Goat

87% Organic Traffic Increase in 6 Months

Buying rare, collectible sneakers online is fraught with danger. Goat.com is the safest way to buy and sell sneakers online. Goat.com features 75,000 sneakers on its ecommerce website, and verifies the authenticity of every pair of shoes listed by a third party seller.

Goat.com wanted to maximize the value of its product listings to increase sales from organic traffic by 10x over the next couple of years. This aggressive sales growth was achievable by an SEO strategy that leveraged strong user growth to generate more listings that ranked well for hundreds of thousands of relevant keywords.

Solution

Fire&Spark™ began the project with keyword research to understand the high value long tail and head terms used by GOAT’s customers to find sneakers online. Then, our team fixed technical issues on goat.com that prevented search engines from properly crawling and indexing the website.

We researched competing SEO strategies used by online shoe retailers and developed an SEO strategy designed to significantly grow the number of listings indexed in Google and optimize them for the right keyword phrases.

This SEO strategy involved fundamental changes to the architecture of the website, including implementation of tagging, optimizing product copy, important changes to HTTP server response headers and a sitemap reorganization.

Methodology

The keyword research focused on long tail keywords used by sneaker buyers to find specific products. Our goal was to rank well in search engines for thousands of these keywords.

Then, our team conducted a technical SEO audit of their existing website and researched competing SEO strategies in their space.

After implementing fixes for high priority technical issues, Fire&Spark™ prepared an SEO strategy designed to:

• Increase the optimized marketplace content indexed in search engines
• Optimize their ecommerce website for high value keywords
• Improve the authority of the site with link building

Next, Fire&Spark™ defined a website architecture for GOAT’s marketplace to optimize the website as it scaled to hundreds of thousands of product listings.

Key points of the website architecture plan included:

• Build a taxonomy for the sneaker marketplace to help search engines organize the product listings
• Maximize rankings for transient product listings with internal linking structure
• Develop SEO landing pages specifically designed to target high value keywords
• Define mobile strategy
• Optimize search engine crawl rate and indexation
• Define onsite faceted search implementation for SEO
• Select a JavaScript framework and JavaScript Navigation components
• Implement proper HTTP response headers
• Optimize product images for image search
• Organize sitemaps to measure and increase indexation