Roadmaping the Organic Search Strategy

POLARIS partnered with the brand on a 6-month organic search strategy to elevate their digital offering and Technical SEO to improve search market share so as to maximise their performance through Christmas sales.

Since the pandemic the brand had experienced consecutive years of organic traffic and sales shrink of over 15%. Despite working with a number of SEO partners, they hadn’t been able to correct course. Understanding the time-sensitive nature of the brief, and how important it was to business performance, our ecommerce SEO team got to work immediately to analyse their strengths and opportunities to formulate into an organic search strategy.

Targeting the right prospects online

Our initial research, conducted using our propriety indexing tool Kartessien Index, first identified where the largest organic revenue opportunities for Virginia Hayward were, and how their site proposition compared to the largest competitors.

We conducted extensive targeting research to target both consumer and corporate demand, identifying core audience groups and their key conversion triggers. We identified key audience profiles for both the corporate and consumer products, with an ideal B2C profile of middle-to-upper class individuals in the age range of 30-65. This profiling allowed us to determine how we should split and use resources on the campaign.

This led to the creation of a two-pronged strategy focused on improving the website’s information architecture and user experience paired with specific optimisations targeting prime visibility for both generic and seasonal transactional topic areas. The latter emphasised improving the site’s Christmas proposition for both consumer-facing ecommerce as well as retaining their historically important corporate gifting offering. We focused additionally on a de-seasonalisation of traffic and revenue to escape the volatility of SERP indexes at Christmas.

CRO meets SEO 

Even though our roots like in being a pure play SEO agency, we have expertise and are qualified in Conversion Rate Optimisation. We began by undertaking a forward-thinking evolution of the site to create best-in-class structures, navigational pathways, and page designs with the aim of providing a seamless user experience.

Redeveloping Page Templates: Using our propriety indexing too, Kartessien Index, we analysed that the competitor standard for page templates put a huge emphasis on bottom-of-page content – an out-of-date trend that did not meet our standards for best search practices. Moving against this trend, we redeveloped page wireframes for product listing pages, product display pages and the homepage to focus on above-the-fold content and cut total wordcounts by over 50%.

Despite peak season fast approaching, and the high-risk carried by overhauling site designs, we made the decision to push forward with integrating this redevelopment with confidence that the quality of our work would yield immediate gains.

Marrying Brand Tone with SEO: When approaching topic-based optimisations, we were aware that on-page copy needed to convey the expertise and heritage of the brand and provide users with helpful information on the purchasing process, while matching the term frequency seen across competitor listings.

Advanced Modeling Tools: Using a custom-built topic modeling script built in python to crawl and analyse competitor content, we exported and analysed term and topic frequency using a semantic-based natural language processing tool to inform the copy structure which was then hand-written by the team to factor in compliance with EEAT and YMYL guidelines.

Individualised Content Strategy: In addition to these core work areas, we also worked with the client to develop a content strategy that enhanced topical relevancy and offered purchase-decision inspiration through fresh content that was divided out into product targeting areas – by recipient, by hamper content and occasion.

Improved Tracking: We resolved tracking issues that were occurring in consent mode V2 and their cookie-management platform.

Challenges

We faced a number of SEO challenges when conducting the campaign:

Time Sensitivity: The activity was scoped as a project, conducted over a 6-month period that included both the lead-in and peak activity period itself. This presented challenges with creating and integrating our work quickly in order that our page and site changes could be fully reconsidered and have their positive effects before the peak season began. The situation was worsened by an integration delay from the client side for the first 40 days of the project, putting us further behind schedule.

To achieve our goals and this issue, and with Virginia Hayward in a resource tight position, we made the executive decision to take control of content integration for the vast majority of the pages we optimised. As a result, all of our changes were integrated in a timely manner.

Lack of PR Investment: The client did not have a PR strategy and were hesitant to invest in one, which inhibited our ability to build offsite equity which was critical to taking top positions on our target SERP pages. We navigated this with an increased focus on internal linking and the creation of a link reclamation program that would identify and recapture lost backlinks.