88% Monthly Traffic Growth & Outranking Amazon (SEO Case Study)

Going up against big competitors in your industry, like Outlook India for Affiliate sites, Amazon for eCommerce sites or Wikipedia for informational queries, isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible either.

With careful content optimization, following the right UX best practices and building authority with quality backlinks, there’s nothing stopping you from doing what we did with our client’s rankings.

In this case study, you’ll learn exactly how my team at The Search Initiative increased our client’s organic traffic from 72.4k to 136.4k sessions in under a year – and outranking the likes of Amazon for important keywords.

In this article, you’ll learn how to:

If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, I cover some of the key insights in this video.

Before that, here’s some more information about the website’s goals and the main challenges that we overcame during the campaign.

The Challenge

The client is an online adult store primarily targeting the United States.

The main objective for this campaign was to grow visibility for commercial intent keywords so as to drive organic traffic to important category pages, with the ultimate aim of generating more online sales through eCommerce.

One of the first things we did to build the site’s domain authority and ranking power so that it could compete against the likes of Amazon – one of their main competitors for adult toys – was to leverage the power of AI to execute a blogger outreach strategy.

Didn’t think Amazon rank for these kinds of keywords? Think again…

At the same time, with the client operating in such a lucrative market, we needed to build topical authority and present them as a credible source of information.

To address a lack of topical authority, we implemented a content strategy that focused on creating informative blog articles that are related to the adult toys that the client sells, and the niche in general.

For any website looking to improve conversions, you need to ensure that you’re providing users with a great experience; and that everything works as expected. The client’s website lacked basic UX best practices that were costing them both money and traffic.

Finally, to improve the positions of the client’s “money” keywords (i.e. the ones that have a commercial intent and bring in the most conversions), we focused our attention on optimizing existing and creating new category pages (more on this later).

Learn how to tackle these challenges for your website by following the steps below.

Building Backlinks With Blogger Outreach (& AI)

When it comes to boosting the rankability of a web page, few SEO tactics come close to being as powerful as link building.

One such link building tactic that we employ (and have continued to get great success from) at TSI, is blogger outreach.

Blogger outreach involves finding topically relevant websites who you can then reach out to for a link back to content that their audience will find useful.

Let’s break down the main steps on how to do blogger outreach – with the help of generative AI tool ChatGPT.

Link Prospecting

There are a number of ways you can find link prospects, but in this case study, I’ll show you the cool new way of how to do it – using ChatGPT.

Link prospecting is about finding niche relevant websites that can link back to your website.

I recommend using GPT4 in conjunction with the WebPilot plugin enabled. To do this, go to Settings and enable plugins.

Go back to the chat and open the Plugin dropdown and select WebPilot – this is a plugin that enables GPT to scan live websites as opposed to relying on its training data from 2021.

So here’s a prompt that you can use to find these prospects:

Using the WebPilot plugin for ChatGPT, please give me a list of 20 popular websites within the [enter your niche].

Here’s an example of a response from GPT providing websites from the audio tech niche.

It was able to find an article that lists 30 popular audio tech sites, and it asked if that’s what I wanted. I said yes, and it listed the sites along with their links.

Now, AI tools like ChatGPT aren’t perfect (yet), so It’s important to manually check each of these sites to ensure they’re relevant to your website.

You can also apply a similar approach to identify online communities within your niche.

Here’s a prompt:

Using the WebPilot plugin for ChatGPT, please give me a list of 10 popular online forums/communities within the [enter your niche].

Here’s the response from ChatGPT:

By the end of this process, you should have a considerable list of potential websites to get a backlink from.

Getting Contact Details

Once you’ve prepared your list of websites that you want to reach out to, the next step is to find the contact information for them i.e. an email address of a writer at the site, or via their general contact form.

You can usually find email addresses on the contact us page of the website (see why having one is important?), but if you’re unable to find one, you can use a tool like Hunter.io.

Hunter.io is a tool that you can use to do this – they have a Chrome extension that allows up to 25 searches per month for free.

If you’re using their website, enter the domain into Domain Search and hit enter.

You can see that the tool has found 21 email addresses for the example site.

Pitch Creation

The most important step in this process is the pitch – this is what will be the deciding factor on whether or not you’ll get a backlink from your prospective site.

The key to crafting a great outreach pitch is ensuring that you’re adding personally relevant information about the website that you’re pitching to. This doesn’t mean that you can template the process, but that you still need to personalize the pitch based on who you’re pitching to.

In general, you need to explain:

To create a pitch worthy of securing backlinks, why not use the help of ChatGPT?

Here’s an example of a prompt that you can use to do this:

Using the WebPilot plugin for GPT, please write a blogger outreach pitch to [enter prospective website URL] (might want to include their about page) with the goal of writing a guest post for their site. Please include a subject line.

My website is [enter your URL], and it’s on the topic of [insert your niche].

Guidelines:

Here’s what ChatGPT came up with:

GPT even provides a compelling subject line that you can use.

Monitoring Progress

Once the emails have been sent out, all is not done. You should monitor your progress to identify which pitches (and subject lines) worked the best. Blogger outreach is something that constantly evolves over time, especially as not every website will get back to you on the first go.

You can also ask GPT to provide a template for follow up emails…

Learn more about how to carry out blogger outreach in detail here.

Here’s a look at the kind of results we’ve got from this link building campaign:

Building Topical Authority with Engaging Blog Content

Apart from optimizing and creating new content for your website’s core landing pages (i.e. the pages that drive your business), it’s important to grow your topical authority – which is a concept that’s been thrown around a lot in recent years.

Read on to find out what it is, why it’s important and how you can build it for your own site.

What is Topical Authority?

Topical authority refers to a website’s perceived expertise and credibility on a specific topic or subject area. Search engines like Google aim to deliver the most relevant and high-quality content to searchers’ queries and use signals like topical authority to determine the ranking of web pages in search results.

Websites that consistently produce high-quality, informative, and relevant content on a specific topic are more likely to be seen as having topical authority.

Here’s an example…

Imagine you’re venturing into the realm of sustainable fashion. Crafting a single article that revolves solely around ‘sustainable clothing’ might not be sufficient to thrive in this niche.

Why? Because sustainable fashion is a broad subject, and attempting to encapsulate its entirety within a single article would be an overwhelming task.

To establish yourself as an authority in this field, your content needs to cover a wide range of topics within sustainable fashion, including:

Why is Topical Authority Important?

Google associates a website with a topic in order to rank it as a relevant resource for search terms about the particular topic.

By having a lot of content about a specific topic on your website, you create opportunities to add internal links between the pages so that Google and users are more likely to find your content more easily.

Doing so also helps increase your topical authority in the eyes of Google and helps show that your website is the go-to resource (i.e. the authority) for the desired topic.

In addition, looking for websites with topical authority is also in Google’s best interest – it saves the search engine time and resources. If every time someone searched for “keto” into Google, without topical authority, Google would have to scan millions of websites to rank the best ones. Instead, they pre-determine authority sites within the keto niche, and give them the first stab at being the result.

How to Build Topical Authority

Here are some tips on how you can build topical authority for your website:

To do this, you need to perform topic-based keyword research.

There are three methods that can help perform topic-based keyword research – all of which require the use of a seed keyword to get you going – Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer tool, Google’s People Also Ask feature and ChatGPT.

Scroll down to the Keyword Ideas section and click on “View all” under the Terms match box.

On the top left, select “Group by parent topic” and “Show as list”.

This’ll show you all keywords that are related to your chosen seed keyword, grouped into topically-related clusters, along with their collective search volume.

Effectively, each parent topic serves as a baseline for a single (or series of topically-related content). Click on the parent topics to view the related keyword clusters.

In this case, we have a candidate for a single post that targets keywords related to “wilderness survival tips”.

In this case, we have topics related to survival gear, movies, series and more.

You can use the following prompt template to find topics that you can cover for your own website: I have a website about [enter seed topic], please can you suggest 20 topics that I can cover?

This means keeping an eye on topics, questions, concerns, news that your audience are actively looking for and/or talking about.

Apart from performing topic-based keyword research as explained above, you can find trending topics by looking at:

Before you scroll down, ensure the filters (i.e. the location, and date ranges) are set to your preferences.

Navigate to the Related topics section and make sure that “Rising” is selected. This shows you related queries/topics that have seen a spike in search demand within your time-frame (as selected in step 2).

Here’s the Subreddit for coffee – you can trawl through this to find what coffee lovers are talking about in real time. For instance, you can see that one of the threads in the forum is about a recent coffee festival in Vienna.

There’s also a thread dedicated for coffee lovers to interact with people from the coffee industry. Providing you with an opportunity to hear directly from your consumers and allowing you to create content that addresses their needs.

However, content freshness doesn’t just refer to adding brand new pages, it also refers to keeping existing pages up to date with relevant content.

This shows Google (and your audience) that you are actively engaged and knowledgeable in the topic.

This includes addressing different aspects and subtopics that can establish your website as a go-to resource for a wide range of related information.

When writing the copy, it’s important to look at what the top ranking competing page for the target keyword of the page has included. Here are some important things you’ll need to consider:

Following the above steps will help establish your site as a topical authority within your industry.

User Experience Optimization

User Experience is important for SEO as search engines like Google prioritize delivering the best possible results to their users.

If your website’s experience is poor, what incentive would users have to stay, let alone buy your product or service?

Why is User Experience Important for SEO?

A positive user experience leads to increased engagement, longer time spent on a website, lower bounce rates, and higher conversion rates. All these factors collectively contribute to the overall quality of a website and its content, which search engines take into consideration when determining the rankability of a web page for a search query.

Below are some factors and metrics that are used to measure the UX of web pages and websites.

Pogo sticking can signal to search engines that the content on a website might not be relevant or valuable to users. A good user experience can help keep visitors engaged and encourage them to explore more pages on the site, ultimately reducing bounce rates.

Let’s look at two of the main fixes we implemented to improve the UX of our client’s website.

Improving Site Functionality

If certain elements of your website don’t function in the intended way, users will become frustrated and leave due to a poor experience.

Implementing such features will differ depending on the platform that you’re on – so instead of showing you how to implement them, I’ll walk you through what kinds of functionalities and best practices you should adhere to, to provide a great user experience for your users

In the client’s case, if the user accidentally added the same product to the cart more than once, it was not possible to remove it. This was a very serious issue as the user may abandon the site as a result of this.

You can give users the ability to sort by:

Creating A Contact Page

A vital element that was missing from the client’s site was a Contact Us page – this may seem trivial, but it’s a crucial page for any website or business that relies on its audience.

As an online store, this made it much more difficult for customers to get in touch with the client to enquire about orders or ask general questions about the client’s product range.

In addition, this was a missed opportunity to improve the site’s E-E-A-T (experience-expertise-authoritativeness-trustworthiness), as Google specifically asks its human quality raters to look for the contact and customer service information of a website.

Your contact page should include the following information:

Here are additional elements that you can add to enhance your Contact Us page:

Follow this link to find out how to embed maps on your site.

You now have the building blocks to create a smashing contact us page which you must add a link to in the top of your main menu navigation to make it easy for users to reach out to you.

Category Page Optimization

If, like our client, your aim is to increase visibility for commercial intent keywords, you should focus on optimizing existing and creating new category pages.

What Are Category Pages & Why Are They Important for SEO?

The main purpose of category (or collection) pages is to organize the products you sell or services that you offer into logical groups, making it easier for visitors to “browse” and find what they’re looking for.

These pages are important for both users and search engines.

They help make it easier for users to find what they’re looking for and help search engines understand the relationship between different pieces of content and how they fit together.

Optimizing Category Pages

Category page optimization isn’t just about inserting commercial intent keywords (e.g. survival kit bag) into the content.

The key is to ensure that your content addresses what your prospective customers and users are looking for.

The key questions you want to ask yourself are:

Here’re some core tips you should follow when optimizing your category pages. Note that these tactics don’t only apply to eCommerce websites, any website that organizes content into categories can use steps outlined below.

For example, if you have an “sweatshirts” category, writing about the history of sweatshirts isn’t going to help the buyer.

Instead, they will want to know:

This is because users are likely already ready to buy if they’ve landed on your category page from their search query, and want to browse the products on offer.

You can add additional information about your product range at the bottom of the page as a general content block, or in an faq section.

Doing this helps new prospective customers who may not be familiar with your brand or products determine whether your brand is a right fit. It also helps Google rank your page better as the additional information provides better context as to what you offer.

For other websites, your content should be placed in order of priority i.e. address the key pain points of the user first so that the most important information is displayed at the top.

For example, this content publisher has a section for Deals. The user is first shown the best deals on offer, followed by the most recent deals.

Presenting the information in this order is beneficial to the user as it shows them where they can save the most money, followed by articles with the most recent (fresh) deals.

For example, if you run a fashion store that sells shoes, you may have a structure as follows:

The second structure is better, because it reduces the risk of having to change the URLs (or the whole structure) if new product lines or ranges are added.

This also helps search engines understand the relationships between your pages and have a clearer picture of your hierarchy.

Here’s an example of a common internal linking structure for a website:

Here’s what this might look like for an eCommerce website:

ItemList used to identify a list of items. This includes products on your category or subcategory page. Within ItemList you will also use ListItem SCHEMA which identifies each item in the list.

You can use GPT to create a template:

Can you write a template for ItemList structured data please?

It’ll write the code for you, and you just need to fill in the blanks.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "http://schema.org",
"@type": "ItemList",
"name": "List Name",
"description": "Description of the list",
"url": "https://example.com/list-url",
"itemListElement": [
{
"@type": "ListItem",
"position": 1,
"url": "https://example.com/item1",
"name": "Item 1 Name"
},
{
"@type": "ListItem",
"position": 2,
"url": "https://example.com/item2",
"name": "Item 2 Name"
},
{
"@type": "ListItem",
"position": 3,
"url": "https://example.com/item3",
"name": "Item 3 Name"
}
// Add more ListItem elements as needed
]
}
</script>

For eCommerce websites with categories that have lots of products, implementing pagination is a best practice as it ensures that users aren’t overwhelmed with too much choice.

For other websites, that for example may have organized their blog into various categories, the same applies.

Google recommends that you:

This essentially means that you need to make each page accessible and indexable. Google then tries to understand that they’re paginated and combines the signals from all of them.

So, your metadata (i.e. the page title and meta description) should also be engaging and compelling enough to convince them to click through to your page in the first place.

You should also include your core keyword within the page title and meta description on your category pages.

To quicken the process of writing SEO-optimized metadata for your category pages, you can use generative AI tools like ChatGPT.

Here’s an example of a prompt I used to quickly generate the page title and meta descriptions for some category pages.

Prompt: Here is a list of category pages on my website: footwear, shoes, sneakers, sandals, boots. All are mens. I’d like you to write SEO-optimized page titles and meta descriptions for each one. For the title, keep the keywords <mens + category> towards the front.

And here’s the response:

Adding New Category Pages

A great way to improve the categories on your website is to create new category pages that target long-tail, more specific keywords.

For example, if you had a homeware website with a category for “wine glasses”, users looking for more specific types of wine glasses will have to browse through irrelevant products before they find what they’re looking for.

By having dedicated pages to more specific categories, you create a much better experience for users, and increase your rankability for a range of additional keywords.

In fact, this is exactly what we did for our client – who only had very broad categories on their website and were missing out on ranking for many juicy commercial intent keywords as a result.

Let’s look at an example of how you can use Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to identify such long-tail keywords for your categories.

When it comes to knowing how far down to categorize your website, you should think about whether there’s enough demand (i.e. search volume) or supply (i.e. whether you have enough products) to warrant the creation of a brand new category or subcategory.

There’s no point creating categories that only have 1 or 2 products – this doesn’t provide users with a great experience as it looks like they have very little to choose from.

Following the above steps will help take your category pages to the next level and increase your visibility for commercial intent keywords.

Here’s an example of a “money” keyword with 148k search volume, where our client is outranking Amazon.

The Results

Here’s what we’ve achieved by executing the above strategies in just over six months.

The organic traffic grew by 88.1% from 72.4k to 136.4k sessions.

The number of keywords that the site ranks for in the top 10 positions of Google increased from 718 to 1,809 keywords – an increase of 152%.

Overall keyword visibility within the top 100 positions grew by 90% from 4,155 to 7,893 keywords.

Conclusion

In this case study, I’ve shown how you can outrank heavyweight websites like Amazon with a strategy that encompasses content optimization, UX optimization, topical authority building and boosting rank ability with an AI-driven backlink strategy.

In this case study, you’ve learned how to:

Implementing the strategy above will ensure that you build your site’s organic search presence through informational keyword targeting and blog optimization. You can also build your online reputation at the same time by providing a great user experience and showcasing your brand through digital PR link building tactics.

If you’re looking for help with your site’s SEO, get in touch with my team at The Search Initiative.

Article by

Matt Diggity

Matt is the founder of Diggity Marketing, LeadSpring, The Search Initiative, The Affiliate Lab, and the Chiang Mai SEO Conference. He actually does SEO too.

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