Posts

by on

Here’s a look at Insect Shield’s growth in 2020 and 2021 on the organic search channel. Our business is highly seasonal, peaking in the spring. Compare April 2020 traffic to April 2021.

I did the work myself using Shopify, SEMrush, Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, Google Analytics, various keyword research tools, and a lot of hands on experience gained over the years.

Note the progress we have made against our number one competitor, Amazon. We overtook them in June of last year. Today our visibility in SERPs for high conversion rate keywords like “insect repellent clothes”, “women’s insect repellent clothes”, and dozens more, is 43% vs. their 31% (bottom chart).

In July 2021, we added commercial content to one of our top informational search intent pages about insects. We saw a drop in overall traffic, but a significant improvement in conversions from that landing page. We will continue this strategy with other informational pages in 2022.

by on

Shopify was the right choice for our new ecommerce platform.

On January 12, 2021, Insect Shield moved from a first generation ecommerce platform called Able Commerce to Shopify. The difference has been striking.

Making improvements to usability and search engine performance is so much easier. Things that would have taken hours using a $125/hour developer can now be done in 60 minutes or less by a $75/hour contractor. Adding pages, making updates, edits and basic SEO can be done quickly and easily in-house.

The selection of apps available to add features and functionality is truly amazing. We use an insanely good, free app for our affiliate program that would have cost thousands of dollars to integrate with an old school web platform.

Most remarkable is what happened to our ecommerce conversion rate. Our organic search conversion rate went from 4.2% to 6.3%. Paid search CVR went from 4.6% to 6.4%. And, as you might expect (because Shopify is a modern, user experience-focused platform), our overall conversion rate on mobile increased by 36%: from 2.7% to 3.7%. When 60% of sessions are on mobile, a 3.7% CVR drives serious revenue growth.

We transferred a solid site structure and nice look-and-feel over from our old site, but the conversion rate success is primarily due to Shopify. None of us at Insect Shield has second thoughts about moving to the new platform.

Insect Shield's ecommerce conversion rate for organic traffic increased from 4.2% to 6.4% YOY March through June.
Organic conversion rate year over year from Feb 28 through June 26 (dates offset to align days of the week)