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Business Overview

Business Overview

The client is a successful US family-run toy manufacturer involving 200 employees and an assortment that includes 60 types of various wooden items ranging from basic figures and children’s educational playthings to tinker toys.

The client has already established a decent distribution network with its branded brick-and-mortar shop, big box stores, and online marketplaces. The owner decided to expand its presence by launching an eCommerce website. The client’s web development team had already been working on the site, but they lacked digital marketing expertise and engaged NIX to implement a comprehensive set of search engine optimization (SEO) steps from scratch and ensure further organic promotion without paid activities to begin with.

Business Overview_2

Challenge

Initially, the site’s release date was set for July 2021 in order to rank highly in search results well before peak sales in the Christmas season. In March, the website’s release became a matter of urgent necessity for the client’s business not to go into the red because of the COVID-19 pandemic and all stores shutting down for an undefined period. The action plan had been revised, and the timeline had been significantly reduced.

Project Scope

The NIX team had the following goals to achieve:

  • 01

    Execute the whole complex of SEO activities by the site launch in 1.5 months

  • 02

    Reach the following organic traffic volume of 2.5k users by the peak Christmas demand in December, and 9k users by June

  • 03

    Achieve 15% site visibility progress within two months after launch

Solution

Solution

Solution

Our experts joined the internal client’s team in the early stages of web architecture development. The work started from the analysis and assessment of the existing inputs, elaboration of requirements tailored to specifics of the eCommerce toy niche to build a far-sighted SEO strategy. The early stage synchronization of web development and SEO prevented the budget overrun and time delay avoiding further remodeling of the site configuration and increased its chances for stable and consistent traffic growth. To accomplish these goals, we used an integrated approach for SEO activities. The scope was the following:

Website Structure

Our experts have built a logical website structure relying on the client’s requirements and deep research on web strengths and weaknesses of main competitors, and identified industry-specific queries. The multi-page website had the following structure:

Semantic Core

Semantic Core

Semantic Core

We worked out keyword searches and their clustering and distribution for different semantic entities to get high visibility in search engines. The team prepared the list of necessary content and requirements for its creation.

Optimization

The website was optimized in three main directions—technical, on-page, and off-page optimization. The steps were the following:

01

Technical Optimization

Technical optimization included finding weak points and implementing guidelines for the enhancement of source code and website ranking optimization. We processed page speed, internal linking, logical structure and crawl depth, page canonicalization, and URL structure. We used canonical tags, sitemap.xml, and robot.txt files to influence the crawl  budget—a critical metric for site indexing.

02

On-page Optimization

On-page optimization was provided on the web development staging. We set up the site content that met the Google demands—our experts used meta-data, matchable keywords and semantically related phrases.

03

Off-page Optimization

We created a long-term, link-building strategy and robust backlink profile to deal with credible, high-quality, and relevant websites that would increase rankings on Google search engine results pages (SERPs) and get more organic traffic.

The steps were the following:

  1. Analysis of referral profiles of toy manufacturers and sellers
  2. Processing of competitors’ external reference mass and traffic to separate applicable donor websites and search for newer, effective ones, taking into account site authority score, topical relevance, and unique referring domains
  3. Formed the action plan for getting quality reference mass for the brand. The team formed a list of relevant website donors, combining guest posting, social media, unlinked brand mentions, and competitor backlink replication. The plan contained the timeline and dynamics of content placement to avoid suspicious activity hits and search engine mistrust.

Web Analytics

Web Analytics

To monitor, troubleshoot, and maintain the site’s performance, the client’s website was connected to Google Search Console. The provided data helped to check page indexing, identify the top organic pages, manage efficiency of snippets, detect and fix page experience issues, look at the Core Web Vitals scores, etc.

Due to Google Analytics, our SEO experts assessed website metrics by tracking user behavior and traffic sources for making further modifications and improving the website rank, which is its position in the search results.

Web Analytics

Indexing by Google

Indexing by Google

Indexing by Google

The NIX team accurately fulfilled the requirements from Google and used the ping tool to be crawled, indexed, and ranked highly in a short time. Due to a polished web structure, quality content and correct clustering, page optimization measures taken to influence the crawling budget 10 days after launching the website demonstrated good results—Google had scanned all the site’s pages and had not reported any errors.

Outcome

With our help, the client received a smooth transition from offline to online without any drop in sales even during the COVID-19 outbreak. Our complex implementation of SEO activities at the strategy stage of website development was a cost-effective and high-performance solution for the client’s business.

Established goals were met within the agreed time frames with results above expectations:

  • SEO performance enabled the website to reach 4k organic visits in December instead of the target of 2.5k; in June this grew to 13k instead of the target of 9k; in September, 25k users with a high conversion rate generated significant income
  • The website had been completely indexed and shown to users on the first page of search results in just 2 months
  • Site visibility progress was 2x higher than expected—it increased from 0% to 30% in 2 months instead of the intended 15%
Outcome

Team:

2 SEO experts

Tech Stack:

Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google  Search Console, Google Optimize, Screamingfrog, SEMrush, Similarweb, Ahrefs, Mindmeister, Bing Webmaster Tools, Moz.com, PageSpeed Insights, Google Mobile-Friendly Test, Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, blackhatlinks.com, WebSiteAuditor, Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner

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