Now when I first came across this company, I was intrigued by the product. There aren’t that many full color 3d printers in the industry yet. This was the first one I’ve ever heard of and since it created a lot of buzz on Kickstarter, I definitely wanted to work with them. Considering my work with Pinshape, I knew I could kick butt in this industry again.
After going back and forth for about a month, we finally signed a 6 month contract and the games were on. I wasn’t competing with any existing clients as their 3d printers are in a different sub-market (Not FDM). I usually like to work with one company for a specific industry but depending on the situation, it could be two.
This was that situation.
In fact, below you’ll find the original SEO Analysis I did.
For obvious reasons, I can’t share their website’s name but you’ll get a fairly good idea on the amount of work that goes into doing SEO for an ecommerce site (Shopify members pay attention).
No fancy lingo or tech jargon just straight to the point information.
So if you are interested in checking out the proposal, just click the link below, you can also hide it to read the rest of the post.
First though . . .
PLEASE NOTE: You’ll see some highlighted text in Orange and Pink boxes. These weren’t in the original proposal. I’ve added them to help you understand why I did what I did. You will also notice how transparent I am. I share all my tools because frankly, transparency is the key to real success.
This was a fun project for me.
I really wanted to see how fast I can rank a website for a massive keyword especially in the 3D printing space.
Funny thing is the keyword I was aiming for was ‘3d Printer Canada’, not ‘3D printer’.
We ended up on the first page for both in under 84 days 🙂
As always, I followed my 4 step process.
- Site Audit + Link Building (Yeah I start link building from day one).
- On Page SEO.
- Content Marketing.
- Site specific ways to grow further.
After I did the Site Audit on SEMRush and a backlink audit using AHREFS. I realized I have my work cut out for me. The backlink profile was around the 200 mark (Referring domains) and as I dug deeper, I realized how many low text to html pages were on this site.
Chris (Client) I must say was quite impressive. Not only was he a ‘maker’ but a perfect client. He gave me full control and said you’re the expert show us what you can do. If there are any changes you want to do, just run them by myself or my team first.
That’s all I needed to know and that’s how it’s done.
First Month
Long story short, did a site crawl and I’m not going to lie, I didn’t expect this to be such a time consuming project. Mainly because it lacked content like a mofo. You can’t rank sites with no content. Not in giant niches like 3D printing.
In fact, these were almost all the errors I fixed in the first month alone along with some ongoing link building.
| On Site Changes | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Combined Posts for Team Member Profiles | To avoid (Low Text Ratio) and increase long copy. |
| Consolidated Posts for 3D Printed Robotic Arm | To avoid (Low Text Ratio) and increase long copy. |
| Added ALT Text to each image on the blog. | Images with proper descriptions are good for SEO. |
| Add H3 Headings On Blog | Structured content ranks better. |
| Added SSL to all pages by contacting BigCommerce | A site shold be htttp or https. Not both. Improves crawling. |
| Setup Analytics Properly for https | Proper Tracking |
| Add 'NoFollow' on most external links on blog | Minimize link juice leakage |
| Add 'NoFollow' on most external links on site. | Minimize link juice leakage |
| Add internal links throughout site | Good linking improves SEO |
| Release a long copy article on blog | Starting increasing our footprint on Google. |
| Convert PDF to Long Copy | Starting increasing our footprint on Google. |
| Optimize 3D Printer for School Page | To start getting conversions faster. |
| Optimize Media page | To add nofollow tags on external links and organize them. |
| Added “FDM” on main product page. | To start ranking for FDM Printer and FDM 3D Printer |
| Looking into minimizing duplicate content. | Duplicate content is bad for SEO. |
| 60 internal links contain nofollow attribute | Improve Link Juice Flow |
| Deleted Autodesk Social links | Too many outgoing links. One website link is enough |
| Optimize FAQ Page | Improve SEO |
| Remove - Geckotek from all PLA pages. | Improve SEO |
| Add 'nofollow' to social links | To 'reduce' link juice drain. |
| Add content to all low and no text pages | Improve SEO |
| Fixed - Canadian Currency spelling from Printer Page | Look professional |
| Fixing or Removing Low Text Ratio Pages | Improve crawling. |
| Redirected [URL hidden for privacy] to /3d-printers | Unnecessary page |
| Added '3d printer filament from Canada' to filament page | Want to rank for '3d printer filament canada' |
| Add '3d printer school' related keywords to a /[URL Hidden for privacy] | To start ranking higher for these keywords. |
| Need to add the following keywords throughout site. | Start ranking for 'canada' related keywords. |
| Fix http / https redirects. [URL hidden for privacy] | Improves crawling for Google. |
After fixing these errors, we had a WHOPPING 2% increasing in organic traffic.
Reason for such a minimum increase is all the changes made and links acquired still needed time to get re-index, etc. The first month is usually like that. It’s all about making the changes. So I was not only working the on site part but also simultaneously link building in the same time. This is what I like to call ‘building momentum’. I start link building from day 1 so when all the changes are re-indexed, the quality of the links pushes the re-indexed rankings much higher.
Second Month
This month was just as hectic. As I mentioned earlier that I really wanted to blow this project out of the water. So I went in harder. There were so many on page and technical SEO issues that I needed to take care of and at the same time, make an impact.
| On Site Changes | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Add internal links throughout site | Good linking improves SEO |
| Release a long copy article on blog | Starting increasing our footprint on Google. |
| Optimize 3D Printer for School Page | To start getting conversions faster. |
| Optimize Media page | To add nofollow tags on external links and organize them. |
| Looking into minimizing duplicate content. | Duplicate content is bad for SEO. |
| Remove - Geckotek from all PLA pages. | Improve SEO |
| Add 'nofollow' to social links | To 'reduce' link juice drain. |
| Add content to all low and no text pages | Improve SEO |
| Fixing or Removing Low Text Ratio Pages | Improve crawling. |
| Fixed broken links | [URL Hidden for Privacy] |
| Add '3d printer school' related keywords to a [URL Hidden] | To increase rankings. |
| Need to add the following keywords throughout site. | Start ranking for 'canada' related keywords. |
| Fixed broken link on [URL Hidden] | |
| 301 [URL Hidden] and PDF link from Thingiverse. | Improve crawling |
| Combined gallery page with 3d printed items page. | Improve crawling |
| Removed redirected pages from Menu Bar | Improve user experience |
| 301 /Past-Printer page to /[URL Hidden for Privacy] | Improve crawling |
| Fix http / https redirects. | Improves crawling for Google. |
| Link Building | |
| Citations | Improves local and International rankings |
| Started | Increases rankings throughout |
| Negative SEO | |
| Need Access to CognitiveSEO.com | To identify and remove 'spam' links from existing customers |
| To protect root domain from potential NegSEO attacks. |
Looks like things were picking up.
We got a nice 21.30% increase in new users:
At this stage, we started getting ranked for various keywords as well. When I saw the following keywords pop up and Google responding so well to what I was doing. I knew it was go time. It was time to push things.
If you look at the last keyword, the biggest one, we literally never ranked for it until now.
Also when you receive an email like this from the Vice President, it only pushes you further 🙂
Third Month
So our link building was on point, 80% of the site architecture was fixed but once you get stuck on the second page, it’s time to do something different than just link building.
Of course it depends on the site but in my case, we still lacked content.
It was time for some long copy, authority style content.
So I whipped up a 4000+ word article using keywords that I uncovered from SEMrush, implemented some serious internal link building, and even before these new changes got re-indexed, we hit my first goal which was to get on the first page for 3D printer Canada (1200 monthly searches a month).
Soon after (2 days later), we got on the first page of *drum roll* . . . 3D Printer.
I would have got this keyword within 6 months anyways but sometimes the SEO gods just work in your favor.
These keyword positions still fluctuate but are mostly solidified.
Nothing like seeing a your site’s traffic move in the right direction 🙂
I might update this case study in the future but this is exactly how I got one of my most recent clients on the first page for the biggest keyword in their industry.