Ultimate Ecommerce Website Overhaul: Theme Build and First SEO Project

Today, we will take a look at an ongoing project for my business, JG Web Development. Several months back, we got the opportunity to start working with Totally Mechanics, a power equipment maintenance and parts provider based in Millersburg, Ohio. As a company with an established ecommerce clientele and ambitions for growing their online market, they were looking to improve their site UX and SEO to convert more sales and bring in more service call business. And, while this is still an ongoing project, things have been going well so far with this ecommerce website overhaul!

Totally Mechanics’ Business

As I mentioned before, Totally Mechanics has two main business segments that their website drives. Firstly, they are dealers of replacement parts for power equipment, and they run an ecommerce store with a library of over 3,500 parts, and they fulfill orders across the US. Some of the products they sell include replacement glass panels for skid steers and loaders, replacement engine parts for power machinery, and smaller components for spot repairs on equipment.

The second aspect of their business is local service calls to repair damaged power equipment for businesses and individuals. This involves both in-house and on-site repairs, and covers both urgent fixes and routine maintenance.

After a short discussion, Totally Mechanics agreed to work with us to boost their site SEO. Our goals were pretty straightforward: drive more traffic to the site with the goals of converting more sales, and capturing more local service jobs. Here’s what we did, and how it’s going.

What We Did

New Theme

Something that we realized pretty quickly was that the theme the site had when we took it over left a lot to be desired. It was built using the Elementor site editor, and, while functional, it featured poor responsive design and did not provide the user experience we were looking for. Quickly, we recommended a theme rebuild, and followed through quickly with a new theme that added a bold color pallet befitting a business in the power equipment industry, an intuitive header complete with a collapsible menu and product search, and clean site footer full of information about Totally Mechanics and how to keep up with them.

After modifying the sitewide theme using the built-in site editor, we turned our focus to the templates for posts and pages, giving them a simple but effective layout focused on drawing attention to the page content. Then, we moved on to the shopping experience.

Improved Shop UX With Thoughtful Design

We knew going in that the most important part of the site to optimize the user experience on would be the shop. It is vitally important that users find it as easy as possible to quickly find the products they need and purchase them, as every click makes it more likely that they will not complete their purchase. And, since we know that in SEO, the user experience is paramount, we completely redesigned the shop, product archives, and product search results templates of the site to optimize for conversions.

Categories and Searchbars

For a business like Totally Mechanics with thousands of products in their store, each of which serving a niche purpose, we were determined to make it easy for customers to find those products. So, we decided to make a sidebar on every product page that connects them to a product only search, product categories, and quick links other important pages on the site.

Every product in the Totally Mechanics store is tagged with a part number, which we wanted to take advantage of to connect customers who know their part number directly to what they are looking for. To that end, the product search bar will take customers directly to a product page if they search it’s part number.

The categories and quick links are present in the sidebar to help customers who have a general idea of what they are looking for, but who don’t know the specifics, to narrow down their search and find the part they need. But, we felt something more was needed to help connect these customers to the products they were looking for. So, we decided to explore some advanced ai features.

AI Features

Many ecommerce businesses are taking full advantage of the latest developments in generative ai technology to gain leads and close sales. We wanted to integrate something quick and powerful onto the site to connect users to the products they were looking for while serving as a friendly and helpful ambassador for the Totally Mechanics brand. And ContentOracle AI Chat by ScryWP fit that bill perfectly.

ScryWP’s ContentOracle AI Chat is a powerful new AI chat plugin for WordPress that uses content from the site (posts, pages, products, etc.) to formulate responses to users and drive them to take action through their conversations. It is particularly suited to sites like Totally Mechanics’, where it helps reduce customer service inquiries, provides insights on customer behavior, and connects customers to products they would not otherwise have found. Here are just a few of the features of ContentOracle AI Chat:

• Product recommendations: conversational inline product recommendations, complete with images and CTA buttons.
• Full compatibility and Customizability: compatible with all major site builders, and can be customized both in tone and appearance using built-in tools.
• Source citations: cites its sources from your content, linking to where it found information.
• No-third parties: No third-party api integrations or vector databases required.
• Much more! Click to read about all its features, and to give it a try!

Keyword Optimizations and Link Building

As the site redesign was going on, we were also, of course, focused on the bread and butter of SEO: optimizing keywords and building links.

Keywords

On a site with as many products as Totally Mechanics, it can be difficult to know where to start in optimizing keywords. So, we worked with leaders at Totally Mechanics to determine which products would benefit the company most from keyword optimization, and we focused our efforts on those. By following best practices for keywords on product pages, we have been able to improve SEO and drive more traffic to those products.

Link Building

Link building is another important and ongoing portion of our long-term SEO strategy for Totally Mechanics. Throughout our theme rebuild, we began the work of improving internal linking on the site. We took this further by building additional internal linking throughout pages on the site.

Additionally, we are actively pursuing link building strategies with high-authority domains, and seeking to have links from low-quality domains taken down to improve the domain authority, and thus SEO, of Totally Mechanics.

How It’s Going

We have seen the good fruits of our labor already in a relatively short time since we started working on the SEO of the Totally Mechanics website. Over the past three months, we have seen an over 70% increase in both impressions and clicks, according to Google Search console.

Notably, since we completed the new theme for the site around a month ago, we have seen a spike in the average number of daily visits, from 30-40 to 50-60 after. We have also seen increases in visits to the pages of key products that Totally Mechanics wants to sell more of since starting our project.

All in all, things are going really well. The visibility of Totally Mechanics’ website is continuing to improve. But, there is still a lot to be done!

Next Steps

Although we have already seen solid increases in traffic to the website, there is a lot still to do. Most of our work so far has consisted of SEO to capture ecommerce searches for power equipment parts. But, a big part of the Totally Mechanics business is service calls and maintenance on local equipment. As such we are actively working on a plan to help Totally Mechanics dominate local SEO for power equipment-related queries. To this end, one of the things we are considering is a local landing pages campaign to build a local SEO presence.

Another plan we are devising is keyword-optimized blog post campaign designed to drive traffic to both the ecommerce and service call segments of the business. We are doing research to find high-volume, low-competitive search queries that we can use to capture traffic and link to Totally Mechanics products and services.

Conclusion

At JG Web Development, we are passionate about bringing the power of cutting-edge modern technology to small and medium size businesses. I am very excited about the opportunity we have to work with Totally Mechanics on their ecommerce website overhaul, and am excited to see where the future takes their business. We will strive to be with them every step of the way on that journey. Be sure to visit their website to check out our work, or for your power equipment parts and repair needs.

Are you interested in web development and SEO services from JG Web Development? Head over to our contact page to get in touch with us today!