Case Study: Spocket Best Dropshipping Suppliers for US + EU Products

Introduction

Spocket is a dropshipping market aiding online retailers by removing the need to hold inventory and erasing upfront costs for retailers. They enable over 60,000+ entrepreneurs across five continents to launch and scale their online stores.

Method and Metric was hired by Spocket with the goal of increasing registrations, traffic, downloads to their Alibaba tool, and diversifying their landing pages.

What We Noticed

The biggest concern on the Spocket.co website is the UX and site architecture as there was a lot of room for improvement for both crawlers and end-users. The site was difficult to navigate, with a lot of orphan pages listed in the XML sitemap and several page types had completely different navigation systems, which made it difficult for the user to continue their journey on the site.

The site’s UX and architecture were a high priority in optimizing the website with metadata and internal link optimization following. After a keyword audit of the website, we discovered that there was room for Spocket.co to improve their rank on high-volume search keywords in their industry. Here we identified where Spocket.co currently ranked and where we could make several improvements.

Content Blog & Competitor Analysis

Spocket has a formidable collection of optimized blog content that helps place the blog in a competitive position against other players in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for target keywords. According to our audit conducted in June 2020, the Spocket blog contributed approximately 56.5% of all website traffic to the Spocket website and approximately 62.5% of all keywords that Spocket ranks for.

In fact, most traffic was concentrated on one blog post. It goes without saying that Spocket’s blog content is a driving force for the website’s SEO as a whole.

This seems to be a common theme in the dropshipping space when direct competitors are analyzed. All direct competitors have placed a high focus on their content, making it an integral part of their marketing strategy. Regardless, Sprocket and its competitors would be competing in the search results for many of the same keywords.

Despite this, Spocket is well-positioned to remain competitive in the SERPs and grow their competitive position due largely in part to a strong backlink profile, which will likely see them rise above smaller dropshipping platforms or resource blogs that simply don’t have the backlinks to compete.

Spocket’s backlink profile can help provide a “running start” when it comes to the development of new content as Google may be more inclined to rank new content higher than existing smaller competitors because of Spocket’s domain authority.

This could see Spocket’s keyword rankings, positioning, and even featured snippet acquisition dramatically increase over the next year.

After conducting the audit, we supported them in diversifying their SEO strategy so that their main pages would rank while increasing the success of their blog with proper keyword research and implementation.

Keyword Research and Mapping Summary

As previously mentioned, most of Spocket’s traffic was being brought in by their blog because it provided value to their customers and there was no keyword strategy that targeted high search volume keywords.

Our first step was to start by collecting relevant dropshipping keywords.

Above, the numbers highlighted in blue show the total Keyword Variations, Questions, or Related Keywords that contain the term “dropshipping” in them. The “Total volume” refers to the number of times a query within this group was searched in a month (approximately for US search results).

We can see that search queries containing the term “dropshipping” have a combined monthly search volume of approximately 863K.

This means that despite the existing content out there, the demand and interest for dropshipping-related content remain substantial.

As a result, there is no shortage of opportunities to take advantage of.

Research proved to be difficult because a lot of the same keywords were being used by Spocket’s competitors and all of them provided similar offerings to their target audience.

However, using search volume analysis, we were able to identify keywords and opportunities to optimize their pages through long-tail keywords.

These are keywords that relate to your business and are easier to rank for than more common keywords because of how niche and specific they are.

Using this strategy, we were able to narrow down a list of keywords that increased the chances for conversion.

We then mapped out and identified high-ranking primary and secondary keywords to each page of the website. This included updates in meta descriptions, titles, and title tags.

Technical Audit

Through our technical audit of the website, we discovered the following issues and provided recommendations:

Issue

The Site Architecture was making it difficult for people to navigate through the site. Depending on the page, there were different navigation systems with regards to headers, footers, and the overall layout of the page.

Our approach

Provided recommendations on how to improve UX and eliminating unnecessary steps in the user journey to improve conversions.

Issue

There were many orphan pages, which are pages without internal links to them. This made it impossible for crawl bots from Google and other search engines to find these pages from crawling the website. The only way these pages would be found is by including them in the sitemap.

Our approach

Identified suitable parent pages to be linked to orphan pages to improve site crawlability.

Issue

There was no internal linking strategy in place. As a result, many pages, especially blog content, had low counts of outgoing internal links. Similarly, a few main pages had low counts of incoming internal links.

Our approach

Developed an internal linking strategy to improve page authority and keyword targeting on the website.

Issue

Obsolete pages found on the sitemap. These were either pages with outdated content, redirects, or 404 status codes

Our approach

Updated sitemap to include only pages intended to be indexed by search engines.

Issue

There were instances of pages with temporary redirects that should have been permanent redirections. These pages were still indexed by Google, and as such was a problem.

Our approach

Updated pages that were incorrectly set as temporary redirects to permanent redirects.

Issue

There were pages with redirect chains, which reduces link equity and wastes the crawl budget.

Our approach

Updated the redirections of these chains to point directly to the final destination URL.

Issue

Inconsistent page title structure. Some pages had “| Spocket” at the end whilst others did not. There were also instances of titles and meta descriptions with too high pixel width and were cut off in the SERP as a result, making it impossible for the searcher to read them in their entirety.

Our approach

Create and implement new page titles and meta descriptions to optimize for pixel width and keyword targeting.

Issue

Many pages had the same H1 tags, which was from an email capture box used on these pages. H2 tags were also missing from many pages.

Our approach

Identified pages with poor use of header tags to be optimized.

Issue

Page speed scores were low across many pages, especially for mobile speed tests. This not only disrupts user experience, with research suggesting that high load times result in higher bounce rates, but mobile page speed is an important ranking factor for Google, this was likely resulting in lower search visibility.

Our approach

Identified the page speed scores of all pages and the specific issues causing load times for each page for Spocket’s internal team to know how to reduce load times for each page.

Issue

Pages were missing schema markup, which helps search engines find and display relevant information to users on the search engine results page. It would have been especially useful for Spocket’s academy courses and collections pages to include price and review structured data.

Our approach

Create a schema markup template to be used by Spocket’s internal team to implement structured data on pages.

Issues

There was evidence that suggested the website had been a victim of one or more negative SEO attacks. There were a couple of instances where the website had spikes in backlinks from spammy websites with low domain authority. These could have potentially been hurting search visibility since backlink spikes can be seen by Google as an attempt by the associated website to game the system by buying cheap backlinks and therefore penalizes said website by lowering its search visibility.

Our approach

Identified backlinks from spammy websites to be disavowed by Spocket’s internal team.

Results

Highlights:

151% increase in organic search traffic (from non-branded searches)
150% increase in organic search users (from non-branded searches)
20% increase in the number of pages per session from organic search traffic
Over twice as many keywords in the top 3 of Google search results

To effectively measure the SEO growth of the website post optimization, we looked at the year-over-year (YoY) change in key Google and Web traffic metrics from non-branded searches.

These are Google searches that did not include “Spocket” or some similar variation of the name. This is to eliminate skewing from brand growth that might not be associated with SEO growth.