How we helped an e-commerce brand in a highly regulated industry outrank an exact match domain

We first completed an audit of the site to look for quick-win opportunities. We also put together a comprehensive plan to build links to their most important category pages.

It became clear during the audit that one of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of top rankings was the fact that their competitor had an exact match keyword domain. Essentially, the competitor’s domain name contained the keyword they were trying to rank for.

Keyword-rich domains are highly effective for capturing SEO traffic. Companies that do not have their target keyword in their domain name must build high quality backlinks to give themselves a fighting chance at ranking.

For e-commerce clients, it is considered best practice to build links to category pages as opposed to product pages. Individual product SKUs come and go, but category pages usually remain fixed. Because category pages typically link to product pages, some of the authority gained by the category page gets transferred to the product pages.

Some e-commerce brands build blogs to capture top of funnel traffic. While this can be an effective strategy for raising brand awareness, we always begin by building links to the source so clients can start seeing an immediate impact on revenue.