SEO Case Study Soap

SEO – Lather, Rinse, & Repeat

How many times have you washed your hands today, or better yet how many times have your coworkers? Right now, there might be your favorite scented holiday soap in the bathroom. For some there might be an empty soap bottle with a little water to get the remnants out. No matter how you go about picking your soap, could you successfully differentiate your product in a national e-commerce playing field? Today we look into how SEO efforts were able to get national rankings for organic soap through 3 simple steps: lather, rinse, repeat.

Lather

Vermont Soap’s SEO campaign launched in February of 2020 with a robust WordPress site for the bulk of their content and Shopify for all end products.

From the homepage of the business:

“Vermont Soap has been replacing yucky petrochemical based products with yummy natural formulations made from organic oils and herbs.”

Our team was tasked with capturing national rankings for this e-commerce site with a product that, in retrospect, was made to disrupt consumer behavior in the soap industry—that being how you pick your soap.

Initial research in Google Analytics identified which products were already driving traffic and sales. We broke all products of the site into the categories below:

  • 1. Organic Soap
  • 2. Organic Castile Soap
  • 3. Organic Foaming Hand Soap
  • 4. Organic Deodorant
  • 5. Handmade Soap
  • 6. Organic Moisturizer
  • 7. Natural Cleaning Spray
  • 8. Natural Organic Shower Gel
  • 9. Soap for Dry and Sensitive Skin
  • 10. Shea Butter
Next, our team strategically placed keyword research into title tags, META descriptions, and on-page content. We optimized product categories in addition to core pages of the wholesale website, ranging from organic soap for oily skin to handmade bar soap made from coconut.

Rinse

The first 30 days of SEO are crucial to results and overall success for the campaign. After lathering a multifaceted SEO strategy throughout the website, our next step was rinsing organic traffic growth. In SEO, we measure organic traffic growth from Google and Bing to gauge campaign success.

In 2020, we saw organic traffic up 46.63% year over year: from 44,273 to 70,491 organic users.

Impression Data
Impressions are when a user sees a website in search results. They strongly indicate SEO growth because as rankings move upward, more people see the website.

We pulled impressions to the Vermont Soap website from June 1st to August 31st in both 2019 and 2020:

2019
Impressions were up in 2019 with the site spiking at 10,698 impressions in one day on August 28th. Our total impressions to the site within those months was 662K.

2020
The website totaled 954K total impressions during the same 2019 time frame—a 208% increase from 2019

Repeat

After starting organic traffic for the Vermont Soap website and noting our successes, we worked to repeat SEO growth for the website. During the early phases of SEO, as Google acclimates to our optimization, we see major incremental gains. Then, growth steadies out and moves at an incremental pace, as seen in our 2020 figures.

Keywords in title tags, META descriptions, and on-page content led to successful national rankings for the Vermont Soap website:

  • #1 for Alkaline Soap
  • #1 for Organic Bar Soaps
  • #1 for Natural Bar Soap
  • #1 for Natural pH Soap
  • #1 for Organic Liquid Soap
  • #1 for pH Balanced Soap
  • #1 for Private Label Soap
  • #1 for Wholesale Soap

#1

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Through the use of a multifaceted SEO strategy with different keyword considerations, our team yielded national rankings for organic soap and delivered significant growth with organic traffic. Our keyword lather on product categories and wholesale pages initiated visibility across search engines. Once our data was initiated, we achieved organic traffic and impression growth. An SEO campaign wouldn’t be complete without repeating what works, ensuring saturation for crucial keyword categories.

Should your campaign become stagnant, it may be time for a touch-up on the site. Looking for a good place to start? Then let us talk about how we can help your business!