25 November 2022 13:57
How we brought the site dveri-spb.ru to the top, increasing traffic by 6 times, the number of orders by 10 times
Ilya Fedolov
Director of Development at Darvin Digital
Content
About the customer What tasks did we buy phone number list face? The beginning: first growth, and then “Minusinsk” We are losing him!
Transformation into an online store
Suddenly: DDoS attack, pandemic...
A Monstrous Redesign, the "Multi-Armed Bandit" and the Invasion of Bots
What are we doing in 2022
Results of promotion for 7 years
What the customer says
Resume
We at Darvin Digital have been working with the St. Petersburg company "Gallery of Doors" for almost 10 years. This story is a whole series (sometimes a thriller) on the topic of SEO promotion . We tell you about the specific steps we took when working with texts, design, usability. About the difficulties we encountered: "Minusinsk", "Baden-Baden", DDoS attack and bot invasion. About the results - we will show figures on the growth of positions, traffic and even revenue.
About the customer
The company "Gallery of Doors" contacted us in 2013, at that time it was a dealer of the group of companies "Doors Wholesale", a supplier of interior and entrance doors in the North-West region. The company had only one offline store at the warehouse, this is what it looked like:
We took over the company's website entirely: its development, content, promotion. Over the years of our cooperation, the company has grown to a network of 7 stores in St. Petersburg.
What tasks did we face?
The customer wanted to attract customers to an offline store (at that time, there was only one) using online promotion. The main task was always the same: for the site to be in the top three search engines for the maximum number of queries. Maintaining these positions for several years, we paid attention not only to content optimization, but also to behavioral factors: a site on which a person spends more time is ranked better by search engines. Accordingly, we worked on the usability of the resource - so that the design was modern, and the structure convenient and understandable.
This chart shows our entire journey, over all the years. As you can see, it wasn't easy (I wonder if you can guess why traffic skyrocketed so much in 2020?). We'll tell you all about it now.
The beginning: first growth, and then "Minusinsk"
In the period 2013-2015, we began to actively promote the customer's website. The emphasis was on organic traffic as the most reliable source of traffic. Using paid advertising, companies are forced to sit "on the needle" of this tool: the money on the balance runs out - no traffic, no orders. In the case of organic traffic, there is no such dependence.
What we did at this stage
On the site: technical optimization, edits to the shopping cart, sliders, filter (there were no major changes, since at that time we were limited by the capabilities of the platform on which the site was hosted).
With content: writing optimized texts , interlinking, new products. This was the "SEO classic" - texts saturated with a large number of queries.
With links: buying links, posting topics on forums. Again, at that time, buying links was a classic, not prohibited and very well-functioning tool.
Results for 1.5 years: according to the metrics, by March 2015 we had 7400 visits to the site. More than half of these visits, 4130, are the same organic, conditionally free, traffic.
In May 2015, Yandex announced the release of the Minusinsk filter: those who use purchased links will either be lowered in ranking or completely excluded from the search results. What did we do? We removed all purchased links by November 2015. And by February 2016, we had more than tripled the overall traffic and traffic from search engines.
This does not mean that we as an agency have stopped working with purchased links altogether, but we have changed our strategy.
We're losing him!
In April 2017, we saw a drop in search results and a decrease in organic traffic. We launched paid advertising - there was no effect: we concluded that we were simply wasting our budget.
This was not a revelation - we understood that the site was bad, it was selling poorly. The mobile version was inconvenient. It was difficult to make any serious changes (the site was originally made on the OpenCart engine) - in general, this was one of those cases when it is easier and cheaper to tear everything down and build from scratch.
In April 2017, a new team took on the project within the agency: Ilya Fedolov and Dmitry Kolyadyuk. Their merit, and probably one of the most difficult moments of the project, was convincing the customer to make a new website when he was already ready to look for another contractor. The previous result was not satisfactory, the advertising budget was wasted, there were no conversions, and we offered not only to stay with us, but also to increase investments, make a new website. But the client agreed - which he did not regret later.
While we were working on the new site, we had to deal with another filter from Yandex: the resource received a warning for overspammed texts, falling under the Baden-Baden filter. We responded immediately: we completely removed and rewrote all the texts. We reported this to Yandex, and it removed the filter from the site. The positions began to grow:
