Apteka.ru
SEO Case Study

We were working on the project based on the CPA model, and the main task was to increase the number of orders from the website. We reviewed the statistics, established the base number of orders per month and forecast the sales growth.

The second feature of the project was the redesign of the website, which was launched on the client side simultaneously with the start of the SEO campaign. As a result, all pages of the site fell out of the search engine indexes, and after several months of work we had to start almost from scratch.

To achieve the highest possible results, we divided the work into 8 stages:

• Expansion of the website structure.
• Technical optimization: fixing bugs and solving technical problems.
• Optimization of regional product catalogs for correct ranking in Russia.
• Optimization of the process of adding new products to the website, elimination of typical errors when deleting products. In this area of work, we closely cooperated with the editors and advised the team on work in certain areas of the production process.
• Optimization of the work of mono-brand mini-shops of pharmaceutical products and cosmetics on the website (advertising tool for partners).
• Development of a link strategy, in which we started from the most marginal products and the average product list in a shopping cart.
• Optimization of the information sections of the website.
• Reworking the mechanism of internal linking of pages and the logic of offering additional products to a user, which made it possible to increase the average purchase amount.

For a multi-page site with thousands of products and categories, the structure is the basis for successful SEO. A confusing, illogical and multi-level site structure is a significant drawback both in terms of usability and in terms of ranking in search engines.

The structure of the website needed to be reworked – in particular, it was necessary to change the names of the categories in the menu. Unfortunately, this point of the strategy could not be fully implemented due to the internal policy of the client.

For the successful promotion of an online pharmacy in the regions, it was necessary to optimize the regional assortment, preventing typical errors associated with duplicate pages and “gluing” non-unique regional pages. To do this, improvements were made in the CMS and uploading the assortment to the website, regional templates for tags and texts were optimized. Since it was impossible to create regional subdomains, the names of the regions were integrated into the URL. As a result, we faced another problem: there were 50-70 URLs for each product card, which is unacceptable according to the SEO standards. However, we (us and the client together) worked out a set of measures, which helped eliminate this problem.

The site attracts manufacturers of pharmaceutical and cosmetic products in terms of its popularity among the users, so it’s a great platform for conducting additional marketing activities. Unfortunately, this does not always have a favorable effect on SEO and creates additional difficulties, since when promotional offers are added, duplicate pages appear, and the uniqueness of the content is “blurred”.

Content plays a decisive role in the ranking of a website. From the point of view of search engine algorithms, content should be exclusive, concise, and regularly updated. That’s why our content optimization strategy includes content expansion in two directions:

• Specialized content prepared by qualified medical professionals. Apteka.ru has its own staff of editors who fill the information section with expert content.
• Commercial content created by professional copywriters. iSEO copywriters prepared texts with a total volume of more than 250,000 characters, which made it possible to fill almost all most profitable sections of the product catalog.