Award Winning SEO and Paid Media Case Studies by Impressive Digital

The process of building an ecommerce business can be daunting, especially in early stages where things can appear convoluted. A successful ecommerce strategy will have a blend of technicality, strategy, and execution. There are many articles related to ecommerce seo or paid media but they often lack context, but not today. Impressive Digital, a leading ecommerce seo and paid media agency, has opened their doors and provided a rare glimpse into their methodology and award winning techniques. 

As submitted to the Global Search Awards, these case studies by Impressive Digital, serve as guidance for implementing effective ecommerce seo and paid media strategies. This article discusses their techniques, hypothesis formation, and rules of implementation. You can also see the results of their operations highlighted by real data, which demonstrate the direct effects of their strategy.

These case studies focus primarily on ecommerce SEO, paid media optimization, link building techniques, and customer targeting. 

Impressive & Top Fitness: Project Overview

Top Fitness is a US based fitness equipment retailer with 27 stores scattered across the country. Their physical presence stretches from the north-east to the west coast. They were experiencing challenges generating ROAS from their online activity. This was an indication to the team at Impressive that there were unaddressed issues related to ecommerce seo and their broader digital marketing strategy. Their case study will demonstrate the methodology used to resolve what could be relatable issues, and inspire a new way of thinking about your own ecommerce traffic acquisition strategy.

Impressive Goals:

• Ecommerce SEO Objective: Increase collections page exposure on SERPs by 50% over a 6 month period
• Paid Media Objective: Increase YoY blended paid media ROAS from 3.55x to 6x within a 6 month period
• Overall Objective: Create and execute an integrated SEO and paid media strategy to drive ROAS and drive down costs of customer acquisition

Budget Allocation: 10% Content and Content Optimization - 55% Link Building Operations - 35% Tech and Consultations - Paid Media and Management (Dedicated Budget)

Ideal Customer Profile: The typical ICP for this business model has been 25+ year old males, with the higher earning 35-54 males representing the biggest revenue contributors. With an average order value (AOV) over $2,500, targeting higher income individuals has been a key component for efficient use of media and resources.

ICP Experimentation: Several experiments were launched over the course of 6 months to challenge the established ICP, with 2 specific experiments aimed at women and younger demos. This demonstrated favorable results, outperforming the normal ICP campaigns in many markets.

Impressive Key Findings: It was believed that the current SEO program was not generating enough mid funnel traffic. Under the previous mandate SEO was focused on top funnel and paid ads were focused mainly on Google bottom funnel tactics. This was driving up ad spending, driving down ROAS, and diminishing business profitability.

Establishing a Hypothesis: Focusing on mid funnel traffic for ecommerce SEO will boost ad spending efficiency substantially.

After 18 months of trialing this mid-funnel SEO strategy, the results were positive but there was a sense that there was room for improvement, and for tighter integration across the paid channel activations. 

Revised Plans:

• A comprehensive audit of all collection pages to benchmark current rankings and identify low hanging fruit opportunities to grow rankings and traffic
• Content optimization program of all collection pages
• Aggressive link building strategy based on a collection page audit. SEO was integral in this process to ensure the highest quality placement.
• The paid media campaign was not as efficient as it should be, with ROAS hovering around 4x. Impressive scaled back spending and refined the strategy.

Implementation of Top Fitness’s Strategy

Ecommerce SEO - Content Optimization

Most fitness equipment sites sell the same brands, equipment, and use the same copy provided by manufacturers - this is a major issue for ecommerce seo. It was important that the copy on collections pages were differentiated. This would help their pages become visible for ecommerce seo and Google.

The Impressive SEO team analyzed the top ranking websites and through a system of pre-programmed prompts, used ChatGPT to rewrite the collection pages to align with what Google was responsive to. With more than 100 pages, this process was done in order of priority, with the pages connected to the link building campaign prioritized. This process could be produced in batches.

*The copy went through a process of quality assurance by a project manager before being shared with the client for approval.

Ecommerce SEO - Link Building

One of the primary reasons for the successful implementation of the link building strategy is what they call the “Impressive Link Quality Score”, an internal calculator that qualifies specific links based on their value for ecommerce seo. 

Link Criteria for Top Fitness:

• Domains publishing in sports, fitness, and wellness niche. This included journalists that specialize in these niches.
• Traffic to the domain must be trending upwards, and ideally over 20k organic visitors monthly
• Domain Rating of over 50 based on Ahrefs rankings
• Referring website has a clean and modern feel
• Content must be quality assured by the Impressive content team

Paid Media - Female Demographic Experiment

With nearly two/thirds of the website’s traffic being male, all previous paid media campaigns leaned masculine. The targeting has typically included attributes like male, NFL fan, ESPN viewer.

Within the Meta ad platform however, we were seeing a high number of female conversions. The female campaign targeted young, high earning professionals, and working moms.

This campaign generated 4.4x blended ROAS with a higher AOV than the many of the male focused campaigns during the same period. 

Paid Media Campaign - Additional Payment Options

Impressive made another critical assumption that involved the high price point. Their targeting and messaging correctly focused on only high earning individuals, which priced out some of their experimentations. Impressive hypothesized that lesser earning people with a passion for fitness would convert more often if they knew there were flexible payment options.

This campaign generated a 13.32x ROAS over the reporting period.

Challenges faced working with Top Fitness

Website Plugin Issue

The biggest challenge Impressive faced involved a plugin update that wiped all of the copy from their collection pages.

The site was built on Shopify and had a number of plugins from the Shogun Theme. Their web development agency accepted an update to one of the content plugins that created the issue. We found out very quickly through a regular indexation. During their SEO manager’s weekly rankings check, he discovered to his horror that the site had encountered a huge ranking hit. Upon further investigation he found that the damage was specifically on Collection Pages that they had spent 4 months optimizing and building links for.

On checking the site we could see the copy for all collections pages had been removed. We contacted the client and the web dev team immediately, after which they reversed the plugin update. However the copy that went back online was from before our content optimization program. Their ecommerce seo team had to go back to the audit phase for all collections pages, identifying the pages by priority, and working in batches to restore all of the previously optimized content.

Rankings took a hit for a month, but the team’s quick work in finding the issue minimized the issue. Through collaboration with the dev agency, and new content uploads, they saw rankings climb back to the pre wipe levels.

Link Building Standards

Another challenge they faced had to do with maintaining link velocity with their high link standards. With their SEO manager sticking religiously to the Quality Score coupled with Top Fitness’s specific criteria, their outreach team struggled to meet the monthly link requirements in a timely manner. They needed to communicate to the client that they were better off falling behind on the link building because it was for the best. The alternative of course meant lowering their standards and connecting to poor fit domains and content pieces.

Results and Evaluation

Ecommerce SEO Objective

In month one, there were only 390 keywords on collection pages ranked on page one, and they wanted to improve to 585 collection page keywords in 6 months.

After implementation of the ecommerce seo and link building, the collection page saw 1218 keywords ranking on page 1 for collection pages, an increase of 212%.

Paid Media Objective

Their goal was to increase YoY blended paid media ROAS from 3.55x up to 6x within a 6 month month period. 

Impressive calculated blended ROAS by combining the platforms reported revenue by the paid ad spend across platforms, allowing for a weighting based figure. Blended ROAS in the previous year was 3.55x, however through deep discussion with the Top Fitness VP of Marketing, we determined a 6x ROAS to be a much more profitable KPI. This particular KPI allowed for the freight and packing costs to be absorbed with margin to spare.

Impressive trimmed ad spending significantly (cutting the YoY ad spend in half), which was intended to focus on efficiency, conversion, and strategic experimentation.

The biggest bet was on the ecommerce SEO program delivering more mid funnel traffic, which would then allow the paid program to narrow in on retargeting warm traffic which had been acquired organically, rather than via paid clicks.

As a result, blended ROAS rose to 7.21x, smashing through the profitable KPI goal.

Overall Objective

The overall objective was to create and execute an integrated ecommerce SEO and paid media strategy to drive up ROAS and thus drive down the cost of acquiring new customers through digital channels.

Collection pages link building:

• Higher ad CTR due to better SERP results (eg. Commercial trainers increase >50%)
• Lower overall CPC due to warmer prospects that engage/convert more often (eg. Functional trainers CPC<40%)
• Cheaper CPA due to lower CPC and less paid media touches required to produce a sale(rowers CPA is <51%)

The YoY sales were actually down 17%, however the fitness industry as a whole has been on a big decline post COVID. A drop in revenue by 17% was a much better result than most fitness retailers. However, the ad spend decreased by close to 50%, this huge decrease resulted in a highly profitable 6 month period.

Impressive and Dr Talbots: A Formula for SEO Success

Dr Talbot’s is a wellness company that produces products for the health and wellbeing of the entire family. The company has been operating for more than 70 years, however, until recently they hadn’t pursued the direct to consumer (DTC) model. Dr Tablots products are sold in all the major retailers across the United States, and are very popular on Amazon. Impressive was appointed to actively work with their DTC team to drive brand awareness, traffic, and sales through Shopify. After onboarding the brand it became perfectly clear that ecommerce SEO was going to be their main focus.

Impressive Goals:

• Grow brand awareness by improving page 1-2 ranking by 50% in first year
• Rank page 1 for marquee products such as infant allergy tablets and baby bottles

Allocation of Budget:

• 20% attributed to content and content optimization
• 55% attributed to link building
• 25% attributed to tech and consultation

Ideal Customer Profile:

Dr Talbot’s primary customer is the first time mother. Their products focused mainly on homeopathic medicines and health devices for babies and young children. The homeopathic nature of their products is a big selling point for mothers who are anxious about unnatural products for newborns. 

The Impressive Process:

The impressive strategy revolves around understanding the buying journey and tailoring their approach for optimal targeting. In this particular case it's the first time mother, which meant investigating their intent and probing potential opportunities.

• They first looked for bottom of the funnel opportunities, usually product specific keywords and phrases that are achievable within the budget.
• Next they looked at mid-funnel opportunities such as category and collection levels. This level is usually the most under-optimized and where Impressive spends most of their time. In this case the first 6-12 months.
• Lastly Impressive looked at the top funnel that is typically higher traffic but less intent opportunities. With SGE (and now AI Overviews) Impressive needed to be especially careful in content selection.

Implementation of Dr Tablot’s Strategy

Dr Tablot’s Keyword Integration

Impressive identified both products and collections for Dr Talbots that they felt were achievable and could produce realizable benefits.

Bottom of the Funnel Keywords: pacifiers, chamomile soothing tablets, infant allergy medicine

Middle of the funnel Keywords: baby bottlers, soothing tablets

Key Steps for Dr Tablot:

• A competitive landscape audit for top ranking pages, evaluating copy and creative assets requirements for ranking
• Writing or rewriting copy to meet the ranking requirements
• Guiding the Dr Talbots marketing team on UX recommendations uncovered during the competitor audit
• Approval from Dr Talbot’s team was a touch more complex than normal. It involved the marketing team that provided product and brand voice quality assurance. Also, the legal team that vetted the content to ensure legality. This extra layer of QA helped ensure the content met Google’s YMYL guidelines.
• After pages went live and were indexed, the link building process began using a framework of high priority pages to boost authority.

Upper Funnel: Upper funnel operations started near the end of the reporting period and carried on afterwards. It was important to employ caution because of potential SGE ramifications. It was believed that a unique point of view will provide some quality visibility.

Ecommerce SEO - Link Building

Once more, Impressive used their own inhouse Link Quality Score, which helped them shortlist the most valuable links. This calculator produces the most effective links and was the secret to their link building success.

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Dr Talbot’s Link Building Criteria:

• Publishing on domains in the family, health, and wellness niche. Or content written by journalists that specialize in the niche.
• Domain rating must be higher than 50 according to Ahrefs
• The referring website has a clean and modern look
• The content is quality checked and adhere to YMYL standards

Challenges faced with Dr Talbots

Content Velocity to Pass Legal Standards

As seen with most pharmaceutical and wellness brands, there is a legal obligation - outside of Google’s YMYL guidelines - to ensure content is factually correct. Impressive worked closely with Dr Talbot’s legal team to ensure content production moved at a consistent pace. 

Link Building Standards

The last challenge faced involved maintaining linked velocity with high link standards. With their SEO manager high standards the outreach team struggled to meet monthly link requirements. Communicating to the client the challenges and allowing for link building to fall behind, enabled them to sustain the standard without compromising on quality.

Results & Evaluation

Grow brand awareness by improving page 1-2 ranking by 50% in first year

• Keywords ranking performance for pages 1-2 in Google experienced huge growth: 289% growth in pages 1-2 ranking terms and 150% growth in overall indexation
• Rank page 1 for marquee products such as infant allergy tablets and baby bottles: Not only were Impressive able to meet the KPI in just 6 months, the SEO program saw the keywords go straight to page and position 1 for a number of high volume search terms.

Conclusion

Proper guidance is essential for a sustainable future, and only a few experts find and execute these strategies like Impressive Digital. This case study analysis demonstrates their methodology, showing you their step by step process and how they identify value. These examples can be used as inspiration for your own ecommerce business and establish both the direction and standards required for proper implementation.