Grow your traffic from 3k to 70k monthly visitors in 14 Months: Sports Gear Swag Case Study

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Here’s the high-level overview of the SEO process we used for SportsGearSwag.com.

We’ll be diving into each of these stages in more detail below.

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About Sports Gear Swag

Sports Gear Swag provides fully customizable jerseys, shorts, and t-shirts for a wide range of sports.

• Domain: https://www.sportsgearswag.com/
• Platform: Custom sports apparel

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SEO Strategy

The client’s main goal was to increase organic search revenue. Our first step was to analyze the website, their target keywords, and competition to build the SEO strategy.

During our initial analysis, we identified a few key issues and opportunities:

Issue #1 – Page Optimization: Many pages had poor title tags, missing meta descriptions, and unoptimized content (if content was even present).

Issue #2 – Technical SEO: There were a several critical technical issues negatively impacting the crawling, indexing, and ranking of the website (duplicate pages, junk URLs indexed, keyword cannibalization, poor internal linking, etc.).

Issue #3 – Link Building: The sportsgearswag.com domain only had a Domain Rating of 10, whereas most of their direct competitors had Domain Ratings between 20 and 50. We knew had to build lots of backlinks and drastically increase Domain Rating to have any chance at surpassing the competition.

Based on initial SEO review, we created the following custom SEO strategy:

The Plan:

1. Knock out technical SEO issues as fast as possible.
2. Optimize the most important pages.
3. Build high-quality, relevant backlinks.
4. Improve Topical Authority by creating highly relevant content.

Let’s dive into each of these stages in more detail.

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Technical SEO

The first step of the SEO Strategy was to fix any technical issues. Here are the main initiatives we focused on:

1. Keyword Cannibalization Analysis
2. Search Index Cleanup
3. Robots.txt Review & Modifications
4. Navigation Audit
5. SEO Diagnostics

Keyword Cannibalization Analysis

Keyword Cannibalization is an SEO issue that occurs when multiple pages compete for the same keyword. When a search engine has trouble determining which page to rank for a specific search keyword, often times none of the pages rank as well as they could.

Here’s a clear example of what keyword cannibalization looks like.

Notice how Google keeps jumping from page to page, trying to figure out the best page to rank for “custom basketball jerseys”?

Using our proprietary Keyword Cannibalization Tool, we were able to quickly identify keywords where a significant portion of impressions were shared across multiple pages, indicating a glaring keyword cannibalization issue.

The next step was to help search engines understand the best page to rank for each keyword. This was done by re-optimizing the ranking pages and adding internal links from the incorrect pages to the correct pages, all while using exact-match anchor text.

Once it became clear to search engines which page to rank for each keyword, we noticed many rankings steadily increase. Take for example “custom basketball uniforms” that shot up to position #1 once it became clear that https://www.sportsgearswag.com/basketball/shop?type[]=UNIFORM was the best URL to rank.

Search Index Cleanup

Next step was to remove any junk URLs from Google’s index. We’ve found cleaning up significant amounts of “dead weight” pages can reduce any duplicate content issues while also helping to improve crawl budget. We often see noticeable rank improvements from this exercise alone.

From our analysis we found lots of parameters getting crawled and indexed that provided no value to users or search engines, often with high bounce rates and low time on site.

We quickly removed these from Google’s index using Google’s Indexing API, which allowed us to bulk remove 100’s of URLs at a time instead of manually removing them 1-by-1 in Google Search Console.

Robots.txt Review & Modifications
Every website has a robots.txt file that can be accessed by adding “/robots.txt” to your root domain (ie. 180marketing.com/robots.txt). The robots.txt file tells search engines which parts of your website they’re allowed to crawl.

It’s a good idea to block any sections of your website that you don’t want indexed. This is especially helpful for larger websites with 1,000’s of pages. This way search engines spend more resources crawling your more important pages (category pages, product pages, blog posts, etc.), and less resources crawling pages that really don’t matter.

We reviewed all crawled URLs and found a few parameter URLs that were getting crawled 1,000’s of times, which provided no value to users or search engines.

We improved the robots.txt file by adding specific directives to block these parameters:

• Disallow: /shop?type%5B0%5D
• Disallow: /*gad=*
• Disallow: /*custom=*
• Disallow: /*srsltid=*

As a result, search engines would now spend more time crawling the important pages, and less time crawling junk URLs that don’t matter.

Navigation Audit
Generally the more links on a page, the less SEO value each link has. The same logic can be applied to a website’s top navigation, where the more internal links in the top nav, the less SEO value is passed through each internal link.

Unfortunately Sports Gear Swag had a very heavy top navigation with 100’s of internal links, many of which were going to lower priority pages.

So to optimize Sports Gear Swag’s site navigation, we wanted to make sure that we were only linking to valuable pages that either a) visitors frequently accessed, or b) pages we wanted to rank well in search engines.

To start, we recreated the top navigation in a spreadsheet so that we could easily see pageviews, traffic, and other helpful metrics for each page all in one place.

From there, we reviewed the data to determine which internal links should be removed, replaced, or repositioned. For example, if a page receives less than 1 organic search visit and 1 pageview per day, it’s probably not worth including within the top navigation.

The Sports Gear Swag site navigation featured links to many low traffic pages that didn’t need to be included. We also found many internal links pointing to the same sub-category pages, but in multiple places.

We ended up removing many internal links from the top navigation, helping to ensure that each link would help pass more “link juice” and SEO value to the most important pages.

SEO Diagnostics
The last step of the Technical SEO stage was to do a deep-dive technical audit. It’s common for an eCommerce store to look ‘squeaky-clean’ on the front end, but when rankings fall short, there are often technical SEO issues holding the site back from performing at it’s best.

Our team crawled the entire website to identify any issues that could impact the crawling, indexing, and ranking of the website. We were able to uncover quite a few issues and opportunities that if resolved, could lead to improved rankings.

Here’s an example of some of the technical SEO issues that were uncovered.

• Many redirects weren’t SEO friendly.
• Lots of broken links.
• Duplicate URLs were creating duplicate content issues.
• Images on product pages didn’t have alt text.
• Infinite scroll on category pages made it difficult for search engines to crawl all product pages.
• Slow site speed and poor Core Web Vitals scores.
• Many dead pages with backlinks that needed to be redirected.

We then worked with the client to fix the issues, ensuring we that the website would be completely SEO-friendly.

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Page Optimization

The next stage of the SEO process was to optimize the most important pages on the website. There were 3 main components of the Page Optimization process:

1. Keyword Research
2. Meta Optimization
3. Content Optimization

Keyword Research
Our goal with the Keyword Research was to identify the best keyword to target on each page. There’s 3 things we looked for when selecting strong keyword.

1. Search Intent: Prioritizing transactional keywords like “custom basketball jerseys” over informational keywords like “how to clean basketball jerseys” for higher conversion rates.
2. High Search Volume: Focusing on keywords with high search volume to drive more search traffic.
3. Low Competition: With less competitive keywords, we knew we could start to see rank improvements much quicker. This was especially important since the website had such a low Domain Rating at the time (DR 10).

However, we initially found that many of the target keywords were ranking on the wrong pages. As seen below, many of our target keywords were ranking on individual product pages instead of the category pages.

By focusing on category pages instead of a individual product pages, users now had a wide selection of jersey styles they could browse and personalize. This provided a much better user experience, which would likely improve engagement metrics like “bounce rate” and “time on site”.

Pro Tip: For any given keyword, make sure you always check what type of page is predominantly ranking on page 1 (category pages, product pages, blog posts, etc.). For the keyword “custom basketball jerseys”, almost every page on ranking page 1 was a category pages, indicating that we would likely achieve the strongest ranking by also pushing a category page.

Meta Optimization
We optimized the title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags to ensure they included our target keywords. We also made sure to make the meta descriptions in particular as compelling as possible to increase click-through rates, resulting in additional search traffic.

Content Optimization
Our next step was to optimize the content on the most important pages. Search engines rely on content to better understand the focus and context of the page. Having both the target keywords and related keywords can have a positive impact on rankings.

We first used Surfer SEO to uncover which keywords the top ranking websites were using in their content. We then optimized the content by incorporating many of the related keywords.

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Content

Speaking of content, the next stage of the SEO process was to add some additional content to the website. Our initial SEO audit uncovered a few content issues for Sports Gear Swag.

1. Category pages didn’t have enough content
2. There was a lack of relevant blog posts

Category Page Content
A few category pages had lots of great content, some had just a few sentences, and most other category pages didn’t have any content. So in addition to optimizing any existing category descriptions that were already in place, we also spent some time creating new optimized category descriptions.

We made sure the most important category pages had at least 200 – 300 words of unique content. When creating category descriptions, we focused on providing helpful information to potential customers by answering the following question:

1. What are the benefits of this product?
2. Who are these products for?
3. What materials are available?
4. What customization options are included?
5. What sizes are available for the product range?
6. How does shipping and returns work?
7. How to reach out for questions?

This ensures we can provide a positive user experience through helpful information, while also having enough content to rank well in search engines.

Blog Posts
There were 2 main goals with the blogging efforts.

1. We wanted to drive additional search traffic while educating potential customers.
2. We wanted Google to see Sports Gear Swag as the “Topical Authority” on all things related to custom sports uniforms and jersey.

As such, we created a content calendar and produced several blog posts each month. Each blog post was targeting a specific high volume keyword to ensure the most search traffic possible.

With the topics identified, the next step was to actually start creating the blog posts. We made sure to include relevant images, graphics, facts, stats, and references to make the content as helpful as possible. To date, we were able to publish 105 blog posts.

We also added internal links to the most important category and product pages within the content. Internal links can help improve rankings of the destination page, assuming the source page, destination page, and anchor text are all relevant.

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Link Building

For the last step of the process, we focused heavily on acquiring high quality backlinks to improve Sports Gear Swag’s domain authority and overall SEO performance.

Website Prospecting
The first step was to prepare a list of potential prospects that would be good candidates for link outreach. Using our proprietary prospect analysis tool, we quickly assessed potential websites that passed our prospecting criteria.

• Domain Rating of at least 20
• At least 500 visits per month
• No significant traffic drop year-over-ear
• Majority of traffic must come from US or other English speaking countries
• No external links to questionable niches (casino, betting, pharma, porn, dating, cannabis, crypto, etc.)

Once we had identified 100’s of qualified link prospects, the next step was to reaching out for backlinks. Here’s an overview of the main link building strategies we used.

Competitor Link Building
We examined the backlinks of the leading competitors using Ahrefs to identify websites that might be open to linking to us as well. We then reached out to any relevant websites with a compelling link pitch, incentivizing them to link to us as well.

Guest Posting
Guest posting is one of the most common link building strategies, usually because it’s very consistent. Basically you write a unique article for a related blog that contains a link to your website. 

What’s great about guest posting is that since we’re writing the article, we have more control over the destination page the link points to. This makes it easier to get backlinks directly to the pages that need them the most (category pages and product pages).

The popularity of this strategy has led to guest posting being abused and the effectiveness of guest posts being brought into question.

However we’ve seen firsthand how powerful guest posts can be when the following guidelines are followed:

• The website must be relevant and on topic
• The website must have editorial standards.
• The website also writes their own content and isn’t just a guest post farm (sites with a “write for us” or “contribute to” page are usually guest post farms).
• The guest post content is 100% unique.
• The guest post was written by someone with firsthand experience and knowledge of the topic.

And that’s exactly what we did for Sports Gear Swag. We worked with relevant sports bloggers to secure guest posts just like this.

Content Marketing
The main goal of our content marketing efforts was to earn backlinks by creating content that appeals to bloggers and webmasters. After doing some research, we found a lot of sports websites were linking to resources for parents.

As such, we created a resource guide called A Parent’s Guide to Choosing the Best Sports Gear for Kids.

Once the content was created, the next step was to promote it to sports blogs, schools, and other relevant websites. For this particular article, the promotion efforts were quite successfully and we were able to successfully acquire backlinks from 23 different websites.

Member Discounts
This strategy includes offering a small discount to groups such as teachers, military, nurses, first responders, etc. We created a landing page for each of these groups with details on how to receive the discount. Example:

Our next step was to promote the discounts to a variety of blogs and online groups that were actively supporting these communities. Many of them were happy to promote our discount code which resulted in additional backlinks.

Scholarship Campaign
The scholarship strategy involved running an essay competition to US students, offering a financial reward to one student for the best essay.

We worked with the client to offer a $1,000 scholarship to one exceptional university student. We created a scholarship page with all the details and began promoting it to university financial aid departments.

This resulted in 45 new backlinks, with an average Domain Rating of 69, from some very high-authority universities and financial aid websites.

Link Building Summary
To date, our team was able to successfully acquire 177 backlinks for sportsgearswag.com since we first started in July 2023.

And as these backlinks came in, their Domain Rating also significantly increased which meant they could now rank for even more competitive keywords.

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SEO Campaign Results

Sports Gear Swag went from around 3,000 visits per month to now over 70,000 visits per month in just 14 months.

During the same time, the number of keywords on page 1 grew from just 239 to now having 3,660 keywords ranking on page 1.

And here’s how their most important keywords were impacted by all the SEO efforts.

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Key Takeaways

• Fixing technical issues can positively impact keyword rankings and site performance.
• Make it crystal clear to search engines which page you want to rank for each keyword.
• Understand the type of pages search engines predominantly rank on page 1 for your keywords.
• Optimizing the meta data and content on your top pages is still very important.
• Make sure you have a strong enough Domain Rating and enough backlinks to outrank your competitors.
• Create educational content on relevant topics that your customers are actually searching for.

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