Improving Site Quality: A Summer SEO Project on My Flower Blog

As usual, when I get vacation, I can’t just sit still. Instead, I turn to work on my flower blog and do things I haven’t had time for, like testing new strategies or learning something new that I need but haven’t had time to focus on. Since the March Core Update, I’ve also been struggling a bit, as Google has been favoring eCommerce sites and larger brands over my affiliate site. Consequently, my organic traffic and sales have been declining. Now i had time to improve my site quality, improve my content and fixing duplicate content issues.

SEO Projects This Summer

Therefore, this summer, I have been working on the following SEO projects:

1. Improve product descriptions
2. Create high-quality and helpful articles
3. Scale down my content (pages)
4. Improve content on existing pages
5. Expand to new markets
6. Improve internal linking between product categories

This was my plan, but in the end I focused most on 1., 3., 4. and 6. I wrote about my plan on LinkedIn as well.

One focus has been to improve my site quality overall. A lot of work has been around the products and product pages, because these are the pages that have lost most organic traffic in the March Core Update.

One big task has been finding a way to remove and reduce duplicate products. I had almost 10,000 products at one point, many of which were duplicates. This caused issues with duplicate content due to improperly fixed product feeds and inconsistently named products across the different stores i do affiliate marketing for. There were some issues with this and quite challenging to fix the feed and find a solution I was happy with, but I’m quite satisfied with the compromises made.

Scaling down my content (pages) goes hand in hand with improving product descriptions and content on existing pages.

Kevin Indig at the Digital Olympus SEO Conference mentioned, “When the number of pages increases and the quality is poor, organic traffic goes down.” Inspired by his speech, I began removing low-quality pages that don’t bring value to users or get impressions or clicks on Google. This process included articles, dictionary pages, but mostly products. Most of the products that I decided to remove were products that don’t rank well, aren’t bringing in sales, and that I know I will never optimize.

I wrote a LinkedIn post about it as well, where I got a lot of comments from other SEOs who had been testing this with good results. This made me really excited and I believed it would work on my site too.

This SEO tactic is called content pruning, and you can read more about it in the Ahrefs blog.

I have also improved product descriptions on about 95% of my products. This was crucial in making sure each product page provided unique and valuable information to users, helping to reduce issues with duplicate content and improve the overall quality of my site.

Here I used my prompts that I have been developing since January, and experimenting with automating the product description optimizing with Make. Here also I improved my prompts and processes, so in the end the product optimization went quite fast automating as much as possible with Make and then All import all texts to my site. 3500+ optimized products in 3-4 weeks.

In addition to improving product descriptions, I have enhanced the internal linking between categories. This helps in better navigation for users and also aids search engines in understanding the structure and hierarchy of the site, potentially improving rankings.

Here I coded with ChatGPT some blocks where I can easily add similar product categories with images and internal links to the category. It looks kinda nice too. This will improve the content hub thinking and improves the user experience as well.

In the end the process of removing pages took me a few weeks, because i have been doing this gradually since the end of June. At most I had around 8000+ products, and now only 3559. Total pages in my sitemap is now 4439, before around 10,000.

Gradually removing product pages and duplicates:
15. June: 8000+ products
1. July: 7720 products
8. July: 6181 products
22. July: 4445 products
1. August: 3559 products

I started with 9967 indexed pages and now 4-5 weeks later i have 3553 indexed pages after the cleanup. That is 64.4% less indexed pages. I still have pages that I try to get indexed here.

After focusing on product and product category pages, I observed the following increases in organic clicks for product and product category pages in the last 28 days (3-30. July 2024) , compared to the previous period:

• Product category pages: 40.6% increase
• Product and product category pages: 40.6% increase
• Product pages: 40.7% increase

I started to work with this sometime in the end of June. Comparing the last 28 days (3-30. July 2024) to previous period, I can see a 40.6 % increase in organic clicks in search console for product and product category pages.

Comparing the last 28 days (3-30. July 2024) to previous period, I can see a 40.7 % increase in organic clicks in search console for product pages.

Comparing the last 28 days (3-30. July 2024) to previous period, I can see a 40.6 % increase in organic clicks in search console for product category pages.

When looking at the number of pages that Google can index and the organic traffic, we can see that for product and product categories, the organic traffic is slowly increasing, when pages are being removed. Most of the removed pages were duplicate content of product pages. During this time, I have also working a lot on improving site quality working with optimizing product descriptions, product categories and internal linking.

I didn’t see any change for articles and other pages, but these are highly seasonal on my blog, but for products and product pages that I worked mostly with, there is a trend to be discovered.

I saw a 57% increase in affiliate revenue in July compared to June. I am happy about this.

While I’m still far from where I was in organic clicks before the March Core Update, I’m happy with the 40% increase in organic clicks, and the 57% increase in revenue in July compared to June. I believe that, removing duplicates and low-quality pages, along with optimizing the remaining product and product category pages, has contributed to these results. Of course there is always other things affecting the results and there is never just one thing we do, seasonal affect might affect and also there was the June 2024 Spam Update by Google as well, that however didn’t seem to have a significant effect on my site this time.

It has been a lot of work but most of it is done now and I can focus on other things. Same time I have been developing my work processes, so my little summer project was good ;). Let’s see how this will develop with time.

But this was a fun and necessary test. I’ll keep you updated on this 🙂

As this was highly inspired from the Digital Olympus Event in Eindhoven, let’s throw in a picture of me there as well 😉 Thanks.