Website promotion using a website builder is not always a good idea. Designers are endowed with a reduced set of options for search engine optimization, and search engines rank higher sites on full-fledged CMS. Sites on some website builders (for example, Wix) are in principle not suitable for SEO, all source code is encrypted there.
Nevertheless, you can work with some. We want to share with you a case study from our practice and tell you how the online store was promoted using the Advantshop constructor and what came of it.
About the project and its tasks
Piniolo is a wholesale supplier of women’s and men’s shoes, as well as women’s clothing and bags.
The main page of the site piniolo.ru
The client set the following tasks:
To increase the number of queries by which users go to the site from search engines.
Increase traffic.
Build a positive online reputation.
As for SEO specialists, the goals looked like this: to bring the site to the top 10 for highly competitive and seasonal queries and increase targeted search traffic by at least 2 times.
We needed to make the site appear on the first page of Yandex and Google for the most important queries for the client’s business. These are, for example, “wholesale Turkish footwear”, “wholesale winter footwear”, “wholesale women’s winter footwear”, “wholesale autumn boots” and others.
Main problems and features of the project
The piniolo.ru site is organized on the AdvantShop constructor. This is a profile system for an online store, but the possibilities of search engine optimization are severely limited here.
Advantshop admin panel
When working on the builder, you won’t have any problems with the tools that the developers have already foreseen and enabled by default. But in terms of SEO tools, this is usually the most basic minimum, which is not enough for full-fledged promotion.
While promoting the piniolo.ru site, we encountered difficulties in creating static page filters, which were required to optimize for collected queries. There is also a problem with the flexibility of the settings for the canonical and noindex tags: these tags are set on certain types of pages in the designer and cannot be set manually on any others.
Also, as part of the initial audit of the piniolo.ru site, the optimizer found many other weaknesses:
- non-unique content;
- duplicate meta tags and pages;
- poorly designed adaptation for mobile devices;
- 404 error pages.
Modules (plugins) were supposed to be the solution to this problem of bound hands. They began only partially: it is difficult to customize them for specific tasks. The required module may not exist at all. We have used some of them, but they are not enough for full SEO.
Project work
The fact that the site is on a constructor does not particularly affect the promotion strategy itself. The emphasis should be on the same as for SEO of any e-commerce sites:
- expand semantics;
- pump over commercial factors;
- improve usability on mobile devices;
- eliminate gross technical errors;
- apply meta tag masks across a large number of pages, covering a maximum of LF queries.
We started with semantics. The optimizer collected the widest possible semantic core, divided it into clusters, for which it was required to create new landing pages.
We also connected 3 additional Advantshop modules:
- Store Reviews – to filter and publish reviews on the reviews page.
- Yandex.Metrica – for installing counters and collecting information for the webmaster, which allows you to analyze and improve the site.
- “SEO-filter” – needed to form the CNC pages and categories.
But modules do not make the constructor an open system, so they could not solve all the problems.
For example, the site did not have the simplest product filters by season, size, material, and so on. To create the desired landing pages, it was required to involve the developers of Advantshop. Such work – and there were enough of them – the client paid for them separately (there is such a practice, if you need to modify the site to fit your requirements).
One of the tasks of collaborating on a site with developers on the client side
Delegating tasks to third-party specialists, additional expenses, connecting a large number of developers and waiting for a response from technical support for many days – all this certainly affects the timing of the appearance of SEO results. A natural question arises: why not transfer the site to another platform, for example, Bitrix or WordPress? Competition in the niche is high, and platform limitations make it difficult to quickly improve usability and redesign.
The answer is simple: it is more convenient for the client. He initially understood what restrictions the designer imposes on the site in terms of promotion. But piniolo.ru is not his only project on Advantshop, he has been working with this platform for a long time and all processes have already been built. The decision to move the site to another CMS would be too radical in a well-functioning and long-running business.
Yulia Mironova, head of the client department SEO.RU:
“When I took over the Piniolo project from another manager, I quickly joined the work, because the client always explains the tasks that the other manager had previously done, if I am not aware of some specifics. This is a very pleasant person to talk to, it’s easy with him. We are always listened to and fulfills almost all the recommendations that are needed for SEO. Quickly coordinates texts. Working with this project is a joy. ”
Fortunately, we are working closely with the design team. We analyzed each of our recommendations for effectiveness and necessity. It was necessary to soberly assess how this or that revision would really work, whether the promotion of an online store would really not be successful without it. This stage was very important because it cost the client additional expenses for the Advantshop developers.
In the process of promotion, we faced the problem of optimizing filter pages, limited functionality of the mobile version of the site, the inability to create a new static page template with the addition of some new elements (in addition to text and images). Going back to strategy, it becomes clear that these are key points. Therefore, we submitted such tasks to the client for consideration and further cooperated with the developers of the designer.
Some of our solutions, which were ordered separately for revision, subsequently appeared in the constructor by default during subsequent updates.
Mobile version of piniolo.ru
All product tags were optimized by masks. Thanks to this, they were able to cover a huge number of website pages for low-frequency queries. Low-frequency queries are one of the most important in SEO for online stores, since these queries are followed by the most ready-to-buy users.
To expand the semantics and improve the internal structure of the site, we took up content. Here, not only commercial, but also information requests were used: for example, we wrote articles on how to choose shoes and take care of them. It worked – the articles also brought traffic to the site.
Vitaly Leontiev, head of the SEO department at SEO.RU:
“Website promotion on a constructor can take a lot of effort and time from the team. But if there is good feedback from the developers of the designer and the client’s understanding about the need for additional investments in the software part, nothing is impossible. At the same time, there is one big but: with each subsequent global update of a design engine like Advantshop, you can lose some of your custom improvements if the developers do not make them in the next update. It’s important to keep track of this so you don’t waste time doing the same thing every time. “
results
Have we achieved our goals? Let’s check the original goals: we needed to double our traffic and bring it to the top 10 pages for seasonal and highly competitive queries.
We achieved the first results thanks to new landing pages created for the updated semantics. The emphasis on expanding semantics, increasing the number of pages on the site, and useful content helped to gain the trust of search engines. For many requests, the site came to the top:
Cells with positions in the top 10 are highlighted in green – these queries made it to the first page of search results
The total number of requests for which users go to the site has doubled:
Piniolo.ru request graph
Along with them, the traffic grew – 2.4 times:
Visit schedule piniolo.ru
Despite the difficulties caused by the fact that the site is on a constructor, in six months we were able to bring a highly competitive site to the top 10 for a number of queries and attract targeted traffic to the site. Therefore, we believe that it is worth taking on website promotion on a constructor if the client understands the specifics of this work and can allocate additional resources to web developers.
