iFactory Administrator 
This case study summarises how focusing on technical SEO and website speed increased organic traffic 85%.
Overview
A major apparel brand was experiencing significant issues with their ecommerce store performance and technical SEO errors that impacted their ability to grow. Specifically:
- Their online store was very slow and frequently timed out, particularly when under load during promotions
- Poor site structure with hundreds of technical SEO issues was impacting their organic search rankings and site traffic.
Resolving Technical SEO Issues
We identified over 280 technical SEO issues in their Magento installation, including:
- 43 pages with duplicate meta descriptions
- 36 duplicate title tags
- 34 pages with duplicate content
- 40 pages with duplicate H1 and title tags
- No canonical urls
- Slow site speed.
These issues made it very difficult for Google to understand how the site was structured, and what content and pages to prioritise for important keywords.
Once we improved resolved these structural issues, improvements in search visibility were profound and quickly realised.
Site Performance Issues
The next step was to improve site performance, in particular improving page speed. There is a huge amount of research demonstrating that poor site speed negatively impacts user experience and leads to:
- Higher bounce rates
- Less time on page
- Lower online conversion rates
- Lower user satisfaction and repeat visits
- Poorer search rankings.
We’ve written extensively about the importance of website speed.
By moving our client’s store to our performance web hosting environment and improving their site structure, we reduced their store’s page load time to less than 2 seconds on product and category pages.
The Result
Simply by focusing on improving technical ‘on page’ search engine optimisation and making the website fast, without engaging in link building or content strategies, our client saw significant improvements compared to the same period the previous year:
- Organic Search traffic increased 85%
- Overall Bounce rate improved nearly 16%.
