About our Partner
Who They Are
ShirtSpace is the leading location for affordable wholesale apparel. They have a huge selection of the cheapest t-shirts, sweatshirts, pants, shorts, hats, jackets, and more at unmatched low prices. They offer a huge selection of apparel, with over 2,000 products and more than 100,000 styles, colors, brands, and sizes.
What They Do
ShirtSpace.com makes it as easy to order one million t-shirts as it is one. They also help you save the most money on quality clothes for all ages. They allow for quick checkouts with a simple form and instant shipping time based on your specific location, all with the same great customer service they have always prided themselves on.
The Problem
Our partner struggled with hundreds of thousands of URLs serving duplicate content. Because of the excessive bloat via duplicate content crawl budget became an issue. The majority of their pages were extremely thin on relevant content. Their site search functionality dynamically created URLs for every query, contributing to crawl budget issues.
The site architecture and URL structure were not in line with best practices, e.g., all of their products were directly under the root domain instead of properly categorized into relevant subdirectories. They were not gaining momentum in authority for any of their target URLs.
The Solution
Understanding the partner's goals and the improvements that needed to be made on their site, the Searchbloom team dove into the work with a clear and prioritized action plan.
The Searchbloom team set the strategy with a three-tiered approach incorporating our methodology; Authority, Relevancy, and Technology (A.R.T.).
To build the authority needed to compete, Searchbloom employed several link acquisition tactics to help create a well-rounded and diverse backlink portfolio.
- Searchbloom performed an internal link audit and found hundreds of broken links and many internal link opportunities. Once we fixed the broken links and further optimized internal link opportunities, we began to see a strong ranking increase correlation.
- With our authority gap audit, which identifies the gap between referring domains from primary competitors, Searchbloom developed outreach targets and began performing custom outreach to bloggers, contributors, publishers, etc. to target URLs, including the root domain, category pages, and blog posts.
- We leveraged several link earning methods, but the middleman method and direct links correlated to our biggest wins for the most part. The partner came to us with a total of 303 referring domains, and as of July 2020, now have over 860. (ahrefs)
- Searchbloom performed a referring domain audit and found that of the 303 referring domains, 42 were of very low-quality, spammy, or were sitewide (dofollow) links. Searchbloom disavowed these low-quality inbound links and regularly monitors inbound links with ongoing referring domain audits.
- Searchbloom analyzed the referring domain audit and noticed 7% of the inbound links were pointing to broken pages. Searchbloom reached out to these publishers and, in an attempt to provide value, shared that these links were broken and a few others on their site and reclaimed over 80% of the broken links and even acquired a few more by adding a little value.
- Searchbloom also performed our web mentions audit and did the same thing with those mentions that were not linking to the website. It was less successful than the reclamation initiative, so we changed our outreach pitch approach to go above and beyond. This outreach was customized to each publisher and included screenshots, resource links, and even some ‘how-to’ info. While this is still not as successful as our ongoing reclamation and general link earning campaigns, we generally get powerful referring domains when it does work.
The Searchbloom team improved the relevance of their site by implementing the following:
- Because content was thin on most URLs, Searchbloom developed content briefs for the partner to describe and add relevancy to target category, product, and blog URLs. These briefs included the target audience/buyer persona, brand messaging, tone, stage of funnel, target
length, target keywords, internal links, headings, sub-headings, etc. - Our keyword research and competitive analysis found many URLs were close to ranking on the first page but lacked relevant titles, descriptions, and headings. As part of any SEO campaign, we crawled the website and reviewed GSC and found that over 60% of the website had issues with either duplicate titles/descriptions or missing them altogether. Manually optimizing titles/descriptions/headings at this scale can take a lot of time. While we began manually optimizing target URLs, we also implemented scalable titles/descriptions/headings using a combination of Ruby on Rails and Python.
The team at Searchbloom took an in-depth look at every aspect of their site and offered recommendations on how to improve the functionality and efficiency.
- Searchbloom recommended we change the entire website URL structure, which included site architecture changes due to faceted navigation, parameterized URLs, etc. We attempted to solve the duplicate content, URL structure, canonical tags, silos/nodes, etc. in one big overhaul. While it took a lot of time and research on how the new URL structure should function and an extensive redirect map, this overhaul yielded the most significant gains by far.
- We made many other technical SEO improvements, but I don’t have enough characters to list them all. Suffice to say; you’ve heard them all. e.g., CDN, browser caching, mobile/device optimization, image compression, segmented XML sitemaps, redirect chain audit, status code origin audit, programmatic alt text, pagination fixes, structured data, and open graph markup, etc.
The Results
With the efforts of the whole team, the partner saw huge revenue growth and a return of 1,839% on their investment with Searchbloom. The tables below provide additional insights into the campaign and its metrics growth YoY between the period of June 2019 to July 2020.
| Metric | Before Searchbloom | With Searchbloom | Difference |
| Organic Sessions | 1,202,804 | 1,882,405 | 56.50% |
| Users | 892,908 | 1,443,693 | 61.68% |
| Organic Keywords ranking #1–3 | 1,708 | 7,432 | 335.13% |
| Organic Keywords ranking #4-10 | 2,618 | 10,161 | 288.12% |
| Organic Keywords ranking #11-100 | 19,494 | 61,105 | 213.46% |
| Metric | Difference |
| Transactions | 41.01% |
| Revenue | 45.95% |
2024 LEADING AGENCY
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