SEO Case Study

Our SEO Melbourne team has delivered real, measurable results for Australian eCommerce businesses. Here is one of those stories.

Sage Horticultural | Strategy | Challenges | Results

Company: Sage Horticultural

Type: [eCommerce SEO]

The Numbers That Matter

Before going into details, here is the snapshot of SEO results for Sage Horticultural.

About Sage Horticultural

Company: Sage Horticultural 

Website: https://www.sagehort.com.au/

Industry: Horticultural Supplies - Greenhouses, Garden Equipment, Growing Accessories 

Business Type: eCommerce (WooCommerce)

Sage Horticultural is a family-owned Australian business with over 60 years of experience, supplying greenhouses, growing equipment, garden tools, and horticultural accessories to home gardeners and commercial growers across Australia.

Despite decades in business and a loyal customer base, their digital presence did not reflect their real-world authority.

Campaign Start - Baseline

In late 2022, Sage Horticultural launched a new WooCommerce website, a much better website than before.

The website had a base of returning customers and some organic traffic, but had not yet been properly optimised for growth.

The business was fulfilling regular orders, but the volume was low relative to the brand's potential, and it needed proper digital marketing planning and execution.

Baseline state at engagement start:

• Limited daily orders
• Smaller warehouse size
• Most top eCommerce categories were not ranking
• Limited brand search volume
• No product reviews
• No structured digital marketing: no feed optimisation, no review strategy, no content plan
• Poorly optimised product feed for free and paid shopping listings

The opportunity was clear: implement proper account structure, build a foundation for paid ads and start focusing on SEO opportunities to grow the business.

The SEO Strategy

The engagement followed a structured, multi-dimensional approach.

Phase 1: Comprehensive SEO Audit

Before starting the core implementation work, a detailed technical and content review was performed.

Technical Health

• Crawling & Indexing: Confirming Googlebot could efficiently access and index all key categories and product pages.
• URL Structure: It was critical to address URL structure and canonical URL (duplicate) content issues. A detailed product structure assessment to utilise crawl budget properly with 1000+ pages.
• Internal Links: A clean and relevant internal linking strategy to identify orphaned pages, thin-linked categories to boost website and page authority.
• Page Speed: Site speed across mobile and desktop (Core Web Vitals baseline).
• Server Issues: Dealing with 403 issues and related.
• Broken Links: It is the foundation for building a clean index, checked and addressed.

On-Page Review

• Heading Tags: Ensuring core pages have compelling headings (H1, H2, H3…).
• Meta Tags: We noticed an instant win with core categories Meta Title optimisation. 
• Structured Data: It is vital for e-commerce businesses to successfully optimise and address the Google Merchant feed related to structured data inconsistencies.
• Image: Poor file naming and no alt tag to properly name and optimise images with a highly optimised alt tag.
• Content Depth: At the start, it had a few thin blogs; over time, we built high authority blogs to support core categories rankings.

Phase 2: Content Assessment

Following the audit, all top category pages were assessed against what was already ranking for the target keywords.

Content Work:

• Categories Content: Most of the categories had general content, and all main category pages were restructured to match the search intent.
• Blog: As mentioned above, from a few ordinary blogs to building high-traffic blog pages supporting core categories and cleaning content based on performance was carried out.
• Product Description: Clear guidelines were created for the team to follow to build an informational product description with potential to rank.

Phase 3: Brand Value Assessment

In the SEO world, it is said that content is king; similarly, brand value and authority are an integral part of SEO.

Google's ranking systems weigh brand signals heavily. A site with growing branded search volume, trust signals, and cross-platform presence is seen as a more authoritative.

For Sage Horticultural, the assessment looked at:

• Branded Search Volume: A good number of people were searching for the brand "Sage Horticultural" and related phrases, but it needed to be elevated. We implemented content and social media strategies to support this.
• Third Party Mentions: We ensured the brand is featured across online platforms, including top local directories, forums, gardening communities, stockist pages, and more.
• Social Presence: From no presence to planning content and featuring regular content to boost social and brand activities.

Phase 4: Links Assessment

Link profile analysis was conducted to understand the baseline domain authority and the gap versus competing ranking sites.

We wanted to ensure the website doesn’t have toxic links that could potentially impact the SEO ranking negatively.

Strategy was planned and executed to ensure existing links are in a healthy state, including directories with proper NAP (Name, Address & Phone).

Phase 5: Google Merchant: Shopping Free Listings Assessment

Google's Shopping Free Listings represent a significant opportunity that many e-commerce businesses just overlook, or they think this is for big e-commerce businesses.

While optimising the feed for Google Ads, we took necessary actions, including feeding with variants to boost overall presence.

Worked with the dev team closely to get the strategies implemented and tested.

Inconsistent listings or listings with errors just missed opportunities.

Phase 6: UGC (User Generated Content) Strategy

User-generated content adds great value to the overall SEO effort.

This was one of the highest-impact initiatives of the entire engagement, and one of the most undervalued by eCommerce businesses.

User-generated content serves multiple purposes simultaneously:

1. Rankings: Product reviews contribute to rich results and can directly improve click-through rate.
2. Conversion: Shoppers trust other customers’ reviews far more than product descriptions; more reviews = higher conversion.
3. Brand Signals: A product with 200+ reviews sends a strong E-E-A-T trust signal to Google.
4. Google Reviews: GMB reviews drive local trust and visibility for branded searches

The UGC Strategy for Sage Horticultural:

• Automation Workflows: We build a number of different automation workflows to get regular and consistent product reviews.
• Higher Customer Satisfaction: A trusted brand with a good history attached, made our job easier to accumulate positive reviews.
• Brand Signal Push: The strategies were reassessed to boost brand signal to help the business gain a better ranking.

Results:

• 700+ product reviews accumulated across the catalogue.
• 50+ Google Business Profile reviews.
• Rich snippets with review ratings started to appear.

Challenges Faced

Challenge 1: Competitive Categories

Required Patience and Persistence.

Some of the most valuable categories: "Greenhouse Australia,", “Polytunnel”, "Bird Netting" were not easy to rank at the start.

As it was evident that they had real value through ad data.

The persistence paid off. Most of the core offerings - top 3 ranking achieved.

Challenge 2: Spike in AI Bots Traffic

In the last 2 years, bot traffic has become a real issue for eCommerce stores, especially with WooCommerce. Overly aggressive firewall rules put in place to block AI scrapers, were also blocking Googlebot, making pages invisible to Google without the site owner knowing it.

To tackle this, we worked with the dev team to ensure the website remained open, available and accessible, integral for SEO traffic and ranking.

Results

• 🏆 Organic Traffic: Daily Visits Increased by +275%
• 🏆 Conversions: Increased by +250%
• 🏆 Reviews: 700+
• 🏆Revenue & Growth: Team headcount nearly doubled, a signal of real business impact

Ready to Grow Your eCommerce with SEO?

The results above are not the exception; they are what structured, persistent eCommerce SEO looks like when done properly.

We can help any eCommerce business that:

• Has genuine products with real search demand.
• Is running WooCommerce, Shopify, or any similar platform.
• Has strong category intent keywords, but is not ranking in the positions that drive traffic.
• Needs traffic and sales to boost the business.

If this sounds like the right fit for you, then learn more about:

• 👉 eCommerce SEO services
• 👉 SEO pricing & packages

Author: Pankaj Yadav

Blog: https://www.webapex.com.au/blog/author/pankaj-yadav/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aboutpankaj/