In this case study we’ll be sharing exactly how we 5x’d The Brobasket’s organic search traffic in just under two months.
This is a powerful example of how a few strategic fixes and optimizations can have a dramatic impact on SEO in a very short amount of time.
We’ve used these same techniques on 100’s of other eCommerce stores to achieve very similar results. And by the end of this case study, you’ll be well equipped to implement the same SEO techniques on your own eCommerce store.
About The BroBasket
The Brobasket is the premier online retailer of curated gift baskets for men, including a wide selection of alcohol, food items and accessories.
- Domain: thebrobasket.com
- Platform: gift baskets for men
However, they had experienced a catastrophic decline in rankings and traffic. With their busy season approaching, they needed a quick and dramatic win.
8-Step SEO Improvement Plan
From our initial SEO review, we identified a total of 8 foundational SEO opportunities we wanted to address:
- Consolidate highly similar pages
- Re-optimize key pages
- Revamp top navigation
- Fix any technical SEO issues
- Fix keyword cannibalization issues
- Remove any “dead weight” URLs that were getting indexed
- Optimize the most important pages
- Add internal links from blog posts to most important pages
Let’s dive into each of these SEO opportunities step-by-step.
1. Consolidate highly similar pages
We first noticed that the site had a lot of category pages built around overly specific keywords without much search volume.
For example, the site had highly similar category pages for different groups of male gift-receivers:
There were 2 main issues with these types of pages.
- There weren’t many people searching for these types of keywords (ie. “gift baskets for husband”). So even ranking #1 wouldn’t deliver any traffic or revenue.
- All these pages were highly similar, with the exact same product selection.
- When it comes to SEO, sometimes less is more. Google’s goal is to offer searchers the most relevant results rather than the most well-optimized pages.
So with the various grandparent/brother/husband pages, we knew they were all essentially the same thing: “gifts for men.”
To fix this, we redirected all these pages to the main “Gifts for Men” collections page, and did the same for all female-targeted page types. As a result, the site just has “Gifts for Men” and “Gifts for Women” in the menu:
We applied this same approach to other groups of similar pages, cutting down the number of redundant category pages significantly.
2. Re-optimize key pages
Almost all the pages on the website were targeting various “for men” keywords. For example:
- “whiskey gifts for men”
- “vodka gifts for men”
- “beer gifts for men”
At first glance this makes sense. The website is literally called “The BroBasket”. But when men search for products online, they aren’t always appending “for men” in their search queries.
So we knew we needed to broaden our keyword selection and focus more on keywords with higher search volume. After all, “whiskey gifts” has over twice the search volume (SV) as “whiskey gifts for men,” and is even easier to rank for with a lower Keyword Difficulty (KD) score.
Rankings for other important keywords like “engraved liquor bottles” were very poor because the content was optimized for male audiences:
It seemed we were limiting our SEO potential by focusing too much on “men” within the content, reducing our ability to rank for more popular keywords.
To fix this, we worked with BroBasket to remove most of the “men” keywords in the content that were limiting the products to just the male audience.
The results were quick and impressive, rankings for “engraved liquor bottles” shot up to position #2 in just a few weeks.
3. Revamp top navigation
The website had a heavy top navigation. In fact, about 1/7th of the entire website was listed in the main navigation menu which was quite excessive.
A website’s top navigation helps Google understand which pages are most important, and should be prioritized higher.
But if you include too many pages in the top navigation, you’re essentially diluting the SEO value of these pages by telling Google every page is of equal importance. And therefore Google will likely assume that none of them are all that important.
To fix this, we recreated their top navigation in a spreadsheet to see which pages had decent SEO potential and were worth keeping, and which ones didn’t belong in the top nav.
We ended up cutting the navigation down from 83 links to just 36 links, focusing on just the pages that had the most SEO potential, but also had the strongest clicks and engagement from users.
4. Fix any technical SEO issues
Our next step was to complete a full technical on-page SEO audit of the BroBasket website. This process involved a complete crawl of the website and consisted of the following 3 components.
From the technical SEO analysis we were able to uncover some valuable SEO opportunities.
- The website had many SEO redirects that weren’t SEO friendly.
- There were multiple broken links negatively impacting crawling.
- Product images weren’t optimized with image alt text.
- The site had slow load times and low scores on Google PageSpeed Insights.
- There were many dead “404” pages that still had backlinks, meaning the backlinks were not having as much of an impact on rankings.
We implemented all the necessary fixes to the issues above, making sure the website would be completely SEO-friendly.
5. Fix keyword cannibalization issues
Keyword Cannibalization is an SEO issue that occurs when multiple pages compete for the same keyword. When a search engine has trouble determining which page to rank for a specific keyword, none of the pages rank as well as they could.
In the case of The Brobasket, there were a lot of similar pages competing for the same keywords. Take for example the keyword “bourbon gift basket”:
Each color on the chart represents a different page on the website. Notice how Google keeps jumping from page to page, trying to figure out the best page to rank for “bourbon gift basket”?
We determined that the Whiskey and Bourbon Gift Sets collection page would provide the best user experience for the keyword “bourbon gift basket”.
So to fix this, we re-optimized the Whiskey and Bourbon Gift Sets collection page and added internal links from the other pages that were incorrectly ranking. We also made sure to use the exact-match keyword “bourbon gift basket” in the anchor text to make it clear that it was the correct page for the keyword.
Once it became clear to search engines which page to rank for each keyword, we saw significant ranking improvements. For example, “bourbon gift baskets” shot up to position #2 within just a few weeks.
6. Remove any “dead weight" URLs that were getting indexed
Next we wanted to ensure that there weren’t any duplicate URLs or other “dead weight” pages getting indexed in Google. Having a bunch of low-value pages indexed can have a negative impact on rankings. So we wanted to minimize any crawl and indexation bloat by blocking unnecessary pages from search engines.
We reviewed all indexed URLs in Google’s search engine, and identified 149 URLs that needed to be removed from Google index.
Here are a few examples of the types of URLs that needed to be deindexed.
- Blog Tag pages: https://thebrobasket.com/blogs/news/tagged/biz_updates
- Parameter pages: https://thebrobasket.com/collections/fathers-day-gift-baskets?page=2&phcursor=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzayI6InBvc2l0aW9uIiwic3YiOjEwMiwiZCI6ImIi
LCJ1aWQiOjM3NTk2NjU0NjY1OTY0LCJsIjo1MCwibyI6MCwiciI6IkNEUCIsInYiOjEsInAiOjJ9.
ZRLK3HYhgeLiWuM-ckfqjnrJ0GSb1S-lYKE9yjwED0I - Internal search pages: https://thebrobasket.com/collections/all?page=12&q=whiskey
For each of these URL types, we either implemented noindex tags or blocked them in the robots.txt file to ensure they wouldn’t get indexed in the future. We also manually removed them in Google Search Console using the URL Removal tool.
7. Optimize the most important pages
There were many pages on the site that had meta descriptions and/or title tags which were too long on the site.
We optimized the title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags to ensure they included our target keywords. We also made sure to make the meta descriptions in particular as compelling as possible to increase click-through rates, resulting in additional search traffic.
8. Add internal links from blog posts to most important pages
BroBasket already had dozens of great blog posts on the website. But we noticed that there weren’t many internal links from these blog posts to their high-value category and product pages.
This was a missed opportunity. Internal links are a great way to pass relevance signals and “link juice” to high priority pages.
For example, if we wanted to improve rankings for the keyword “gift baskets for men” (2,300 searches/month), we could look for mentions of “gift baskets for men” on existing blog posts and hyperlink that text to the Gift Baskets for Men collections page.
And that’s exactly what we did.
We reviewed all the existing blog posts for internal linking opportunities to relevant category pages, product pages, and even other blog posts.
SEO Campaign Results
There was a lot of work that went into this SEO campaign. But what about the results?
BroBasket’s organic search traffic grew 5X in just a few months, going from around 5,000 visits per month to now around 25,000 monthly search visitors.
During the same time, the number of keywords on page 1 grew from just 958 to now having 3,373 keywords ranking on page 1.
And here’s how their most important keywords were impacted by the SEO efforts.
The campaign was a huge success and the BroBasket team was very happy with the results.
SEO doesn’t always have to take 6-12 months to deliver results. Sometimes just fixing technical issues and optimizing pages is all it takes to get some great results.
