If you’re a leading online grocer – or any e-commerce site – the one thing you absolutely need more of before you can boost sales is website traffic.

One of the best ways to get that traffic is to rank well in organic search results for more keywords.

How do you rank well for more keywords and show up in more Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)?

With really great content – and in this case, A LOT of it.

The mission: Improve site traffic

When this e-commerce site asked us to create 800 landing pages in the span of 3 months, some of us were sure they meant to write 80.

But the figures were right, and that meant we had to gear up for one of the more remarkable feats of teamwork at Brafton – nay – any company.

The purpose of this content would be to increase the number of keywords the site ranked for, and ideally, improve the rankings of existing keywords, with the long-term goal of driving more site traffic and – eventually – boosting sales.

We started with a trial run.

Two writers tackled the first two landing pages, and during a review of those pieces, the client said he felt good going into the holidays knowing he’d be partnering with us.

The real work began in Q1 when we set out to create the copy.

In fewer than 90 business days, 13 of our writers, 3 editorial managers, and 2 project managers collaborated to create 800 landing pages.

About half of those pages were product category and subcategory pages, while the other half were about specific brands featured on the site. All of them used careful phrasing that would help maximize keyword ranking and traffic potential.

444,000 words later: Mission accomplished

We began the project in early January of 2020 and finished it before the end of March.

In total, we produced 444,000 words, which is the equivalent of about two Moby Dicks.

As a result, the total number of keywords the online grocer ranked for jumped by more than 20% in the span of about 6 months.

That ~20% increase ultimately helped drive a 56% increase in traffic – and counting.

Because when you rank for more keywords, you start showing up in more search results, and when that happens, more people start clicking on your pages.

The lesson: Content for SEO works

This was, for all intents and purposes, a text-book example of content being used to facilitate SEO, and SEO acting as a pathway to improved website traffic.

As we established in the first sentence of this post, traffic is a precursor to the most beautiful metric of them all: A year-over-year increase in sales.

To be continued …

Dominick Sorrentino, Brafton's Brand & Product Manager, is based in Portland, ME. He likes language, playing guitar, birding, taking his dog on scenic strolls, traveling, and a good conversation over a great cup of coffee. He promises he's not as pretentious as he sounds.