From a brand new online domain, ShopSM was able to rise to the #1 spot in search engine ranking positions for target keywords in a span of six months and grow its Organic Visits from 0 – 20,000 per month—thanks to our tenacious, tailor-fit SEO strategy.

As relevant brands swiftly pivot to the digital space, it becomes an increasing challenge for newcomer platforms to make their presence known. With SM Store being the leading retail player in the Philippines, it was critical to bring the brand’s website—which was made from scratch and therefore had no preexisting data—to the top of the ranks in record time.

We partnered with ShopSM to accelerate the brand’s entry into e-commerce with an aggressive and meticulous SEO strategy and later on, transitioning into the Shopify platform. Our goal was to drive traffic and increase visibility by ranking for crucial key terms. Below, we outline how our digital marketing agency was able to rank ShopSM as first on virtually all our target keywords and drive almost 20,000 organic pageviews per month in less than a year.

The challenges:

Pre-Shopify: We had our work cut out for us in the beginning. Our client’s domain was brand new with no existing data and was mounted on a proprietary e-commerce system—a difficult site for Google to crawl and deem relevant. There were also thousands of pages and counting to optimize.

Post-Shopify: The content migration resulted in a vast amount of errors, from missing pages and SEO elements to unoptimized URLs. With all these issues, we also had to retain our results from the previous platform.

How we solved it

Pre-Shopify:

The Approach:

• • A specialized SEO training session was conducted with the ShopSM team to help them improve product pages on their end. We understood that running a megasite and optimising it requires all hands on deck. 
  • A customized SEO toolkit, which includes SEO Philippines‘ best practices, recommendations and do’s & don’ts, was developed and turned over to the client for long-term utilization by the ShopSM team.

• Workflow efficiency

• • Weekly SEO audits were enacted to categorize our tasks by level of difficulty and return on results.
  • Prioritization of urgent concerns were expedited to maximize our timeline.

• A hardworking SEO strategy

• • Identified keywords were mapped out to level 1 pages, maximizing SEO benefits.
  • On-page SEO elements of top-tier pages were modified to be search engine-friendly and to maximize traffic and business opportunities.
  • A link building campaign targeting brand growth and RA target keywords was run, increasing backlinks to the ShopSM site and boosting the domain ranking score.

The Results:

• Since October, 12 out of our 14 keywords now rank first on SERPs, with the other two at second place. The biggest jump was from 75th place to first place.
• 3 years after, it is expected of course that we dominate all SM branded keywords. 🤣
• ShopSM now ranks for non-branded long-tail keywords in the store and growing.

• The brand new ShopSM site is now one of the fastest-growing Domain Authority amongst SEO clients of LeapOut. 

Post-Shopify:

The Approach:

• Adaptation to the new platform
  • Optimization of product pages with good conversion results per the BU to boost page searchability.
  • Acceleration of technical optimization of top-level pages through improved tags, metadata, URLs, internal linking and schema markups if applicable.
  • Optimization of URLs with SKUs and product IDs instead of keyword-richness to improve crawlability and page authority.

• Rectifying errors
  • Pinpointing broken links and redirecting them to new versions of the pages via 301 redirection.

The Results:

• In just a few months, ShopSM has begun to rank for non-brand keywords on SERPs, beginning to come on par with leading e-commerce websites.

Going the extra mile:

The first phase of our campaign has already produced impressive results, but we’re not stopping there. We have more techniques to further boost our client’s asset to the top.

Boosting our link building campaign

• We want to run an aggressive link building strategy to elevate ShopSM’s link profile and quickly widen the gap between them and their competitors.

Final insights:

Managing an e-commerce SEO campaign is no easy task, but with the right strategy and hyper-focused SEO implementation, rewarding results can be achieved. Great SEO victories not only come from a great agency, but from a supportive client that believes in the importance of organic growth, website searchability, and overall user experience. Kudos to our great clients at ShopSM for achieving remarkable results!

Do checkout our SEO Packages in the Philippines if you’re looking to grow your organic traffic, increase your organic conversions, and just scale your e-store business.