About our Partner
Who They Are
In 1988, Don Bermant founded the Granite Seed Company (parent company of Nature’s Seed) near Salt Lake City, Utah. His vision: to reclaim and restore lands damaged by mining, drilling, wildfires, floods, and other erosion events throughout the West.
What They Do
Naturesseed.com, an ecommerce store that offers premium quality lawn, wildflower, pasture, and specialty seeds direct to consumers for cases of erosion, wildfire damage or other natural disasters to homeowners, state government agencies, corporations, etc.
The Problem
- The partner came to Searchbloom with a very dated website built on Drupal 6, which was approaching its end of life as Drupal 8 was about to be released. The website’s design and technical implementation had user experience, checkout sequence issues, and brought cripplingly low conversion rates.
- Because canonical tags were absent sitewide, the site had thousands of duplicate URLs. Additionally, unresolved issues stemming from faceted navigation compounded the duplicate content problems.
- They ranked for a few long-tail keywords like ‘goat pasture seed’ but couldn’t break through on any head terms.
- They had procured a more appropriate domain (naturesseed.com) and wanted to migrate away from (naturesfinestseed.com) but didn’t know how to implement the new domain without negatively affecting the website.
The Solution
Searchbloom’s SEO strategy is threefold: Authority, Relevancy, and Technology (A.R.T.). We conducted a thorough audit of our partners' online presence and identified areas of improvement that would help them achieve their traffic and revenue goals.
- Searchbloom performed a referring domain audit and found that of the 515 referring domains, 223 were of very low-quality, spammy, or were sitewide(dofollow) links. Searchbloom disavowed these low-quality inbound links and regularly monitors inbound links with ongoing referring domain audits.
- We leveraged several link earning methods but link reclamation, unlinked mentions, and the middleman method correlated to our most significant authority gains. Our partner came to us with a total of 292 undisavowed referring domains, and as of July 2020, now have over 660. (ahrefs)
- With our authority gap audit, Searchbloom developed outreach targets and began performing custom outreach to bloggers, contributors, publishers, etc. to target URLs, including the root domain, category pages, and blog posts.
- Searchbloom analyzed the referring domain audit and observed that over 25% of the inbound links were pointing to broken pages. Searchbloom reached out to these webmasters and shared that these links were broken and reclaimed 100% of them! These were mostly governmental websites citing revegetation or erosion control for specific states.
- Searchbloom also performed our web mentions audit and did the same thing with those mentions that were not linking to our site. It was nearly as successful as the reclamation initiative! This outreach was customized to each publisher and included screenshots, resource links, and even some ‘how-to’ info.
- Searchbloom performed an internal link audit and found hundreds of broken links and many internal link opportunities. We fixed these broken internal links to stop the bleeding while building a new website for the partner.
- Because content was thin on most URLs, Searchbloom developed content briefs for our content team to describe and add relevancy to target category, product, and blog URLs. These briefs included the target audience/buyer persona, brand messaging, tone, stage of funnel, target length, target keywords, internal links, headings, sub-headings, etc.
- Upon engagement, Searchbloom crawled the website, reviewed GSC, and found that most URLs had issues with either duplicate titles/descriptions or were missing them altogether. Starting with the highest priority URLs, we manually optimized each URL with targeted, persuasive, and relevant titles/descriptions/headings.
- Searchbloom created long-form resource pages and guides to capture traffic from long-tail keyword opportunities and leverage the middleman method to acquire inbound links to strengthen target product and category pages.
- Searchbloom recommended a website rebuild from the ground up for two reasons. 1) Drupal 6 was about to reach its end of life with the Drupal 8update coming very soon, and 2) organic traffic, user experience, and several
other highly important issues stemmed from the current tech stack. Our aim was to resolve all of the technical SEO issues from the legacy site by building a new site that included site architecture changes due to the URL structure, faceted navigation, no canonical tags, parameterized URLs, etc. - We have made many other tech improvements, which include: incorporating a CDN, leveraging browser caching, mobile/device optimization, image compression, segmented XML sitemaps, redirect chain resolution, pagination fixes, structured data, and open graph markup, etc.
- In the process of developing the new website, Searchbloom also created the SEED SELECTOR™, which allows users to enter their zip code or select their region to find the best seed products for their ecotype. This tool has dramatically lifted the overall ecommerce conversion rate and improved the user experience.
- Searchbloom worked with tools like Visual Website Optimizer to increase ecommerce conversion rates. We tested many elements, e.g., cart icon redesign, sticky top navigation, cart page redesign, homepage banner size-reduction, etc.
The Results
| Metric | July 2017 | July 2020 | % Increased |
| Referring Domains | 292 | 660 | 126% |
| Referring Pages | 456 | 2124 | 366% |
| Ecommerce Conversion Rate | 0.56% | 2.24% | 300% |
| Metric | % Increased |
| Revenue | 741% |
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