If there were an SEO Hall of Fame, this site would be in it. Over the last few decades they’ve used SEO brilliance to build a big, boring and very profitable wholesale kitchen equipment business from scratch. I’m talking about Webstaurant Store , a family-owned e-commerce operation based in Lancaster County, PA that has grown to hundreds of millions in sales largely through heavy traffic to their well-optimized website.
So who better to demonstrate how to do SEO very well? Let’s look at one of the pages from their website to see how they make it so visible to search engines. The page I've analyzed was picked at random from among hundreds of their product pages.
Large Amounts of Content This particular product page has hundreds of words of textual content which are visible to Google. The descriptions are extremely detailed which improves SEO but also helps customers who are considering a purchase.
Beyond textual content, the page has lots more too. There are eight photos of the unit and three videos (one of the videos even includes a transcript of the content for further indexable content). Then there are product dimensions, specifications, a table comparing this unit with similar ones, user-submitted photos and videos, and lots of reviews. Clearly tons of work went into this content but the result is a great experience for the user and loads of indexable content for Google.
Page Title and URL Structure Great care has been taken to create clear and consistent page tagging, the kind that Google indexing thrives on. The page URL contains the product name, specs and SKU number. Those are reinforced in the page title, the meta description and the H1 tag. This kind of careful consistency in each of these elements is critical for SEO.
Links on the Page This product page has 105 links connecting it with other pages. And obviously, other product pages like this one also have many links. This creates a nexus of links across the site which makes indexing it very easy as search engine spiders whiz from page to page creating a detailed map of the site.
But not only that, this page has 244 backlinks feeding traffic to the page and signaling to Google that it’s a relevant and credible page for many searches.
Overall Website SEO Performance The team at Webstaurant Store has been at SEO for a long time and it shows. The chart below shows their work over the last ten years as their site has begun to rank for more and more keywords. Today the site ranks for 1.4 million keywords.
Organic Keyword Trend Chart for Webstaurant Store
And here are just some of the search terms for which they have a number-one ranking which means their site shows up in the first position on the first page of Google.
Kitchen supply store Web restaurant store Kitchen supplies Restaurant equipment Restaurant supplies How much is this SEO effort worth? Well, one of their leading keywords, “restaurant supply,” delivers 120,000 visits per year to their website. And if they had to buy that term using paid search on Google, that traffic would cost $374,000. And that’s just one of 1.4 million keywords they rank for which are now delivering a steady stream of “free” traffic to their website today. Not bad for SEO.
