Boosting Visibility and Sales: A Comprehensive SEO Transformation for a Fitness Equipment Business

About the Client

About the Client:

An independent business founded by a national-level competitive bodybuilder and fitness enthusiast. In contrast to large retailers selling commercial gym equipment, our client focuses on delivering exceptional quality products at competitive prices. Additionally, their hands-on customer service sets them apart in the industry.

Keywords provided by the client & Ranking (June 2019)

Organic Traffic (June 2019)

The Challenge

The website is currently underperforming, as the clients are struggling to achieve high rankings for extremely competitive keywords. This situation is adversely affecting their sales and organic traffic.

• Our primary challenge was to drive organic growth and increase the website's organic traffic. We aimed to target a wider audience across the USA through organic searches.
• Following the YMYL update, optimizing the website according to EAT and YMYL guidelines presented a significant challenge. Moreover, standing out amidst fierce competition from major eCommerce suppliers like Amazon and eBay required us to employ attention-grabbing tactics.
• Another major hurdle we faced was the limited project budget. Despite this constraint, the client suggested ten highly competitive keywords, while we identified an additional 40-50 keywords. Initially, we lacked sufficient website pages to effectively optimize and target these keywords.
• Website content posed a significant challenge as well, with the initial content being of low quality. We optimized the website and urged the client to add high-quality, unique content aligned with our target keywords.
• The website was lacking high-quality backlinks, which posed a significant hurdle for us.
• Website speed also emerged as a substantial challenge that required attention and optimization.

By addressing these challenges head-on, we aimed to enhance the website's performance, improve keyword rankings, and drive increased organic traffic.

The Solution

Upon analyzing the website, we quickly realized that there was a lack of sufficient categories and product pages to effectively target our chosen keywords. Recognizing this, we commenced work on the initial website while simultaneously proposing to the client the addition of more categories and product pages. To emphasize the importance of separate categories and product pages, we presented a comprehensive plan to the client. Fortunately, the client was receptive and created the category pages within the designated timeframe.

In order to enhance the website's visibility and improve keyword rankings, we diligently added quality content that aligned with our target keywords. This not only increased the website's presence on the web but also had a direct impact on improving keyword rankings, subsequently driving an increase in website traffic.

To optimize the website's performance, we focused on improving its speed by implementing various measures across all website pages.

In addition, we embarked on a proactive approach to generate high-quality backlinks. This involved engaging in guest posting, article submission, quora submission, classified submission, and other strategies to acquire relevant and authoritative backlinks.

By implementing these actions, we aimed to improve the website's search engine visibility, and keyword rankings, and ultimately, drive increased organic traffic.

We identified the following opportunities to scale traffic & ranking:

1. Best SEO practices - To enhance organic traffic and improve the performance of the website, we implemented a range of effective SEO practices. Here's an overview of our approach:

• Keyword Research and Targeting: - We conducted comprehensive keyword research, identifying 40-50 high-value keywords with a monthly search volume of approximately 300 thousand. Based on these keywords, we strategically mapped out target landing pages to be created and optimized.
• We had requested the client to incorporate a Blog section and regularly update it with blog posts. However, the client declined our proposal. Simultaneously, we approached them regarding the addition of location-based pages, and fortunately, they agreed. By incorporating these new website pages and content, we can seize opportunities for website analysis, internal linking, heading tags, and optimizing other web pages. As a result, our website's ranking started to improve, and we began to experience an increase in traffic.
• A comprehensive off-page campaign was implemented, during which we diligently created hundreds of links every month, resulting in an impressive total of over 1000 links within a year.
• We adopted various SEO best practices, including optimizing the metadata, improving the speed of the website, and enhancing the existing content.

Managing Google Updates

We implemented an information-rich strategy to enhance our website's ranking based on the principles of Google updates.

Every time Google rolled out an update, it had an impact on numerous websites, and we were no exception. When the YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) and EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) updates were introduced, we focused our efforts on adhering to the EAT principle and undertook the following steps:

1. We displayed accreditation badges prominently in the footer of our main website.
2. We optimized client testimonials and review ratings in the website footer.
3. We embedded testimonial videos from our clients' YouTube channels on the main specialty pages of our website.

Content Structure and Optimization –

We recognized the importance of utilizing information-based content to attain top rankings on SERPs, which led to our client's pages being featured on rich snippets. Here are the steps we implemented:

1. We created new city pages and optimized the content according to our targeted keywords.
2. The content was factual, concise, and aimed at establishing trust between the customer and the supplier.
3. From an SEO standpoint, we prioritized improving indexing and incorporated images to enhance the EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) value.
4. We strategically utilized specific keywords to facilitate users in swiftly reaching the bottom of the sales funnel, minimizing any unnecessary time wastage.

The Results:

Keywords Ranking:

From June 2019 to June 2020, we achieved consistent top 3 rankings for highly competitive keywords.

No. Of keywords in the top 10:

Keywords ranking data from SEMrush -

Overall Traffic Growth:

Overall, we experienced a remarkable 145% increase in organic traffic during the 6-month period from July 2019 to December 2019 compared to January 2020 to June 2020.

Organic Traffic (June 2019)