W3 Affinity started digital marketing efforts for Pick a Bloom in November of 2015.

Pick a Bloom set out to sell wedding flowers online with a Shopify website and wanted to be disruptors by bringing a product that had a negative connotation for being “Fake” and “Dead looking” in their industry to the spotlight due to its actual beauty and longevity over their competitors’ products online.

Pick a Bloom faced a very uphill battle for the spotlight in a very crowded wedding industry. They brought W3 Affinity on board as the experts in both Shopify Development and SEO.

Up against a wall of competitors, bloggers, forums, and directory sites in their industry, Pick a Bloom needed to make an impact that would get ranked in Google to be able to compete for organic business.

With virtually everything in their industry having a blog post, website, Wikipedia page, and every form of marketing and advertising material covered, we needed to find a topic we knew well and be the best at it.

We needed an edge on the competition, everyone had great content, but not everyone had it properly optimized. That’s where our strategy won.

We began the strategy phase of our SEO process immediately knowing, we had to go big.

We proposed a blog for “Cost of Wedding Flowers” due to the traffic that the keyword commanded (and all the related phrases). The competition for the keyword phrase was very steep, but we saw an opportunity to do better in the research for the blog and wanted to exploit that as our opportunity to get found.

We utilized tools like Spyfu & Google’s Keyword Tool to determine what the competitors were already dominating so that we could pick a title for the blog post. We landed on “How much do wedding flowers cost” due to the volume of search for the keyword phrase and the fact that it was only medium competition, versus the high competition of the “cost of wedding flowers” phrase we discovered. This was our chance to come into the cost phrase market from a back door.

Our teams got together to discuss all of the options for this blog. It was a collaboration with their owner Anndria and our team to come up with all the headings within the content before we started researching the answers to the questions we wanted to answer. We knew we needed to break it down by category of flowers, we knew we had to be unbiased in our review of the cost to provide true value to their site visitors and we knew we needed to be in-depth in our answers to ensure that the visitors would not only visit, but read the content.

We proposed a minimum of 1,800 words for the blog, developed the titles of the sections for Pick a Bloom based on keyword research, and assisted in the research for each section. Pick a Bloom’s in-house writer took our requirements and created an amazing blog that looked great, read well, and was very informative.

With this post, we had to pull out all stops. There were no restrictions in our process, we needed to rank for this blog.

The blog post underwent a full audit & optimization process:

• Images had Alt & Title tags added
• Headings were formatted with H1-H3 based on priority
• Blog Schema Markup was added in the Shopify Liquid code to markup title, author, description, date published, date modified, and image.
• The blog was indexed through Google Webmaster Tools

That was it, we pulled out the big guns and optimized this blog, sat back, and watched as our rankings grew, and they did at first…

After a solid 30 days, we went from not existing to the 10th page of Google…

We had already begun the process of link building to the blog, pointing internal links to the blog, emailing clients about the blog, advertising about the blog, and posting it all over social media. We saw another bump, we moved to the 2nd page of Google!

We all know that the second page doesn’t cut it in SEO.

We had done everything we could to rank, even gathered some great links from other sources, and couldn’t break the top 10.

We had used AMP on our WordPress clients in the past and saw some good results from it and know that AMP is a project worth doing for all clients, but hadn’t cracked the mold on how we wanted to approach it for our Shopify clients.

After considerable research, we found FireAMP, a Shopify Plugin that provides the ability to configure AMP for your pages, posts, products, and categories.

We installed the app and contacted the owner of it right away to begin customization of how the AMP layout looked and felt.

Finally, we installed tracking and reported it to Webmaster Tools so that we could being to measure the result of our labors.

We waited about 30 days and started to see dramatic growth in traffic to the website from Google Organic Search on MOBILE DEVICES. This was it, we had done it! A culmination of all the SEO we had done before + the utilization of AMP had cracked the barriers for Pick a Bloom and resulted in first page rankings for over 550 keywords, which has led to Pick a Bloom being seen over 1,000 times per day in SERPs.

YES! This was it, what we’d been waiting, and waiting, and waiting patiently to happen. We had been fighting competitors through link building and our tactics outlined in the strategy, but AMP had sealed the deal.

Traffic grew month over month past the 30-day mark by 100% until we reached the 8th month where traffic had cumulatively reached 1000% growth for Pick a Bloom.