Case Study: Medical Products Online Shop

There were a large number of URLs that carried a session ID. This unnecessarily inflated the number of URLs on the site and created masses of duplicate content, which made crawling and indexing considerably harder for Google. Content that helps visitors buy products or gives them tips was practically non-existent – the existing texts were far too short and offered neither users nor search engines any real value.

Important on-page basics such as maintaining the meta tags had also been neglected. For many important brands and manufacturers there were no dedicated category pages at all, and the existing categories were not maintained in terms of content. Instead of specifically optimizing for the brand and manufacturer keywords, the previous optimization had relied exclusively on generic, highly competitive keywords.

On top of this, internal linking was far too weak, so important pages received hardly any link equity, and the backlink profile was almost non-existent. There was therefore a lack of both internal and external signals to rank competitively at all for the relevant search terms. A Google Merchant Center had not been set up either – so a valuable, free source of traffic remained completely unused.