In this week’s teardown, I analyze a 7-year-old eCommerce site, HappyGardens.com. The site receives 35,000 organic visitors per month (Ahrefs estimate).
Garden decor is a growing niche of products that is boosted by the strong growth of gardening since the pandemic. Gardening has become one of the most popular hobbies with 55% of Americans maintaining a garden.
The owners of this brand have done a great job of offering unique and attractive products for their target customers. They also differentiate from other stores by supporting artisans from Hondorus and using recycled packaging.
They have served over 150,000 customers since the business began and are well-positioned to grow with a strong social presence and strong Google rankings.
In this teardown I look at what this eCommerce site does very well and the specific changes I would make to increase traffic and revenue.
This is what I cover in this report:
- Website overview
- Major highlights
- Competitor overview
- Easy wins to increase revenue and/or traffic
- Actionable takeaways you can apply
Let’s get into it!
✅ Website Overview & Highlights
Traffic has been volatile over the past couple of years but is currently at an all-time high in organic traffic at about 35k organic visitors per month.
It also has a strong domain authority and a decent number of referring domains for an eCommerce site.
The website’s domain has been active since 2018 when it was started by a father and son team.
The business name is highly brandable and memorable. This has helped it grow its branded search volume to around 300 per month.
The website follows many of the best practices for eCommerce sites including a slide-in shopping cart and popup windows to encourage email signups.
They also do a good job of using social media to engage with the gardening community and grow awareness from people discovering them on sites like Pinterest and Facebook.
For example, some of their Facebook page posts can generate over 1,000 shares.
They also sell their products on other platforms like Etsy where they have 6,500 5-star reviews.
One unique thing they do is feature a customer review at the top of the product page. This helps improve conversions by providing strong social proof and trustworthy recommendations.
They do a good job of collecting reviews with customer photos and displaying them on the product pages which helps improve the conversion rate. Northwestern University found that displaying 5 reviews increased the conversion rate by 270% compared to displaying no reviews.
Highlights
- 650 referring domains
- Pinterest account with 5.9k followers and 757k monthly views
- Facebook page with 775k followers
- Instagram account with 352k followers
Why is this site winning?
- Good link profile with some high authority links like PC Mag, Green Matters, Outdoors.org, and more
- Good branded search volume of about 300 searches per month
- Strong presence on social media sites which drives awareness and traffic
Top 3 Competitors
Here are similar competitors targeting many of the same keywords.
- GardenArtisans.com – A garden decor eCommerce site with 18k organic traffic (Ahrefs).
- WindandWeather.com – An eCommerce site selling garden art, weather instruments, and more with 35k organic traffic (Ahrefs).
- TheGardenGates.com – A luxury eCommerce site selling outdoor decorations and outdoor furniture with 18k organic traffic (Ahrefs).
Let’s get into the easy wins to grow this specific website.
🔥 5 Easy Wins To Grow This Website
There are opportunities to significantly grow this brand. I break down the following easy wins:
- Add more content to collections pages
- Run a Google Ads Shopping campaign and bid on branded keywords
- Add more collections pages
- Build inbound links from gardening blogs
- Publish more blog content
Let’s get into it!
➡️ Win #1: Add More Content to Collections Pages
Their collections pages rank highly in Google but sometimes have very little text content.
For example, the Garden Signs collection ranks #3 in Google for “garden signs” but this page only has about 50 words of content.
They could potentially move up in the rankings to the #1 position and significantly increase traffic by adding more descriptive content to help Google understand the page.
They do a good job of providing additional content with FAQs on some collections pages, so they should add FAQs to all collections pages.
➡️ Win #2: Run a Google Ads Shopping Campaign and Bid on Branded Keywords
Ahrefs shows that the site doesn’t run Google Ads so starting a campaign can be a good way to attract new customers who are searching for garden decor.
With unique products like handmade stone statues, they could attract many potential customers by showing up in the Google Shopping carousel for Google searches related to garden decor.
They can also bid on their own brand name for Google Search ads so that other brands don’t appear above them when people search for “Happy Gardens”. One of the sponsored links that appears above their brand name in Google is the Happy Gardens store on Amazon, which sells the same products as the website but charges high fees (usually 15%).
Additionally, bidding on competitors’ brand names for Google Search ads can help increase awareness of the brand and provide an alternative to searchers who are looking for garden decor stores.
Increasing sales through paid ads can lead to many positive second-order effects. It can help acquire new customers who may become repeat buyers. It will also lead to more reviews on products that have little or no reviews.
➡️ Win #3: Add More Collections Pages
The collections pages already generate a lot of traffic for the site. For example, their wind chimes collection page generates about 2,600 monthly organic traffic according to Ahrefs. Currently, there are about 26 collection pages.
They can take what is already working well and expand it by adding more collections pages that match specific keywords like “gifts for gardeners” or “handmade garden decor”.
They can also look at collections pages on competitors’ sites that already generate organic traffic for ideas of new pages to publish.
➡️ Win #4: Build Inbound Links from Gardening Blogs
There are a large number of gardening-focused sites and blogs that cover this popular hobby.
This site can work on building highly relevant links from gardening sites that can boost rankings and also lead to referral traffic from people interested in gardening.
They can email gardening sites and blogs and ask if they are interested in covering their unique products. If yes, they can be sent free products to review or paid to write a review.
Another way to build links from gardening sites is to start an affiliate program. Affiliate links are supposed to have the HTML attribute rel=”sponsored” but often there are some links that are missing the tag. Additionally, you can ask your affiliates if they can link to the site in a blog post or existing page.
Many gardening sites have lost a lot of traffic from recent Google updates so they may be more open to selling links on their site.
➡️ Win #5: Publish More Blog Content
The blog shows that the last article was published in September 2023, which is over 6 months ago.
Their informational articles have been effective at generating traffic. For example, their article “How to keep squirrels out of bird feeders” generates about 1,900 organic visitors per month. Five other informational articles generate over 1,000 organic visitors per month.
Currently, the entire site has about 570 pages, including product pages. By adding more pages of informational or educational content, they can rank for many more gardening-related keywords and attract more natural links to bolster the link profile.
👉 Actionable Takeaways
Here are actionable takeaways that you can apply to your niche website today:
- Look for “thin” pages with little content and work on adding unique and useful content to improve Google rankings.
- Google shopping ads can be an effective new customer acquisition tactic that can also lead to reviews on product pages with no reviews.
- eCommerce sites should bid on their brand name with Google Ads to prevent competitors from showing above your site for brand searches.
- Building links from relevant sites can increase rankings while also sending referral traffic from people who are interested in the topic.
- eCommerce sites with good domain authority can attract customers at a low cost per acquisition by publishing informational content targeting relevant keywords.
