Milk
Monster

Sharp drop in Organic Traffic.

The website ranked well and was bringing new customers daily, but in Agust 2021, the organic traffic significantly decreased.

Areto came on board 3 months after this incident. Our preliminary conclusion was that the drop was due to a combination of several factors:

• A very slow website – long load times and slow responses to queries.
• Poor E-commerce website structure
• Multiple URLs for the same product
• Lack of content, especially within the category, sub-category and product pages
• Suspicious links acquired
• The arrival of new aggressive competitors

Get to the core of the problem

A Faster Website

The website was very slow. This indicated that the hosting service does not provide the appropriate server for the amount of traffic and queries and needs to be upgraded, or the website was using resource-hungry functionality.

The server was set up correctly. Areto repbuilt the website to improve loading speed of all pages, especially the home page and all the product-related ones.  The website is built in WordPress andWooCommerce. Plugins were reinstalled

In addition, we installed a better caching of the website (great for repeat users) and improved the connection with the database. Finally, we replaced some Ajax-based resources with Javascript. There is still some work to do in this area.

Better Website Structure

SEO Friendly

The way a website is organized will help users and search engines understand better where they are on the site. The original website had a flat architecture, which made it was difficult to identify which pages were product categories, product pages or blog posts just by looking at their URLs.

Making significant changes to the URL structure of a website can be harmful to the site navigation and the rankings in the search engines. We reorganized product categories and product tags, cleaned up dead links, changed the URL structure of pages making sure to redirect their old addresses to the new ones.
After verifying that no errors were triggered by this change, we made sure that all the products would include the primary category they belong to, the main sub-category as needed, and the product name.

Using canonical tags, we made sure that the product pages would refer to one and only one page, removing duplicated content from Google’s index.

Complete Update in 2 Months

Content Optimization

In total, Areto wrote text content for 80 pages in 2 months. Most of this content has been provided for the different product categories and sub-categories available on the website. This included title, description, heading structure, alt texts, internal linking between the new URLs…

Finally, this was the opportunity for us to make a few additional changes to some other aspects, like de-indexing old pages from Google’s index, and updating and optimizing the XML sitemaps.

As an added bonus, we made the website more user-friendly, introducing a better filtering system to provide an overall better shopping experience.

Sales Boost

Organic Traffic Increase

Tthe weekly organic traffic started to climb back up in September and keeps increasing. Before the drop, the number of monthly visits was 15,500 with a peak at 16,500 visits the month before.

After the drop, the organic traffic went down below the 8,000 visits per month and gradually decreased, reaching under the 7,000 monthly visits 6 weeks later, at which point Areto started working on this website. About 8 weeks later, we started seeing some improvements, with almost 4,000 visitors per month (+100% in six weeks). By the end of October, we passed the 9,000 visitors per month and slowly climbed up to 10,300 visitors in March 2022.