Hamilton Place is a regional mall in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It spans an impressive 1,160 square feet and features shopping, dining, and entertainment options for visitors of all ages.

Since its grand opening in 1987, Hamilton Place has maintained a steadfast online presence, with internet archives revealing a website launch in 2000.

Recently, the mall’s owner, CBL Properties, chose Hamilton Place to pilot a new eCommerce initiative. This platform, called the Inventory Insider, provides comprehensive product information and real-time stock availability directly on the mall’s website.

This move has marked a pivotal moment in the mall’s digital footprint, sparking an unprecedented surge in organic traffic.

In this SEO case study, we’ll dissect how this initiative catapulted Hamilton Place into new heights of visibility. We’ll also share tips and tutorials on how you can leverage their SEO wins on your website.

The Catalyst: How Hamilton Place Reached 750K Monthly Visits

1. Online Product Catalog and Programmatic SEO

Hamilton Place started to launch the Inventory Insider in January 2024. And it did it fast.

In just 3 months, the website went from 1K to 863K pages. This is particularly impressive considering how, for most of the domain’s lifetime, the site never exceeded 900 URLs.

These new pages live within the Products subfolder.

When you get to the Inventory Insider, it’s very similar to a standard eCommerce site. You can sort by Women, Men, Baby & Kids, Home, and more.

When you reach a product page, you find all expected information readily available.

However, Inventory Insider is not your traditional eCommerce platform. Users can’t buy online directly from Hamilton Place.

Instead, its strength lies in stock availability at the brick-and-mortar store, Hamilton Place. And if you’re a non-Chattanooga local and still want to buy the item online, you can click the Visit retailer’s website button to purchase from the brand.

Now, adding over 863K pages in a matter of 3 months is no easy feat.

In fact, it’s practically impossible to do it by hand.

So, what did Hamilton Place do to get all of its products online so quickly?

Programmatic SEO.

Programmatic SEO (pSEO) uses a template, database, and automation to produce many pages in a short amount of time. Its main advantage is its scalability, which allows you to increase content production quickly.

Despite its apparent advantages, pSEO isn’t a golden ticket. Its effectiveness depends on your input, meaning it still requires work to get it right.

For Hamilton Place, product pages are ideal for this type of AI-generated content.

All pages follow the same format and update stock availability in real-time. We also noticed that their product descriptions come directly from the retailer’s website.

Take our above screenshot of the Zales men’s watch as an example. If you compare its product information to the description below (from the Zales website), you’ll see they’re identical.

Hamilton Place automates its product description copywriting by importing them from its retailers. This eliminates the need for time-consuming copywriting.

We’d like to think they had the retailers’ permission to do so and must make a note that this is a very specific use case. Automating your content creation is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

But for Hamilton Place, it’s been a prime example of automating a workflow to make their entire catalog available online.

Why this matters:

Hamilton Place’s content strategy and use of programmatic SEO have proven invaluable in 2024.

After the Inventory Insider’s launch, they received more visitors to the site than ever.

Ranking keywords exploded into the multi-million range in just 3 months.

For website owners, it’s a lesson in strategic content creation and the power of automation.

By embracing technology, businesses can streamline workflows, maximize operational efficiency, and boost brand awareness.

How to leverage automated workflows on your website:

This Zapier article shows you how to do programmatic SEO on your website.

It’s also important to consider how you can automate certain SEO processes without eliminating hand-written content altogether. (We prefer this method for most businesses.)

Some ways of accomplishing this are:

• Using AI to write meta titles and meta descriptions
• Setting image alt text and title tags to generate automatically with image smart tags
• Automatically redirecting 404 pages to your homepage (or any custom page)
• Installing an SEO plugin to get internal linking suggestions in WordPress

Tools for automation:

With All in One SEO (AIOSEO), the best WordPress SEO plugin, you can make your optimizations more efficient and effective.

AIOSEO helps you automate important SEO tasks to maximize your content’s reach.

Regarding the previous bullet point list, you can use the following tools to automate your SEO workflows:

• Metadata – AI Title/Description Generator crafts unique and compelling meta titles and descriptions in a single click.
• Image SEO – Turn on Image SEO to add variables and customize image attributes automatically.
• 404 Redirects – Redirection Manager makes it easy to help users and search engines navigate your site and avoid page not found errors.
• Linking – Link Assistant generates internal linking suggesting directly in the WordPress editor.

Next, let’s see how the Inventory Insider is helping Hamilton Place appear in the Google People Also Ask box.

2. Optimized Copy and People Also Ask Results

In a strategic move to provide valuable and relevant information to users, Hamilton Place used optimized product copy to win 1.6K rankings in Google’s People Also Ask (PAA) results.

The PAA section of the search engine results page (SERP) provides users with related questions to their original query. Users can click on them to reveal a drop-down of the answer, as shown below.

Now, as we saw earlier, Hamilton Place didn’t craft product descriptions on its own. Instead, they leveraged their partnerships to import the copy from their retailers’ websites.

These product descriptions were already optimized for users and search engines.

For users, they include clear and accurate product details like specifications and features.

For search engines, they include keywords and technical optimizations like schema markup.

Combined, it creates a helpful user experience that’s easy for search engines to comprehend.

Why this matters:

There are many benefits to ranking in Google’s PAA box. Some of the most important include:

• Greater visibility
• Enhanced credibility
• Higher clickthrough rates
• More website visitors

How to optimize for PAA results:

User-centric content is at the heart of winning PAA results.

With that said, there are steps you can take to optimize your content for PAA results:

1. Perform keyword research and target question-based queries.
2. Craft content that fulfills search intent.
3. Add FAQ schema. (Hamilton Place used product schema, which we’ll explain in our next section.)
4. Conduct a competitor analysis.

This tutorial explains each step in a beginner-friendly manner, showing you how to optimize for Google’s PAA box.

Tools for ranking in Google PAA:

Clear, concise copy and keywords play an integral role in PAA results. TruSEO Score Analysis is an innovative tool that helps you with both.

TruSEO analyzes your content to help you maximize its reach in organic search. It runs a series of checks, including analyzing your content’s readability and checking its focus keyword.

Then, it generates action-oriented checklists, like the Readability Checklist shown below.

Now, let’s see how the new product catalog helped Hamilton Place stand out on the SERP with images.

3. Product Schema Markup and Image Rich Results

Hamilton Place implements product schema markup on each of its 862K+ product pages.

Schema markup is a structured data format that communicates important details about your page to search engines. There are several types, each accompanied by a unique set of attributes.

For Hamilton Place, its use of product schema markup allows them to share product details like price, availability, and offers.

They also assign an image for each product, which has created a visually enticing presence on the SERP.

Images are a type of SERP feature that appears next to your organic listing. Google refers to these as “text result images.”

And in March 2024, Hamilton Place got a lot of them.

775,256, to be exact.

Why this matters:

According to SEO statistics, rich results get 58% of all clicks.

That’s significantly higher than non-rich results, which have a 41% clickthrough rate (CTR).

Images are a powerful way to grab users’ attention as they browse the SERP. Their inclusion and technical optimizations, like schema markup, encourage user engagement and clicks.

How to implement schema markup:

This guide demonstrates three methods for adding schema markup to WordPress without a plugin.

Each uses JSON-LD and requires basic coding knowledge.

Both of these tools will help you acquire the schema markup itself:

• Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper
• JSON-LD Playground

For eCommerce sites, you’ll want to select Product in each tool to generate the appropriate schema markup.

Tools for schema markup:

Want to skip the code and take the easy route to image rich results?

A schema generator plugin does the work for you, making structured data a breeze.

In AIOSEO, you can implement a product schema with just a few clicks. Navigate to the Schema Generator in the WordPress editor and select Product from the catalog.

You’ll enter your product details and can upload a product image.

Once you’re finished, AIOSEO will format the structured data properly for search engines.

Standout SEO Wins

Before we wrap up, we’d like to point out an additional SEO win for Hamilton Place. It showcases the effectiveness of our broader SEO strategy, independent of the new product catalog.

Hamilton Place Earns an SEO Boost With a Knowledge Panel

Knowledge panels are the informational boxes you sometimes see on the right side of Google search results. They can appear when users search for people, places, things, and organizations.

Knowledge panels are important for a couple of reasons.

First, they provide users with a quick and trusted summary of key information about an entity. This saves time and effort, letting you learn the basics without wading through multiple websites.

Second, knowledge panels can boost the visibility and credibility of your businesses. A well-maintained panel acts like a mini-website on the SERP, attracting attention and driving more traffic.

Overall, knowledge panels are a win-win for both searchers and the entities they represent.

Tool: After claiming your Google knowledge panel, AIOSEO can help you set up your knowledge graph. It’s quick and easy and gives search engines important details about your business. You can also use the local SEO tool to add information about one or more locations.

Takeaways

In our analysis of hamiltonplace.com, we found key strategies that website owners can follow to find success online.

Now, let’s look at the top three and bottom three strategies to give you some actionable steps.

Top 3 Strategies to Emulate

1. Get creative with your online presence. Hamilton Place showcases how creativity with your online presence can expand your reach, even if you don’t sell products online. By using their brick-and-mortar product catalog to provide product information and inventory, they engage with their existing audience and boost brand awareness. This ultimately allows them to cast a wider net and connect with a greater pool of potential customers.
2. Leverage automation tools to streamline SEO. Content creation is already time-consuming. Throw in SEO, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Hamilton Place used programmatic SEO (pSEO) to lighten their load and create SEO-friendly product pages. While pSEO isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, it’s important to review your workflows and identify areas for improvement. Automation tools can streamline tasks like writing metadata and optimizing subheadings, allowing you to focus on creating unique, high-quality content.
3. Implement schema markup to win rich snippets on the SERP. Schema markup and optimized images can significantly enhance the appearance of your website in search results. These elements create attention-grabbing rich results that boost clicks and drive traffic to your site.

Bottom 3 Strategies to Reconsider

1. Writing short, non-descriptive page titles. Users and search engines rely on page titles to understand content. Short, generic titles like “Duffel” offer little information. Instead, you want to use descriptive words to entice users to click. AI title generators can help you automate this task and write search-friendly meta titles for you.
2. Missing canonical tags on indexable pages. Duplicate content can confuse search engines. Canonical tags specify the preferred version of a web page, preventing penalties and ensuring the right page gets indexed. And when the page is unique, you should use a self-referencing canonical. Canonical URLs are easy to customize in AIOSEO settings.
3. Duplicating meta descriptions across several pages. Unique meta descriptions encourage users to click on your search results. Using the same one across multiple pages can be confusing for users and search engines. You can use a meta description generator to write unique, compelling descriptions for your content.

Steal Our Winning SEO Strategy: A Checklist for Your Website

Dominate the SERP and Win More Traffic With AIOSEO

Hamilton Place secured organic search success, but the journey is just beginning for you.

With AIOSEO, you can achieve similar results and lighten the load of technical SEO tasks.

With thousands of 5-star reviews and trusted by over 3 million website owners, you’ll get all the tools you need to dominate search results. No prior SEO experience is required. Our user-friendly interface makes SEO accessible for everyone, putting higher rankings just around the corner.

Here are a few of our favorite features:

• TruSEO On-Page Analysis: Get a snapshot view, or go into detail, of your content’s on-page SEO with this innovative tool. TruSEO analyzes your content optimizations and gives you actionable insights to maximize its reach.
• Rich Snippets Schema: AIOSEO offers various schema markup options to help you claim more rich results on the SERP. It’s as simple as choosing the schema you want; then, we’ll format the structured data for Google.
• Local SEO: Our local SEO tool implements local business schema for you—no coding required. We’ll also help you format your local SEO settings to boost your visibility in local searches and rank higher in Google Maps.
• Image SEO: Turn on automatic image alt text and title attributes with a single click. You’ll save time from manual entries while helping users and search engines understand your images.
• Redirection Manager: Prevent humans and bots from getting lost when you move content or domains. Our Redirection Manager helps you easily choose and implement the best redirect type that preserves SEO.
• Robots.txt Editor: Control how bots crawl your site with the Robots.txt Editor, which allows you to override default WordPress settings. This tool makes it simple to view your robots.txt file and manage rules.