Dr. Golly
Live Site: drgolly.com
Next-level Performance
Search Engine Optimisation Case Study
+140%
Keywords on page 1
+706%
Organic Visibility
+105%
Organic Traffic
The Brief
Our brief was to increase the SEO performance for a very popular baby sleep program e-commerce store.
The website was built using Shopify, had an excellent brand presence in Australia and a growing customer base. We knew we could take the website’s performance to the next level, both in terms of SEO and technical functionality.
The Solution
The first step was to design a new keyword-informed site architecture, expanding the client’s current offerings in terms of both breadth and depth. This was to inform a complete redesign and rebuild, moving the site away from Shopify and into WordPress and WooCommerce. WordPress is by far the most customisable CMS and SEO professionals have free reign in terms of on-page information architecture.
The Results
Keyword Rankings Source: SEM Rush
- Total Keyword Rankings
- Page 1 Keywords
| Jan 2022 | 332 | 15 |
|---|---|---|
| Feb 2022 | 348 | 15 |
| Mar 2022 | 329 | 26 |
| Apr 2022 | 279 | 28 |
| May 2022 | 366 | 27 |
| Jun 2022 | 469 | 30 |
| Jul 2022 | 515 | 32 |
| Aug 2022 | 519 | 29 |
| Sep 2022 | 671 | 37 |
| Oct 2022 | 1149 | 36 |
We performed optimisations on the existing website throughout the year, and the upward trend from January is apparent. However, note the large spike in improvements immediately after the new website launched in September 2022.
Visibility on Google Source: Google Search Console
- Impressions
| Jan 2022 | 615 |
|---|---|
| Feb 2022 | 640 |
| Mar 2022 | 869 |
| Apr 2022 | 797 |
| May 2022 | 1039 |
| Jun 2022 | 1300 |
| Jul 2022 | 1184 |
| Aug 2022 | 1381 |
| Sep 2022 | 1100 |
| Oct 2022 | 2081 |
| Nov 2022 | 2538 |
Organic impressions followed a similar upward trajectory through the year, as did the immediate and notable uptick after the launch.
Conclusion
In our experience, WordPress always performs better than Shopify in terms of SEO. This is largely due to two factors: Shopify’s URL structure cannot be modified to SEO best-practices, and each page’s design and layout doesn’t allow for the customisation that WordPress offers. Both of the factors are very important for SEO performance.
We don’t rebuild websites if it’s already performing well, but drgolly.com is a young website and we took the opportunity to switch its CMS before the risk begins to outweigh the reward. It’s now set up for SEO successes long into the future.
