Generating organic SEO traffic takes time, requires consistency, and making sure that you’re on the right track along the way is a no-brainer.
Many companies think it’s risky to make that long-term investment. They say what if I do the effort and nobody comes?
That’s a question we’ve been asked a lot. So we decided to share the success stories of our partners who decided to make that investment for their business.
Also, for those who said what if we do the effort and it works, here are the gains of taking the organic route.
In this case study I’ll be reviewing the results from our fruitful partnership with Gameball that started exactly in June 2020.
First, let me show you the results, some background about Gameball, and afterwards I’ll dive into how we got to 4X organic SEO traffic in 6 months, and explain our step by step strategy, so you can apply the same for your own business.
Here are the screenshots of organic SEO traffic results for Gameball from January to Dec 2020:
(screenshots taken in Dec 2020 from Google Search Console.)
Who is Gameball?
Gameball is one of the leading loyalty and retention platforms for eCommerce that catered to 2,000+ businesses in more than 55 countries.
They help eCommerce merchants retain and grow their customers by creating personal experiences tailored to their actions and interests by offering loyalty and rewards management, interactive and targeted messages, and referral programs, all within a single gamified experience.
In other words, turning the process of going through your store and completing a purchase into a game rather than a process.
Gameball supports eCommerce websites built on Shopify, Woocommerce, and Magento.
What was our starting point & objectives?
“We started noticing new players emerging into the market and already climbing up search ranks faster.”
— Ahmed Khairy, CEO & Co-founder at Gameball
Gameball is not the only key-player in their market, and they noticed smaller competitors starting to appear ahead of them on Google.
But, our team was set to change that. So we put together our recommended milestones, and objectives for the next six months.
Objectives:
- Building data monitoring dashboards to track marketing activities
- Optimizing Website and blog for SEO
- Developing a content marketing strategy based on researched keywords gaps in the industry
- Setting up an in-house marketing team for Gameball to build on what we’ll do
Why start with data monitoring dashboards?
As the well known consultant Peter Drucker said:
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”
So, if we’re going to pursue growth for your business, we always begin our relationship by clearly defining success in measurable terms that can be monitored.
“In God we trust, all others must bring data.”
But, when you have multiple data resources like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, website, blog, and application in most cases, you may feel overwhelmed by the scrappy data all over the place
It’s hard to gather insights without leaning on some kind of an analyst member in your team.
so, our goal is to centralize data to be all presented in one place for ease of access and readability to all team members.
You do not have to be an analyst to use and understand a data dashboard. Even if you don’t work in marketing or data analytics, you will be able to understand the numbers.
The end result would be that if you are a Gameball team member, you wake up, open GDS (Google data studio), and smoothly check out numbers of daily website unique traffic, conversion rates for specific triggered actions like app installs, cost per conversions for paid campaigns, blog returning users, organic traffic source by keyword, and etc.
What were the SEO challenges & how did we overcome them?
After making sure data tracking is going well, our team took a deep dive into SEO auditing for both Gameball and competitors, and came to realize the following conclusions:
- Gameball’s website and blog has a huge room for improvement in terms of performance, loading speed and URLs indexing.
- Most of the market is fighting over a small number of keywords such as loyalty, rewards programs, customer loyalty programs etc.
- Some competitors are getting organic traffic from other long tail keywords such as “loyalty programs for shopify pos” which use the product + platform name and sometimes words like best, top, trending, etc.
Now it’s time for some action, in order to optimize website and blog for SEO, we started implementing the following:
1- Drafting thin content pages for both website and blog to avoid algorithmic penalties
Publishing thin content on your website can quickly hurt your brand’s image, causes a lot of trouble to your website, and you’ll probably get penalized by Google.
So, what the hell is thin content? How can you identify it on your website? And how to fix it?
We just explained this in detail with actual examples in this case study.
2- Submitting a new sitemap to Google Search Console that contains less URLs with zero duplicate titles
According to Google Search Central, a sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them.
Think of it as a book’s table of contents, except the sections are the links, and it’s telling Google bots what’s important on your website in terms of pages before they go ahead and do it themselves.
Also, while having a one page website is bad for SEO, indexing more pages can actually hurt your SEO efforts. The smaller your sitemap, the less strain you’re putting on both your server and your SEO efforts.
3- Optimizing all images to improve website’s performance
If your website speed is poor, users’ experience and your conversion rates are likely to be the same.
Images are almost always a significant part of the issue. Seems obvious and an easy opportunity to improve in this area but most people get lazy and don’t do it.
So, what do you need to do before you upload your images?
The most important thing to do is to save images in the largest physical size needed, not the largest available. Also, choosing the right file type is essential, and we always go with either JPGs or PNGs.
4- Optimizing blog to prevent comment spam
Abusing the comments section is one of the most used ways by bloggers and SEO specialists trying to win a backlink, and get better search rankings.
But the thing is, nobody likes spam. Nobody wants to see irrelevant content posted on a blog post that does not add any value to the topic.
What you can do is enable moderation of comments by just turning it on If you are using a content management system that has a built-in moderation option. This will prevent any comment from appearing on your website without being moderated by you or by your team.
Building and running a content marketing engine that brings organic SEO traffic
Content is king.
Once we have it’s fuel ready and set, and by fuel here I mean SEO, our team started developing a content marketing roadmap.
The main goal is not just to create content with no purpose, but to unleash the inbound traffic growth engine and get the ball rolling with organic leads, and revenue through the following:
- Researching keyword gaps in the industry
- Suggesting blog post ideas based on researched long tail keywords.
- Building a content road map, including titles for blog post ideas and posting prioritization on a monthly basis.
- Creating content and optimizing of blog structure for LONG TAIL KEYWORDS that include “Shopify”
- Keeping an eye on results week by week and always optimizing
The Results:
At the end of the year, after 6 months of our partnership, Gameball was getting around 400% increase in total clicks, 433% increase in total impressions, 300% increase in Shopify query clicks, and 563% increase in Shopify query impressions.
Shopify query
(screenshot taken in Dec 2020 from Google Search Console.)
Empowering Gameball to build on what we achieved
We enjoyed the success of our work with Gameball’s team. We thought all of us deserve a pat on the back for making this possible.
But, we were determined to build on what we did by hiring an in-house marketing team that best fits Gameball needs.
You see, our policy at Startups Galaxy is to get rid of our clients, but in a good way I mean 😀
In other words, our aim is to build the growth foundation from strategy to results, and get the ball rolling in a couple of months by implementing high value growth activities by our own team.
Then we help build an in-house team for clients, capable of building on what we did to scale things up, even if we had to keep an eye on a macro level for a couple of more months to make sure the ball is still rolling.
So, with Gameball, to build the cornerstone of building the rest of the team, we helped with recruiting:
- Head of Growth (SEO background)
- Product Marketing Manager
“With the help of Startups Galaxy, we are able to give our growth activities an impactful boost and built the growth infrastructure that we needed to scale those activities afterwards”
— Ahmed Khairy, CEO & Co-founder at Gameball
Explore how you can enjoy similar breakthrough results, get in touch with us, and we can do this for your startup!
This Marketing Case Study has been approved by Gameball
