Case study · E-commerce
Not clickbait3.8× more clicks. No link building.
In six months, an online store got 20.1K clicks from Google. The six months before: 5.26K. No link building and no Core Web Vitals work, just a semantic content network. Here’s exactly how I built it.
- Clicks
- 20.1K
- was 5.26K
- 3.8×
- Impressions
- 1.16M
- was 421K
- 2.8×
- Click-through rate
- 1.7%
- was 1.2%
- Average position
- 23.6
- was 24.4
Google Search Console, web search: the last 6 months vs the 6 months before.
Average position barely moved while impressions nearly tripled. That’s the network at work: the store started showing up for far more searches, not just ranking higher for a few.
Sales tripled too. That dashboard stays private.
The receipts
Straight from Search Console
What I skipped
Not on the to-do list
Link building
I put zero effort into getting backlinks.
Core Web Vitals
I didn’t focus on page speed scores.
Meta descriptions
I didn’t write them, except on blog posts.
What I did
A semantic content network
Instead of chasing links, I made the site easy for Google to understand. Every page answers a real question, sits under one topic and points to the right product.
Cut what didn’t fit
I audited every page and deleted anything that didn’t belong in the store’s niche.
Gave every page a parent
I sorted the content into categories. Every article, old or new, sits under one parent category.
Answered real questions
For each product, I searched it on Google, read the “People also ask” questions and wrote clear answers to every one.
Linked up the chain
Every article links to its parent category, and every category links to the products it covers.
Linked only what’s related
Articles and products link to each other only when they’re closely related.
How it fits together
Every page has a job
Articles
- How do I choose one?
- Is it worth the price?
- How do I look after it?
Answer the questions people ask.
Category
- The parent topic
Groups the answers under one topic.
Product
- What you sell
Where the sale happens.
Do this for every product and the network ends up covering almost every search intent around what you sell.
Before you copy this
Two things that matter
- Pro tip
Write honest link text
Don’t stuff keywords into your links. Describe the page you’re linking to, so the link matches what people are looking for.
- Fine print
Bring some authority
This works when a site already has some authority. A brand-new site needs off-page work first, like earning mentions and links from other sites.
