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.
