SEO for Aitken Wines

Improving the search engine rankings of key products for wine and spirit merchant Aitken Wines.

Background

Aitken Wines were being out-ranked by their competitors and experiencing indexing issues that meant some key products were not in the search results at all.

Goals

  • Audit the Aitken Wines website to discover all issues that may affect search engine rankings
  • Provide a prioritised list of SEO and general website issues
  • Address general website issues
  • Achieve a top ten ranking for each of the key products
  • Recommend new features or content that would improve search engine rankings across the site
  • Deliver a content strategy that recommends steps for using content to improve rankings and visitor experience
  • Create a step-by-step SEO improvement guide that the Aitken Wines team can use to update other products

Process

I performed an audit of the Aitken Wines website that covered:

  • Content (quality, relevance, uniqueness)
  • Performance (page loading time, interactivity)
  • Functionality (usability of search, navigation, product page)
  • Design (layout, accessibility)
  • Mobile-friendliness
  • Page meta information (titles and descriptions)
  • Keyword analysis
  • Competitor analysis

The audit used industry-standard SEO analysis tools and manual techniques to determine if the website was:

  • being correctly crawled, indexed, and rendered by Google
  • free from on-page SEO problems
  • free from potential issues on sites that relate/link back to it
  • delivering a good user experience (for both mobile and desktop users)
  • keyword-optimised
  • free from duplicate or thin content

Results

✓ Top 10 rankings for key products
✓ 15% increase in visits from Search
✓ 23% increase in conversions

The audit identified a number of issues that would need addressed:

  • The aitkenwines.com domain has a low Domain Authority score
  • Most product pages were ‘thin’ content (pages with low text-HTML ratio)
  • All pages were missing hreflang and lang attributes
  • Product pages had an issue with headings skipping a heading level
  • Product images were missing alt text
  • Some product titles did not include the full or correct name of the product
  • Product descriptions did not feature the product name in the correct position
  • Product images were too small
  • There weren’t enough product images
  • Some meta titles had issues with their length or content
  • Some meta descriptions were either too long or missing
  • Some product pages were not indexed or indexable
  • There were some poor quality backlinks from non-reputable and harmful sites
  • There were some performance issues on mobile
  • There were some accessibility issues that would affect SEO

I updated the site-wide issues first and then worked on fixing the issues identified with the key product pages:

  • Updated product titles, meta titles, and meta descriptions
  • Added content to product pages to improve text-to-HTML ratio and inform the visitor (delivery information, information about the producer and region)
  • Added more product images and increased size
  • Fixed issues with headings
  • Updated product descriptions to include product name (the target keywords) in the right area

Finally, I delivered a content strategy and a DIY step-by-step guide that will help ensure the Aitken Wines website will include content that helps increase rankings and delivers a better visitor experience going forward.

Responsibilities
Search Engine Optimisation, Copywriting, Design, Shopify theme development
Collaborations
Zen (agency)
Client
Aitken Wines