Consolidating instead of creating.
Several weak pages chasing one term will lose to a single strong one every time. Most of the ranking gain came from removal.
Ecommerce ·United States
Page three to position one.
Brick-Anew sell fireplace doors and fireplace paint into a US market they should have owned. The site was a mess, so we consolidated it, and then we rebuilt it. Three main terms, all at position one.
Position 1
Fireplace doors
From page three on the term that carries the business.
Position 1
Brick paint, fireplace paint
The other two terms that define the category.
Rebuilt
The whole site
Consolidated for search, redesigned for conversion.
Client
Brick-Anew
Industry
Ecommerce (fireplace doors and paint)
Reach
United States
Services
SEO · Content · Technical · Links · Web design
A good business behind a difficult site.
Brick-Anew make fireplace doors and fireplace paint, and they have been doing it long enough to know the category better than anyone competing with them for it.
The site did not reflect that. It was, in plain terms, a mess. Years of accumulation with no structure holding it together, which is a very common way for a long running ecommerce site to end up.
The effect on search was predictable. For fireplace doors, the term the business is built on, they sat on page three. Nobody buying fireplace doors reaches page three.
The same products, at the top of the page.
No chart. The comparison is the chart.
Before
- Page three for fireplace doors
- A sprawling site with no structure holding it together
- Competing pages splitting the same search intent
- A design that was not built to convert the traffic it earned
- Category authority that never showed up in the rankings
After
- Position one for fireplace doors
- Position one for brick paint and fireplace paint
- Consolidated so each term has one page that owns it
- A rebuilt site, designed around conversion
- The rankings finally matching what they actually know
Three phases, starting with subtraction.
The instinct on a struggling ecommerce site is to add pages. This needed the opposite.
Phase 01
Consolidating what was already there.
A great deal of the work was merging and removing rather than writing. Where several pages were competing for the same search, they became one page strong enough to win it.
Phase 02
Taking the main terms.
With the structure holding, fireplace doors, brick paint and fireplace paint each had a single clear page behind them. All three are now at position one.
Phase 03
Rebuilding the site around conversion.
Ranking first only pays if the page sells. We are rebuilding the site, and that rebuild is designed around conversion rather than around the search work that got them there.
The decisions that disproportionately mattered.
Three calls did most of the work.
Winning the terms that are the business.
Fireplace doors, brick paint, fireplace paint. Three terms define this category, and position one on all three is worth more than breadth across a hundred.
Rebuilding, not patching.
Once the traffic arrived it became obvious the site was the constraint. Rebuilding was the honest answer, even though it was the longer one.
I’ve worked with Arken Digital for over 3 years now and Richard and his team do an awesome job. We are a small B to C site. I have worked with other SEO agencies, but have never had one perform well enough to stay with them longer than 6 months. Arken’s attention to detail and execution are excellent and I would highly recommend them.
What it added up to.
Position one for fireplace doors, brick paint and fireplace paint, from a starting point of page three on the term the business depends on.
The rebuilt site follows, designed to convert the traffic the search work now delivers. Three years in, and the interesting part is still ahead of it.
Your version of this
Sitting on page three for the term your business is built on?
Send us your URL. We will run your store through the same first pass we ran on Brick-Anew, and send back a 15 minute video walkthrough of what we would do. Or whether we are the right people to do it.