How this SEO successfully optimized 500 sites and counting

Every SEO client comes with unique business challenges. Relying on Wix’s SEO tools gives this search marketer more time to solve them. Find out how Tom Nelan helped three very different clients crush their growth goals. 

The business 

Originally a lawyer, Tom first became fascinated with SEO when he built his wife a website for her Japanese translator business. In 2017, he went on to formally study SEO at the Digital Marketing Institute of Ireland, where he graduated in the top 1% of his class. Needless to say, he immediately put his newfound skills to work and helped his wife’s website climb to the top of the SERP. 

Tom officially launched his own business, SEO for Wix, in 2018. In order to connect with potential clients, he joined the Wix Marketplace and was paired up with his own customer success manager. From there, his business has gone from strength to strength. Now a Top 25 Wix Partner globally, Tom has worked on 500 Wix sites and counting. With hundreds of five-star reviews, he has happy clients everywhere from Switzerland to Singapore.  

Tom Nelan, Founder of SEO for Wix

Skyrocketing sci-fi sales exceed The Geekside’s expectations

100% increase in organic traffic over 3 months

6.3K keywords ranked 

67% increase in sales over 1 year 

The SEO challenge 

Specializing in everything from Harry Potter to Stranger Things, The Geekside is a sci-fi merchandise store based in the UK town of Skipton. They got in touch with Tom because they had a problem: their brick and mortar store was thriving but their online presence was in the doldrums. Their website traffic simply wasn’t living up to expectations, and realistically there were only so many customers they could attract through their shop window. 

The solution 

Tom got to work by identifying some site design improvements that could help Google better understand what The Geekside’s website was all about. As it was built on Wix, the business owner was able to make these edits themselves with minimal fuss. With these changes implemented, Tom dove straight into the more technical SEO tasks on his to-do list. 

As an online store with more than 700 products to optimize, this kind of painstaking work would typically set a project back by several days or even weeks. However, Tom decided to rely on Wix’s best-in-class default settings and then apply his own SEO logic at scale, which cut the project’s timeline by more than 50%. 

“Take a page title for example,” describes Tom. “You can insert that as a value that goes in for each of the 700 products. So Harry Potter will be one value on the Harry Potter page, but that appears as Star Trek on the Star Trek related page. With Wix, you can do that in bulk and put in the relevant keywords across the board, all with just a couple of clicks.”

These time-saving features give Tom—and his clients—an edge in today’s marketplace.

“If you can save one day's worth of time, you can pass those savings along to your customers. It just makes being a Wix SEO that bit more competitive in challenging times. You can come back to the client with a quote that's surprisingly decent from their point of view.”

The results 

Within 3 months, Tom’s SEO work paid off with a huge increase in online visibility for The Geekside’s online store. Now ranking for 6.3K keywords, the website experienced a 100% increase in organic traffic which in turn led to a whopping 67% increase in sales. 

Barbulianno Design brings in unprecedented profits 

10.2K keywords ranked 

6.9K organic traffic 

70% increase in profits over 1 year

The SEO challenge

Barbulianno Design is a UK-based homeware business that showcases sustainable brands and artisan furniture makers. The website creates revenue through affiliate links, so attracting high levels of traffic is critical in order to turn a profit. 

When Tom arrived on the scene, Barbulianno Design was a blank slate SEO-wise. The first thing he noticed was the website wasn’t fulfilling the “Expertise” requirement in Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines. Specifically, the site’s About page wasn’t telling a clear story about who the business owner was and what the business offered. 

The solution 

Tom advised his client how to tailor the website’s design and content in a way that search engines would understand, before getting to work on the site’s technical SEO. After conducting thorough keyword research, he got the site owner’s buy-in on which keywords to optimize for. As always, Tom advised against a “scatter-gun approach”, as he routinely explains to clients that their site can’t be all things to all people. 

“We ended up with a nice final list of keywords, and then it was just a matter of putting those in all the little places that you can put keywords in Wix. There's so many if you know where to look,” Tom explains. 

The final task Tom undertook was backlinking. When explaining to clients how this helps Google understand their site, he uses the metaphor of how neural pathways work in the brain. “When you're talking to business people every day, you have to bring it back to a language that they can understand,” he recommends.

The results 

Following on from Tom’s SEO work, Barbulianno Designs experienced an X% uplift in organic traffic and was named Etsy Affiliate of the Month for its popularity. 

“I could see serious growth very soon after Tom optimized Barbulianno Design,” shares the business owner, Vanja Barbul. “Google has become our number one traffic source. Profits increased by 70% in the first year and by a further 120% the following year.”

Transforming CO₂ Radical from a niche product into a top seller

25% conversion rate 

$100K traffic value 

The SEO challenge 

Founded by two medical professionals in 2021, CO₂ Radical is a groundbreaking product that provides real-time air quality updates to its users via smartphone. The monitor provides a crucial service as it protects against toxic particles that can lead to the spread of infections like COVID-19. Of course, the SEO challenge that comes with marketing highly innovative products is that no one is searching for them—yet.  

Tom was well aware of this fact when the owners of CO₂ Radical reached out to him. Their website had been getting trace amounts of traffic, but nowhere near what they had hoped for given how much time and resources they invested in getting their new product off the ground. 

The solution

While they had plenty of content on their website, Tom recognized it wasn’t telling their company’s story as clearly as Google needed it to. With his design and content recommendations implemented, Tom put his keyword research into practice and used Wix’s SEO tools to insert high-performing phrases in all the right places.

“After you optimize the site, you have to take your hands off the wheel and give Google time to get to grips with your improvements,” Tom notes. “In this case, it happened quickly. They were very, very happy clients.”

The results 

Tom successfully turned an extremely niche product into the highest earner of all the Wix sites he’s ever worked on. CO₂ Radical’s website now boasts a 25% conversion rate which is nearly 9 times higher than the industry benchmark. 

Learn how smart SEO features on Wix can help you deliver higher KPIs in less time, and explore our SEO Learning Hub for the latest insights from industry experts.