Case Study: Shopify SEO + Content Marketing + Shopify Dev & Design @ Ethans.com

Kirill Sajaev

SEO & Founder

 ·  2 min read

Table of contents

PROJECT SUMMARY

AUQ ran an SEO campaign for Ethans.com which covered:

  • Content planning & content creation
  • Backlink creation
  • Website analytics set up and tracking
  • Shopify Development + Design

Our goal was to set up organic search as a viable traffic and conversion driving channel for an emerging ecommerce brand.

The Client

Ethans is an health focused brand that produces and sells “clean energy drinks”. They have a limited number of SKUs, but a loyal following of customers who value their approach to clean caffeine and energy without jitters.

The Challenge

Ethan’s business is in an interesting position, the drink market is niche and highly competitive – and the “clean energy” concept is still unknown to many consumers.

Ethans.com is also a brand new website with low domain authority – we knew we’d have to introduce a linkbuilding strategy as well.

Development & design – to incorproate our SEO recommendations Ethans.com needed a dev team that understand SEO on a technical level. AUQ brought in our designers and developers to create and build the necessary elements for conversion as well as organic rankings.

The Solution

Content Strategy

We wanted to introduce this idea to the public by creating educational content around regular ‘daily lifestyle’ topics like:

  • How to stay awake on a long drive?
  • What are energy drink jitters?
  • Why do energy drinks make me tired?
  • How to stay awake for a long class?

Any popular topics that would be considered top or mid-funnel that could help new customers discover the benefits of Ethans energy drinks.

We also looked into a competitive marketing strategy by targeting competitors brand names for searches like:

  • How much caffeine in Celsius energy drink?
  • 5-hour energy side effects
  • Nootropics for energy

Any of these searches would signal a potential interested user and it benefits Ethans to have them land on their domain.

Content Execution

After planning a 6 month content campaign we searched for and hired writers with industry expertise. One of our best practices is to hire new authors for each new industry.

In this case we looked for nutritionists or dietitians, the best candidates also had a strong online footprint we could leverage for Google’s EEAT authority. Which we then showcase in our ‘author’ page template.

Analytics

To track success we focused primarily on 3 KPIs:

  1. Organic Traffic Growth: We expect to grow organic traffic each month, pending some calibrations for seasonality.
  2. Conversions From Organic Traffic: We tracked add to carts and product views as our primary metrics.
  3. Organic Rankings: Rankings for core terms like “clean energy drink” as well as higher funnel research terms.

AUQ’s analytics team set up the necessary tagging within Shopify using GA4 and Google Tag Manager. After that we pull the data into a live Looker Studio dashboard that updates the necessary data every 15 minutes.

This analytics structure allows us to spend less time on reports and more time on SEO optimizations.

The Outcome

Within 7 months of work we’ve grown traffic ( as publicly referenced by Ahrefs.com ) from 200 monthly visits to 17,000 monthly visits.

Increased the number of Page 1 keywords from 55 to 1,020

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