SEO for Coffeshop website

Coffeeshop is a rather tricky topic for online promotion. It is forbidden to advertise this online store in traditional ways, so we offered the owner the option that will be resultative and will not lead to a ban. We decided to promote the online store in SEO.

Website topic: sales of cannabis seeds, equipment and substances for growing plants, as well as Rasta accessories.

Work on the project started in June 2020. During the audit, it was found that the website has been in existence for more than two years, but has a number of problems:

• low site loading speed;
• lack of HTML and XML site maps;
• file robots.txt is not configured;
• presence of cyclic internal links;
• problems with pagination of pages, optimization of meta tags, and so on.

After analyzing competitors who occupy TOP positions for the main key queries in this niche, it became clear that in addition to eliminating technical errors of the site, it is necessary to build a semantic core, optimize meta tags for the collected semantics, add content to commercial pages,and increase the quality of the link mass, while optimizing the site for the Google search engine.

First of all. A technical task was drawn up for the programmer to finalize the site and fix a number of errors, the main of which were:

• duplicates of the main and internal pages;
• absence of microformats;
• non-optimized attributes of the images;
• not configured meta tag generation for category and product pages;
• non-unique pagination pages.

These fixes were necessary to improve the site’s usability, make it more user-friendly, and increase the site’s visibility in the search network.

Then. As previously agreed, we built a semantic core for the main categories of the site, optimized meta tags for them (after which, of course, we implemented them), and also unsubscribed texts to the category pages.

After all the actions performed for internal site optimization, we started the most interesting thing – external site optimization.

Adhering to the planned strategy to improve the site’s link profile, we started searching for sites to host guest posts, but immediately encountered a number of rejections from site owners who did not want to publish articles that were in any way related to the promoted topic. After that, it was decided to use the search for sites in special services, as well as to order the publication of links on thematic forums and reviews of the site by users from social networks.

But this did not bring the expected results due to the fact that services for publishing links on forums and social networks constantly blocked the account, since this topic is prohibited everywhere.

However, we did not give up and, changing the topics of articles, we began to find sites that were willing to post our articles. In addition, we began to actively register the site on local directories and response sites, which gave results.

At the moment, work on the project continues, but we can already show what has changed today.

Results achieved in 3 months:

In comparison with the period before the start of SEO work, there is an increase in the number of users, sessions, an increase in the number of transactions and revenue:

Growth in the number of requests in the TOP 3, 10, 30:

Uniform positive growth dynamics of reference donors:

Conclusions: for each project, it is important to find your own approach and set of tools. The most popular services or promotion methods don’t always work.