Technical SEO for Golf Support
The Brief
Golfsupport.com is a leading e-commerce store in the golf industry. They sell a huge range of equipment and merchandise from top golf brands. When we first started working with the business, they had just been hit with a nasty Google penalty and wanted to start performing well in organic search again. Through consistent technical improvements and an extensive link earning campaign, the site was performing well but still had much room for growth. A yet unknown issue on the website was preventing the brand from breaking onto the first page and into the top 3 results for hundreds of their target keywords that they had long held spots in the first 5 pages for. For many keywords, multiple Golf Support pages could be found ranking on the second page but all would struggle to make it into the top 10 results.
Our Strategy
The technical SEO team first needed to find the on-site issue(s) holding the website back. Seeing multiple pages ranking on the second page onwards for the same keyword suggested that there was an issue with the sites content. Google was struggling to decide which page was most appropriate to rank for a given keyword and as a result, all pages ranked lower. Issues like this can be hard to diagnose which is where the experience and knowlegde of an expert SEO company really comes into play. The team found that the category descriptions where the main cause of the issue. Almost all descriptions contained duplicate content which lowered the quality of the pages. Internal competition was also an issue with multiple pages being optimised for the same or similar keywords. We carried out a complete content overall (re-writing hundreds of category and sub category descriptions) to ensure that all content was unique to the Golf Support site. An internal linking structure was also implemented to help users and Google better navigate and understand the website. The internal links help Google decide which page should rank for which keywords and as a result, the page best optimised and most appropriate for a target keyword can rank as highly as possible and the risk of internal competition is removed.
The Results
Through consistent re-writing of the categories and sub categories, the duplicate content found on the site was dramatically reduced and the experience for users greatly improved. The internal links made it clearer to Google and users which categories where about which product ranges, types and brands and they could more easily be ranked for the appropriate keywords as result. The implemented content strategy resulted in increased rankings across categories and sub categories for product specific, high buyer intent searches which are most likely to generate additional sales and revenue. The increase in rankings from this campaign will drive an additional 12,311 organic visitors a month.
"Doing what is beneficial for customers and website users is a top priority. The fact that this technical SEO change and content strategy not only greatly benefited rankings but also meant that more valuable, high quality and unique content was available to users is just brilliant."
The results
