I joined Xero Shoes back in December. And my very first initiative was to get our SEO strategy back in motion. We already had an SEO agency working with us. We needed someone who knew enough about SEO to execute their recommendations and ship improvements to the website.
Our Rankings Started to Slip
The timing was pretty convenient because the week I joined our Google Ranking started slipping for one of our most lucrative keywords: barefoot shoes.
Now if this was a long-tail keyword that has 200 searches a month that's a small problem. We wouldn't spend much energy to fix that type of ranking from dropping. But this is the opposite of the long-tail. This is a fat-head keyword. It's huge.
What's unusual about our ranking slipping is that the SEO fundamentals of the site are great:
- We have a good domain authority
- We have tons of inbound links from websites in the same niche
- Our brand is well known and respected
- Our website has been around a long time
And much of our competition hasn't been around that long. So something unusual was going on.
Months of Tweaks
Partly because I was brand new at the company and partly because it's easier to complete small projects we started making tweaks to our website every two weeks.
- We updated our SEO meta title & meta description
- We added “barefoot shoes” to several places on the home page
- We pointed internal links to the home page
- We improved the heading structure
- We updated our main navigation menu
- We found a hidden H1 in our markup and removed it
- We spent a few months fixing technical SEO errors
- Removed 80+ pieces of thin content
- Fixed 3 redirect loops
- Fixed 10+ redirect chains
- Fixed 100+ links to redirects
- We consolidated dozens of memes into a single page
- We added an SEO sitemap
- We even removed a blog category called “Barefoot Shoes” which could potentially confuse Google and cannibalize our rankings
In the space of ~4 months we made a ton of changes!
The good news is we got into the habit of starting & completing projects. Not everything will help. But if we can get good at executing, then over time we'll make more good decisions than bad decisions. And with each change we learn a little about what Google actually cares about.
Did all of these changes make a difference? Not really. For months we were near position 7-9 for the keyword “barefoot shoes”. 🙁
Taking a Big Swing
By April I realized that we've solved enough problems on the site and we should have seen an improvement by now. The small technical issue aren't the reason we're underperforming in search. Something else must be going on.
I wanted to change our mindset from being reactive and focusing on quick wins to instead focus on doing something big and impactful (even if it takes time).
I asked our SEO agency to research our competitors and analyze what they have on the pages that rank for “barefoot shoes”. And they noticed that all of our competitors had product thumbnails on these pages. 👀
I continued this research and counted the number of products on their landing pages:
| SERP Ranking (04/16) | URL | Shoppable Products |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | www.vivobarefoot.com/us/ | 9 |
| 2 | www.lemsshoes.com/collections/lems-barefoot-series | 42 |
| 3 | www.groundies.com/start/ | 16 |
| 4 | www.vivobarefoot.com/us/womens | 11 |
| 5 | www.feelgrounds.com/collections/shoes | 86 |
| 6 | pedterra.com | 4 |
| 7 | xeroshoes.com | 0 |
Answer the Search Intent
It became clear to me we're not solving the users search intent. When they search “barefoot shoes” they want understand what a barefoot shoe is.
- What do they look like?
- How much do they cost?
- What colors do they come in?
- Are they just shoes with holes cut in the bottom!?
Our hypothesis was we need to let Google know we're showing users actual products on our landing page. We added what we're calling “Shoppable Products” to our homepage a few weeks later.
To be clear we've always shown products on our homepage. But they've been embedded in life-style imagery. We want to show Google product photos with JUST the product in them along with other important product information like size, pricing, and color.
Results of Shoppable Products
Google reranked our website immediately. Literally within hours we went from ranking #7 to ranking #1.
We've been bouncing around the SERP for the past two months and most of that time we've been in position #1.
Now if you're new to SEO you might think that there isn't much difference between position number 1 and position number 7. After all both are on the first page of the search results right? If you have the best content surely, people will see result #7 and click it.
That unfortunately doesn't line up with how humans operate. Here's some data from FirstPageSEO that measures the click through rate of each position on the Google SERP.
| Google Search Feature | CTR |
| Position 1 | 39.8% |
| Position 2 | 18.7% |
| Position 3 | 10.2% |
| Position 4 | 7.2% |
| Position 5 | 5.1% |
| Position 6 | 4.4% |
| Position 7 | 3.0% |
By moving from position #7 to position #1 we've 10X the click through rate. While I can't share our actual traffic numbers suffice it to say we're receiving thousands of extra clicks each month. 📈🎉
What Did I Learn
I learned a few things from this experience. My biggest takeaway is to get in the practice of executing quickly and consistently and then zoom out and try to solve a big problem.
In our case we realized we weren't answering the search intent for searchers. Many people don't know what barefoot shoes are. They want an overview, or a quick explanation of the benefits of barefoot shoes. Just because we have a high domain authority doesn't mean we should rank for that keyword. We still need to answer the users search intent.
My other takeaway is not to be scared about doing large projects. Sometimes you can spend months fixing little problems which don't move the business forward. Take larger swings and if you connect instead of moving from position #7 to position #6 you can jump all the way to position #1. That unlocks a huge amount of value for your business.