SEO Case Study for a Product-Based Business Selling in Canada and the US
June Hunter Images: Canadian Product-Based E-Commerce Business with a Focus on High-Quality Art, Designs, and Prints
This e-commerce SEO case study covers Story Envelope Media’s work for June Hunter, a Canadian artist and photographer who wanted to increase her online visibility and sell more art prints from her Shopify store. Her crow and raven prints are absolutely stunning and deserved to get found by more online shoppers looking to add a touch of nature to their homes.
Article by Colette Nichol, Story Strategist, SEO Expert, and Solo Filmmaker
Success Highlights
- Total organic traffic up 1300% in 12 months (organic sessions)
- Total organic traffic up 1500% in 18 months (organic sessions)
- 163% increase in organic traffic (visitors) to the collections pages in 12 months.
- Organic traffic from 581/mo in April 2023 to 8,572/mo in April 2024
- Page 1 for 413 keywords.
- Position 1 on Google for 39 keywords.
- Total sales of art prints went up 40% year-over-year.
- Total revenue from art prints went up 59.6% year-over-year.
Top Reasons for Success
- Use of premium evergreen video to help decision-making and build trust.
- Optimization of collections and product listings.
- New Shopify theme.
- Homepage optimization.
- Authority-building and traffic growth from strategic blogging.
Important Note about Story Envelope’s Secret Sauce
While this case study gives you a basic overview of what we did as SEO experts to grow traffic, I won’t be revealing any of the industry-specific secrets or tactics that allowed us to outperform the competition.
We keep our tactics confidential because we don’t want a client’s competitors to know how to replicate our successes. We offer non-compete contracts to all our clients so they can feel secure that we will not work with anyone who is directly competing against them within the same market.
And, frankly, our “secret sauce” is largely the fact that we’re obsessed with deeply understanding our clients’ ideal clients and use great design and high-quality visual and text-based content that’s enjoyable for visitors to read and interact with.
Custom video is another ingredient in our secret sauce.
High-end videos that create a connection and feeling of trust with the visitor are often a key element in our website strategies.
We’ve created a process we call the Traffic for Experts Method that we use for every client. This method allows us to understand the essence of a business and craft a strategy that helps business owners achieve their goals.
Creative E-commerce Videos
Integrating these videos onto June’s website helped to increased the number and size of prints sold. Video is an absolutely critical part of any SEO strategy, but it’s particularly important for e-commerce stores.
Who & What
This e-commerce Shopify SEO case study focuses on June Hunter Images.
June Hunter is a photographer, designer, and artist based out of Vancouver, BC. She is an award-winning photographer with beautiful designs inspired by nature. June has been in business for over twenty years and focuses on creating crow and raven portraits.
She wanted to grow the traffic to her online store so she could focus more on making art and photography and less on email marketing.
She also wanted to increase her print sales, as they are her highest-profit product and have the easiest shipping and packing requirements. And as an artist, prints are one of her favorite products.
I’ve known June for over ten years, so I was excited to see how we could help June increase traffic to her website.
Check out June’s beautiful crow art and raven art on her website.
Before Doing SEO
Before getting started with SEO, June was doing what many shop owners do: accidental SEO.
June created lovely product listings with the most important information about her products. She organized collections around her different areas of art and included beautiful photos on all of her product listings.
She was getting traffic to her website but not seeing consistent organic sales.
Most of her sales would occur after she sent out her email newsletter.
June wasn’t getting as much organic traffic to her collections as she should have because they were not optimized for the keywords people were using to search for her type of artwork. The collections’ names were creative rather than SEO-optimized.
It’s important to use the right keywords in the right places to get the right traffic.
Goals
The goal of June’s project was to increase organic traffic to her most important products and collections.
We wanted to ensure that she could consistently make sales even when she hasn’t sent out a recent newsletter. Email marketing is a critical part of June’s business. However, she wanted to see sales throughout the month, not just when she had sent out a newsletter.
In addition, June wanted to increase the number of prints she sold as she moved away from selling her hand-crafted jewelry.
Enhancing the Call to Action
We also wanted to increase email subscribers.
Since June was already sending out a newsletter twice monthly, it made sense to increase the potential buyers on that email list. We ensured the CTA page was optimized to capture more visitors so June could grow her email list more effectively. June’s email list is now growing consistently.
What Worked
We created new collections that were optimized around the keywords people use to search for her particular type of art.
We also created an entirely new Shopify theme that allowed us to craft an SEO-optimized home page.
Having a properly optimized home page is a big deal when it comes to SEO. You need to make sure your home page is complete and allows Google to understand what you do and what your most important pages and collections are if you’re a shop owner.
We also optimized her product listings to have the right structure so that they appear more easily in searches.
Next, we created helpful videos for her prints to help people choose the right print size. These videos increased the number of large-sized prints, which increased overall revenue for prints.
We also created a video that showed June’s process of taking a photograph and turning it into a high-quality art print. This video went on every print listing and helped increase trust and engagement.
Finally, we started a blogging strategy to increase June’s authority for crow and raven topics and art topics.
These blogs support the collections and the website’s overall authority, driving traffic to the site.
The winning strategy included the following:
- New Shopify theme
- Keyword research
- Complete upgrade of the homepage – turning it from a brief overview to a comprehensive and well-optimized storefront for the business
- Nav bar and footer optimization
- New collections based on keywords
- Product updates based on keywords
- Premium evergreen videos for key products
- Blogging to support service pages
- Desktop and mobile optimization
Results/Wins
June was able to start ranking on Page 1 for several new keywords that she had not ranked before.
This resulted in organic sales that were previously impossible.
In addition, June’s crow and raven art pages went to the top of Page 1 in Canada and to the middle of Page 1 in the USA. This movement resulted in a 163% increase in organic traffic to all collections.
- Organic traffic went up 1300% in 12 months (organic sessions)
- Organic traffic went up 1500% in 18 months (organic sessions)
- Revenue from organic traffic went up by more than 100% in 12 months
- Revenue from organic shopping went up by over 40% in 12 months
- Total sales of individual art prints went up by 40% year-over-year
- Revenue from art prints went up by over 59.6% year-over-year
- Organic traffic went from 581/mo in April 2023 to 8,572/mo in April 2024; as of November 2024, organic traffic had reached 10,000+ per month.
- June has 413 page 1 keywords rankings in the USA
- June has 39 position 1 rankings for her product keywords (i.e. BOFU, not informational)
Challenges
The main challenge with this project was to increase traffic on a limited budget for a very visual niche.
The SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) are very, very volatile. E-commerce moves very quickly, and the search results pages move a lot.
We’d never done SEO for an artist before, so there was a learning curve in terms of figuring out what works within this niche.
It’s also a very visual space, so creating engaging pages was critical.
Ultimately focusing on the right keyword, creating strategic collections, and doing supportive blogging and premium videos was the work that made the biggest difference.
The Takeaway
When doing e-commerce SEO, it’s important to focus on creating collections based on the exact-match keywords your customers are searching for online.
In addition, doing premium evergreen videos that help customers make decisions about what to buy and nudge them toward higher-priced products is extremely important.
Video should be a part of every e-commerce strategy.
Without it, we wouldn’t have seen persuasive results.
In addition, top-of-funnel blogging is key to building authority for the website, while bottom-of-funnel collection and product listing optimization are key to increasing revenue.
It’s important to focus on optimizing for conversions as well as driving traffic. Moreover, if you’re going to be driving tons of traffic, you’ll want to build your email list and make sales, so make sure you have a great pop-up or lead magnet offer.
A discount offer works just fine as a lead magnet. Just make sure your follow-up sequence is optimized.
So, What Would Page 1 of Google Do for Your Business?
If you’d like to find out more about how we can help you, please get in touch.
You may be in a niche where dominating Google isn’t outrageously expensive. Let me be clear: some niches are super competitive, and getting to Page 1 is costly.
However, most local businesses do not fall into that category. In fact, most local businesses can massively increase their organic traffic and walk-ins if they have a solid SEO strategy that’s properly executed.
Schedule a Free SEO Consultation to Discuss Your Business Goals
If you’re serious about getting on Page #1 of Google with your business and driving more leads, please reach out and schedule a call. I’d love to hear about your goals and see if our services align with your needs.
CLICK HERE: To Schedule Your SEO Consultation
More Related Articles
⭐Increase Targeted Organic Traffic to Your Website with SEO
⭐Is SEO Worth It, or Is It a Scam?
⭐Quick Guide to SEO Marketing for Small Businesses
About the Author
Hi! I’m Colette Nichol. I’m a solo filmmaker, SEO expert, story strategist, and digital marketer based out of rainy Vancouver, Canada. I’ve been helping local expertise-driven businesses and global brands since 2014 when I founded Story Envelope Media.
In 2017, I started applying SEO to my work with clients and in my own business. The results were extraordinary, and I got obsessed!
If you’re interested in working together, please reach out. I’d love to hear about your business goals to see if we can help.
We currently take on a maximum of one new client per month and are typically booked 3-months in advance, so please reach out early.
