for money pages, select keywords from your research that are in the same ballpark than what your site is already ranking for.

Once you’ve done this, prioritise and start creating content in clusters. To keep going with our example, this would mean to create all Office Chair Guide articles first, then all office productivity articles and then all office wellbeing articles.

If you see there are natural sub categories within these main topics that could all link to the same category page, start creating that sub cluster first and then move on to the rest of the article within that main topic.

Step 3: Create conversion focused on page content, assets and functionality to increase traffic conversion.

Until now you’ve worked hard to rank your site and get organic traffic to your money pages, but that’s of little value if your pages don’t convert that traffic into customers.

You’ve built a good foundation by choosing relevant keywords, but now you have to make sure your category and product pages give the customer everything they need to solve any question or objection they might have about your product.

To help do this you can work on the following

3.1 On Page Content

For category pages, make sure the text helps your customers understand the features and benefits of the products listed on that category. This text should naturally serve as a buying guide that helps customers understand at a high level the difference between each product.

Think it should communicate all the possible answers a sales person in your company could give if a customer was in a physical store with only those products on display. Organise it clearly with headers, use bullet points and be concise.

For example, take a look at how the team at Koala, a premium D2C mattress company, creates content for their category pages. Besides including a description of each mattress and their common features they include a section that helps their customers understand the differences between their mattresses in q quick and comprehensive way

3.2 Conversion Assets

Think of conversion assets as the visual way to provide a good user experience for your customers and as generous ways of serving them.

B2B sales are long and most of the time more than one person is involved in the decision making process.

If a boss sends an employee to find a solution for a problem and that employee is required to quote from different suppliers: do you offer downloadable product brochures they can print and discuss in a meeting with their boss?

The last thing you want is for your product to not be considered properly just because that employee couldn’t gather and communicate all the relevant information to the boss.

Do you provide helpful and concise product and assembly videos that show the benefits, ease of use and how your product stands out?

Consider that explainer videos are specially important if your customers have low awareness of how your products or services work, how they can help them and how they are different from the competition.

Do you provide a way for customers to imagine what the product looks like or operates like in different environments so they can relate it to their own?

Think photos, renders, illustrations.

Do you quickly solve common objections through appropriate imagery and other forms of content?

Brainstorm what images, videos and downloadable’s you can create to address all these issues in visual and effective way

As a reference, take a look at the work Toast, a point of sale system for the hospitality industry, has done to help their customers compare their system against their competition.

Not only have they created comparison guides to compare their system against every direct competitor

They have also created an interactive comparison tool that lets their leads compare quickly the advantages of Toast vs their competitors in a simple and straightforward way.

Another example is the video on their homepage, that quickly explains to customers how Toast works and how it can help them manage their business better.

To achieve the results presented at the beginning of this case study we:

• Redesigned the website to help customers navigate the site more easily as well as achieve a cleaner and more modern look that would help create trust with our customers from the first interaction.
• Replaced all product images and videos to increase the perceived value of the products, show the features and functionality of the products as well as to provide an aesthetically pleasing shopping experience on category pages.
• Improved product category content to help customers clearly understand the differences between products and materials used as well as to provide space for targeting additional keywords and increase traffic.
• Improved product page content to quickly showcase all product features, benefits, specifications and frequently asked questions to remove customer objections and increase ecommerce transactions.

3.3 Functionality

This section is about thinking about what the user can do on the page and the technical performance of the website. Think how you behave on other ecommerce sites and what you expect.

• Does the page load fast
• Is the browsing experience comfortable on both mobile and desktop?
• If you have many products on a category page, do you offer relevant filters so customers can filter products by size, price or different features?
• Do you offer a simple and secure looking checkout process?
• Is there a clear way to navigate to product category pages and product pages from other landing pages and blog articles?

Brainstorm with your sales team what your customers might want to do if they were to arrive at a physical store with your products. How could you translate that to your online store to create a similar experience?

Brainstorm what your customer might want to do if they landed on the wrong page, are you helping them get to the right page easily?

Improving this part of the user experience will make a huge difference in your conversion rates and in how your customers perceive your website and your business.

Some of these factors can also make a huge difference on your on site metrics like bounce rate, session durations and average pages per session. All of which are signals that can affect in one way or another your organic rankings.

Improving functionality and performance in general will also dramatically affect paid channel conversion rates, especially the speed side of things as every fraction of a second can be the difference between a lead bouncing or browsing your store.

To achieve the results presented at the beginning of this case study we:

• Rebuilt the backend of the website and changed wordpress theme to improve performance and user experience with a fast loading site with approving core web vital scores.
• Reviewed and replaced bloated plugins that were causing the site to slow down.
• Changed hosting provider to prevent future security issues, prevent future negative SEO attacks and increased site wide performance.

Now you try it

Make no mistake, every business can scale with consistently growing high quality organic traffic, but creating a website and random blog posts for the sake of it and praying for sales to come in isn’t a strategy.

Sure, it may have worked in the old days when competition wasn’t high and anything would rank, I know multimillion dollar businesses that started this way but eventually got caught up by their competitors and had to shift to a more up to date strategy before it was too late.

The question here is, is your organic strategy a reliable form of growth that is consistent and scalable?

Executing our Ecommerce Foundations Strategy has helped us increase a local established businesses revenue by 75% in one year. That’s a start-up rate of growth, not an established B2B level of growth that you’re leaving on the table.

Now, the specific execution of this strategy will change from business to business, but the principles remain constant.

• Plan an ideal site architecture that will compound the benefit of everything you create.
• Build money pages and relevant topic clusters to attract organic traffic that is likely to convert.
• Create conversion assets and functionality that helps your customers understand your product, solve their questions, overcome their objections and encourage them to buy form you over the competition

If you’ve found this insightful and think this strategy can help you grow your business, get in touch for a free consultation with the lead SEO who executed this strategy.