Greyhaze Online Vape Shop
Grey Haze is a well-established online vaping store based in Birmingham. I develop and maintain their e-commerce website to improve UX/UI and increase CRO. I have also worked to develop SEO strategies to improve the brands SERP.
Strategic Roadmap
Upon starting my time at Greyhaze and being new to the business with a fresh perspective, I was able to identify a number of issues that had previously gone unnoticed. As Greyhaze is a vaping company, their products are prohibited from any form of paid ads on Google, Facebook, Instagram and the like, leaving them heavily reliant on SEO to market the business and grow the customer base. After performing a website audit it was clear to see that, despite the importance of SEO, it was not being made a priority and there was a huge need for improvement with the SEO strategy, CRO and overall content on the website. During my time at Greyhaze I have assisted the business in resolving a number of issues by providing strategic advice and implementing processes to increase their visibility, generate sales and ultimately increase their revenue.
Some of the strategic directions include:
Due to advertising restrictions the written content within the website is of the utmost importance. Product collections need to be updated, blogs need to be written and product descriptions should be strategically worded with SEO in mind, it was my recommendation that to make an impact on our rank, we should hire a dedicated content writer (either internal or external) to focus on this area of the business.
Following the site audit it was apparent that certain ‘SEO Best Practices’ were not being followed. Issues such as meta titles and meta description optimisation, outdated product terminology, and inadequate product descriptions were highlighted, and it was clear to see that there was a lack of structure and communication between departments within the business. I advised that a company SEO Guidelines and Best Practices document should be created and implemented to ensure that all teams, from merchandising to marketing, can ensure all content is created with SEO in mind and adheres to the wider industry standards.
Previously there has been no in-house specialist that was focussed solely on SEO, and little to no resources had been allocated to outsourcing either. I advised the team at Greyhaze to start making this a priority and suggested building relationships with external agencies who would be responsible for facilitating changes with speed optimisation, SEO audits, implementing coding and improving UX/UI. Working with external teams was a more cost effective and quicker way to drive results within the business.
Customer Experience
I advised the brand to implement Royal Mail and DHL as their chosen delivery service to give their customers faster, more reliable shipping and a better delivery experience overall.
Conversion Rate Optimisation
I identified a number of issues with website functionality which hindered the customer’s buying experience, and had a negative effect on sales. I implemented multiple different design and functionality changes to improve UX/UI and increase CRO, and managed a website developer who assisted with implementing these changes.
A number of UX/UI changes were implemented across the website. Some of the key changes I compLeted include:
This feature gives the customer a discount for buying multiple items, and provides an incentive for the customer to increase their order value. This improved the CRO and increased the average order value across the site.
I implemented this design feature to facilitate seamless navigation through the products section of the website, thus making the buyers journey to purchasing easier. This feature also helped strengthen the site's internal linking system and strategically boost page authority.
After running performance tests I discovered the website speed score was average at best as the site was using a large number of scripts and plugins that negatively impacted the site speed. Working with an external team I facilitated the hardcoding of plugins and scripts into the theme to reduce the javascript load and improve the overall site speed.
Search Engine Optimisation
Upon starting work with the brand, I identified a number of issues with the sites SEO and merchandising and felt that the site was not fully optimised to get the best SERP and maximise sales. I came up with a strategy to solve these issues which included rewriting content to include keywords, internal links and adding new content and features that improve SEO and streamlined the customers buying experience.
My work at Greyhaze has certainly been challenging at times. Just before I started working on this project there had been an algorithm update which gave the site a temporary boost, however this quickly began to tail off as there was a lack of structure and strategy within the SEO department. Previously SEO was not a main focus for the company, and as such there was a lack of resources dedicated to this project. Right from the beginning of the project it was a priority for me to stop the decline of the site's ranking as quickly as possible, and implement some key strategies and structures that would bring about long-term, sustainable results.
A number of SEO changes were implemented across the website. Some of the key changes I completed include:
Header tags improve the SEO of a webpage, but unfortunately the header hierarchy on the Greyhaze website was poorly structured which had a negative impact both on SEO and the users experience. I discovered headers were not being read as H2, H3, H4 and so on, which meant that Google couldn’t read the site's title structure - if Google can’t read the headers it can’t understand what content is on the page. I worked to implement the necessary changes to correct the header tags and ensure the headers were fully optimised with SEO in mind.
Not only are they a great way to improve your customer experience, FAQ’s can be a useful tool in your SEO strategy. I worked with content writers to create SEO friendly FAQ’s segments across the website, and implemented the FAQ schema markup to the webpage’s code to further boost the SEO benefits.
Through using certain analysis tools, I was able to determine that the Greyhaze website had a number of toxic and spammy backlinks that were of a low quality. The backlinks had not been checked or maintained since they were put into action, which meant that these toxic/spammy backlinks had gone unnoticed and were negatively impacting the overall ranking of the site. I was able to assess backlink profiles and rate the page’s trust and power to identify exactly which links were ineffective and disavow them to prevent any link-based penalties.
Off the back of this analysis, I developed a new backlink strategy to ensure that we were regularly placing high quality links that were trustworthy and in alignment with our site, and ensured that all existing backlinks were being analysed periodically to maintain a high-quality backlink profile that increases the sites visibility and has a positive impact on rankings.
After conducting some broad keyword research around the vaping industry and analysing the results, it became apparent that disposables were a fast growing trend within the niche. Despite this being a popular keyword, it was not being fully utilised across the website which meant we were missing out on visibility and ranking power due to the lack of internal links. To rectify this issue, I decided to add a disposables collection to the main header banner, with a mega menu to add featured brands and multi-buy offers to really get the maximum impact and generate the most visibility and internal linking for this keyword and collection.
