SEO Critique – Leupold.com

I’m excited to launch my first SEO critique, for Leupold & Stevens Inc., a well established optics company with annual revenues north of $100 million. 🤯

If you’re a business owner, steal from this.

Here’s a deep-dive with 4 high-leverage, tactical SEO tips for Leupold to increase revenue: 

First, let’s look at current SEO metrics according to Ahrefs:

✅ 205,000 organic visitors

✅ 41,100 organic keywords

✅ 4,630 referring domains

✅ 492,000 backlinks

With hundreds of thousands of monthly organic visitors, a 10% increase in organic traffic could equate to millions in revenue per year (Leupolds products are not cheap! A premium pair of their binoculars will cost you over $1,000 🤩)

Our business goals for this critique:

1. Increase organic SEO traffic (and subsequent revenue!)

Before we dive in, we’ll set & follow some SEO principles:

1. Eliminate major issues
2. Implement trust signals
3. Find what’s working and double down
4. Target new “low-hanging fruit” opportunities

 

These basic SEO practices will keep us on track when working through a large site.

We’ll be focusing on 4 critical parts of the website with the highest ROI:

1. Homepage
2. Category Pages
3. Search Pages
4. Trust Pages (About, Contact, etc.)

For each of these, we’ll first critique it and then add our SEO improvements.

Ready? Here we go! 🚀

1. Homepage

Leupold’s main product category is “optics”. Hundreds of thousands of would-be customers come to Leupold.com every month in search of anything from Binoculars to specialized dials used on hunting scopes. 

Lots of opportunities there.

Currently, the homepage is not optimized well for SEO.

The title tag reads “Home page”.

We also noticed: 

❌ There is no clear target keyword(s) for the homepage

❌ There is no H1 tag

❌ The homepage features a slider which is bad for conversion and SEO

❌ The main product categories are linked from the homepage using buttons rather than text

Here’s what we’d do to improve the homepage:

✅ Remove the slider and implement a static hero image design with an H1, keyword rich subtext, and a CTA

✅ Change the title tag to “Binoculars, Spotting Scopes, Range Finders, Rifle Scopes, & More – Leupold Optics”

✅ Interlink the main product categories (scopes, binoculars, etc.) with contextual h2 or h3 headings 

Since the site already has tons of authority (and is crawled consistently by Google), these small optimizations will get picked up immediately so we’ll be able to see their impact immediately.

Here’s an example of the homepage with a better optimized structure:

2. Trust Pages

Next up, pages like the About, Contact, Privacy Policy, and Terms and Conditions go a long way in establishing trust with Google (and in turn positive rankings). Even well established sites like Leupold can see noticeable increases in rankings by optimizing these pages.

Currently on Leupold we notice:

✅The footer contains links to important pages like Contact, Troubleshooting, Privacy Policy, & Legal

✅ The contact page features the business name, address, phone number, and a Google Map embed showing the headquarters location

✅ The main navigation features a dedicated “support” section with easily accessible links to important pages

Nothing to fix here. Leupold does a better than average job of making information about their business easily accessible.

If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.

3. Category Pages

On to the good stuff. On ecom sites, product category pages present a great way to bring in buyer oriented traffic. On Leupold, we can see the binocular page (https://www.leupold.com/shop/binoculars) ranks #17 for “binoculars”, a search with 153,000 monthly searches.. Yet they only receive 284 visits per month according to Ahrefs. 

Why? 

The binoculars page:

❌ Has an under optimized title tag (“Binoculars | Leupold”)

❌ A meta description that’s too long (over 265 characters)

❌ Only 27 words of content outside of the product links

❌ Not enough links

A 1st page ranking for “binoculars” would likely bring in an additional 20,000-75,000 visitors and hundreds of thousands in yearly revenue.

(And that’s just 1 page)

Here’s what we can do to make the page better:

✅ Add 2 or 3 additional high search volume keywords variations to the title tag to target additional keywords “small binoculars”, “long range binoculars” etc.

✅ Fix the meta description

✅ Add 300-500 words of unique “binocular” content to the page in the form of FAQ’s or other helpful content to boost the page word count

✅ Add internal links to the binoculars category page from other important pages on the site and from the binocular product pages using high search volume target keyword anchor text like “view all binoculars”,  “see more small binoculars”, “back to all long range binoculars”, & “view binoculars for hunting”

✅ Build 25-50 high authority links using a mix of brand and keyword anchor texts

4. Search Results Pages

Search results pages when utilized properly provide an opportunity to programmatically create hundreds or thousands of high quality pages optimized to rank for valuable keywords. On Leupold, they utilize search to display products based on the application (for specific guns etc.). By optimizing these search pages, we can create dozens of unique landing pages for each product.

👉1 ranking opportunity becomes dozens

Example: Rifle Scope for Gun Model 1 (unique page)

Example: Rifle Scope for Gun Model 2 (unique page)

Example: Rifle Scope for Gun Model 3 (unique page)

Currently, the search pages:

❌ Feature title tags like “Search results for: ‘7 mag scope’”

❌ Lack content outside of the product listings

❌ Have duplicate meta descriptions for every search results page

With a simple strategy, we can clean this up nicely.

Here’s what we’d do to make it better:

✅ Add tags for each product on the site based on popular applications (“Fits X Gun”)

✅ Add application descriptions for each popular product (“300 words about gun X to be displayed in sidebar widget of relevant search results pages”)

✅ Optimize the search results page template to display better H1, title tag, and meta descriptions

✅ Create linkable “Gun type” tag clouds on product pages that say “View all products for X Gun” to improve interlinks to search results landing pages

… that’s it!

Simple changes like this can drive big results:

✅ Ranking for more overall keywords

✅ Ranking better for existing keywords

✅ Page 2-3 rankings jumping to page 1

✅ 25%+ more organic traffic, sales, and subsequent revenue

At this scale, just a 10% increase in organic traffic would mean hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in revenue for Leupold.

We’re confident we could double that.

Good SEO does not only improve your current results, it should also open you up to hundreds of new opportunities.

In fact, I’ll even *guarantee* this will increase revenue for Leupold.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading!

If you’re interested in SEO for your business, DM me to chat 🙏.