Goshiki’s SEO Project
Goshiki, a group company of UJ Thinktank, operates an e-commerce website named Best Prints. In 2020, the company implemented an SEO project, which we have previously outlined in our blog, but this page explains furthermore details.
Best Print before implementing SEO consulting
Best Print was started by its president, Tatsuro Tanaka, in 2010. Currently, Best Prints’ e-commerce website generates about 95% of the company’s annual sales of 700 million yen. (Related article: Wikipedia)
Goshiki had spent a large amount of its advertising budget on Google and other online advertising until August 2020. in August 2019, Goshiki asked a Japanese advertising agency to outsource their online advertising and this activity went well. The advertising agency told Goshiki that the traffic would increase as much as Goshiki invested, so Goshiki invested in advertising as the agency said. However, since Google charges per click, the more traffic Gpshiki got through Google advertising, the more they spent on advertising. Therefore, Goshiki decided to set a budget limit for advertising and make investments within that limit.
What prompted Goshiki to seek SEO consulting?
In March 2020, when the effects of COVID-19 began to cause significant damage to the global economy, Best Prints suffered from a chronic decline in the number of visitors, which affected sales, and was looking for a drastic solution. In this situation, President, Tanaka discovered the term “SEO” on the blog of UJ Thinktank, which had not yet been established as an organization. The blog explained, “how to increase visitors through free Google searches (called organic searches), rather than spending money on online advertising.” Goshiki urgently needed a drastic solution, so in May 2020, they decided to take the consulting services from UJ Thinktank and worked with Best Print’s website manager to implement SEO strategies.
Shocking facts revealed from UJT’s SEO consulting report
UJ Thinktank conducted a thorough investigation of the current status of Best Prints e-commerce website and found problems. At the first debriefing session, UJ Thinktank reported many problems which decrease their traffic.
The problems were wide-ranging, but in a nutshell, they were that “Google did not understand the Best Prints’ website properly and the number of times it appeared in search results was decreasing.” Therefore, when people who were looking for printing-related products searched on Google, Best Prints’ products did not appear properly in Google’s search results, meaning a loss of opportunity.
Best Prints had been using Google Analytics, an application that tracks the number of visitors to websites, as a measure of website performance, but had not been making much use of Google Search Console, an application that tracks Google’s organic searches.
The search console allows you to track the number of times a search result appears in Google search results, the number of times a user clicks on the search result, etc. According to a UJ Thinktank’s report, there was a serious drop in Google search traffic from the beginning of 2020. The number of clicks per day had been around 200 times usually, but at the time of the investigation, it had dropped to around 50 times per day.
Measures to get traffic from search results = SEO
Goshiki focused on this problem very seriously, and under President Tanaka’s direction, they launched the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) project and worked with UJ Thinktank to implement measures to improve the problem.
The first thing they did was to review the “titles” of each web page. Every single web page has a title. On the Best Prints’ website, this title was not set properly. UJ Thinktank extracted all the titles from the Best Prints’ website and submitted them in an Excel sheet. What we found was that some of the titles did not have the brand name or the product name, and this was the reason why Google could not properly understand Best Prints’ product pages.
Next, UJ Thinktank found that the “meta description,” which is the summary text describing the page, was also faulty. This meta description is also an item that is not visible on the surface of the website because it is placed inside the HTML. Best Prints’ meta descriptions had many problems, such as the same text on several pages, and missing product and company names.
Goshiki project team first decided to thoroughly fix these two issues, and each of their staff members began work on them, spending about a month making the necessary corrections.
After SEO implementation, both the number of search results and clicks were improved significantly.
As of December 2020, the number of Google search results had been improved by 61%, and the number of clicks had tripled compared to before the SEO project began.
Conducted a Test to Stop Google Ads and See If It Affects the Overall Traffic.
In September 2020, Goshiki conducted a test to see how the overall number of traffic would be affected by stopping the Google ads that they had invested in until the time. As a result, Best Prints’ website was able to gain access from Google’s organic search results, although not all of it, and enough to compensate for the amount of access they were getting from advertising. In response to the test result, Goshiki fundamentally reviewed its advertising investment and switched to a policy of advertising only for products that were difficult to obtain from Google’s organic search. This decision has succeeded in reducing the advertising cost to about one-tenth of what it had been spending.
Conclusion
With UJ Thinktank’s SEO consulting services, Goshiki was able to increase the number of visitors to its website even during the COVID-19 pandemic. The important thing to remember in this effort is that a website cannot attract visitors just by creating it. There are many different sources of traffic to a website such as social networking and email marketing, but the largest percentage is from Google search results. Optimizing the inflow from these search results is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and to achieve this SEO, it is essential to create pages that follow Google’s guidelines. However, it is almost impossible to research and implement every item listed in these guidelines in-house. In this case, UJ Thinktank’s professional knowledge would work.
If your company is experiencing problems with your website, please try UJ Thinktank’s free consulting service. If you can find out what the problem is, you can take critical action to solve it. I believe that the demand for online business will continue to accelerate in the future. At that time, building a website that can attract customers will become an essential task for company management.
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