ESP Water Products - Search Engine Optimization
ESP Water Products is a Water Filtration System Distributor located in Sunnyvale Texas that sells Reverse Osmosis, Ultraviolet, and Whole House filters through their business website www.espwaterproducts.com.
Intro
ESP carries out around 90% of it's business online, their site was built using Big Commerce and their competitive advantage lies on their strong SEO.
Founded back in 2001 ESP had accumulated significant digital presence via backlinks through a number of publications. After a change in management in 2016 ESP began creating engaging long form content that followed SEO best practices and began ranking on the first page of google for a number of high volume high difficulty key terms like Reverse Osmosis, Ultra Violet Systems, Whole House Filter among others.
Scoping
The first step working with ESP was to identify the key performance indicators that we needed to target for optimization. These included their current conversion rate, bounce rates, page speed performance for both desktop and mobile and their current ranking for top keywords.
We proceeded to run a comprehensive audit of the site and crawled around 2800 content and product pages. The scan showed significatn opportunities for improvement as most pages needed to follow SEO best practices. After setting up a plan we made sure that all pages met minimum requirements to avoid google penalizations. This included adding missing meta descriptions, fixing 404 page errors, fixing broken links, internal pages redirecting to insecure HTTP resources among many others.
On top of this, it was also important to make sure that the site was stable why we made all of the required edits since any change to the structure of the site could affect rankings.
Cleanup
After around 40 hours of work we managed to remove almost all Google penalties to the site via Onsite SEO, resulting in an increase in ranking for a number of high volume keywords after Google reindexed the site a couple of months later. In addition to fixing all warnings provided by the Ahrefs Health Score tool we also went ahead and compressed as many product images as we could to improve the overall load performance of the site resulting in significantly faster load for the top ranking pages of the site.
New Sitemap
After increasing the healthscore of the site we had to get back to the drawing board and figure out the next opportunity for improvement. In this case we noticed that bounce rates for some of the top pages of the site were fairly high, signaling to lack of engagement from visitors. In order to fix this we suggested restructuring the current navigation of the site so that content could be more easily accessible. Based on our research a significant ammount of the traffic coming through the homepage was not being redirected to other pages of the site leading to lower engagement. This resulted in a brand new organization of their navigation that would allow for visitors to access the top ranking pages much more easily.
