ATL Fight Shop

The Challenge

One of the most challenging aspects of starting a new company is getting those early sales in. I had the goal of starting my own ecommerce store that offered high quality products to consumers in the combat sports industry, from boxing to mixed martial arts gear. While this industry is not terribly saturated with retailers, it is dominated by major big box retailers and established combat sports brands.

After beginning the early months establishing relationships with some of the major brands in combat sports, such as Everlast, Cleto Reyes and Adidas, I now had my initial inventory to begin selling. But since ATL Fight Shop is primarily an e-commerce store, how do we bring people to the online store and create opportunities to make sales? I really have a few options to generate traffic. We can either spend money on search engine ads, social media ads, or take the time to invest in a long-term SEO strategy.

The long-term SEO strategy is what I chose to move forward with.

The Goal

The goal for any e-commerce store is to make sales. But how do we make sales if we have no one coming to our store? Another question to ask is how do we expect visitors to complete a purchase with us if they’ve never heard of us?

All of these questions I sought to address with our long-term SEO strategy.

The Approach

I was very aware that a long-term SEO strategy was going to take some time before I saw any significant metrics. But I started building the website to be fully SEO friendly by placing heavy emphasis on the content and targeting the right keywords. For every product offered on the website, I conducted keyword research to examine various potential keyphrases that were being searched on a monthly basis and used those keywords within HTML heading tags. I made sure to write unique product descriptions for all of the products and included the necessary image alt tags to be safe. This process was repeated for every product page.

Next, I made sure to set up a Google Merchant Center account so that the store’s products were displayed in the Google Shopping tab. Ensuring the right keywords were embedded in each product page would provide me with a boost in organic shopping results.

After connecting the store’s product feed with Google Merchant Center, I then went back into the store and began setting up collection pages that focused on broad keywords such as “blue boxing gloves”, “boxing hand wraps”, etc. I made sure the keywords were embedded within the proper HTML heading tags as well as the titles and meta descriptions.

Additionally, I put together a blog content strategy that focused on answering common questions within the boxing and MMA community. Blog articles are a fantastic way to increase overall brand visibility online and proves to be an effective inbound marketing approach.

Lastly, considering the 3 rules of thumb for SEO, I needed to establish some level of domain authority so that the new e-commerce store could have better ranking opportunities. I partnered with a backlink builder via UpWork and we discussed target keywords, what external websites we would best benefit from having a backlink from, and what pages we wanted to improve search rankings.

What's The End Result?

I started with a zero history domain in www.atlfightshop.com and I’ve been able to improve our domain authority score to a 24, according to SEM Rush. To date, we’re averaging 1,200+ organic visitors and we’re making consistent sales. As I continue to push content within the site, our average monthly traffic is estimated to continue to rise month over month.