Vanessa Arbuthnott is an ecommerce website that manufactures bespoke and made to measure fabric furniture and furnishings.
They cater for the upper end of the market and deliver rustic and expertly made products that are distributed to the UK market.
They are a great example of a small start business that has harnessed the power of search marketing to grow.
View Website »The original brief was for our in-house development team to build Vanessa Arbuthnott fabrics company a new website. However, SEO was also recommended within the build, to give the client the best possible chance of reaping the benefits of their new website.
Whilst the website was being built, we liaised with the development team and dedicated time to making sure that we over delivered which led to us being able to convince Vanessa Arbuthnott Fabrics that they could massively benefit from sustained SEO and Content Marketing activity.
They set us the target of increasing traffic by 20% within the initial 6 months as well as increasing rankings for desired head terms such as “Designer Fabrics” and “Made to measure curtains”. We consulted and compromised on adopting a long tail keyword strategy so that we could not only increase the overall traffic and visibility of the website but also help improve conversion rates due to their audience being the upper end of the market.
On Page Technical Strategy
Our technical and content audits highlighted areas in which we could drastically expand the site architecture by identifying the different ways in which users could search for fabric products throughout the website. These recommendations were put in place with a dynamic faceted navigation feature on the made to measure section of the website, meaning we could increase the amount of pages indexed in Google and thus bring in more traffic. This also served to improve the user experience due to simplifying the bespoke complexities in made to measure products of the website.
We then noticed that an increase in products being added to the site would likely cause issues with Google’s crawl budget. Our solution to overcome the sheer amount of faceted navigation pages was to place a no index and no follow tags on all URL’s that had more than three filters applied. We arrived at this decision due to the fact that it was highly unlikely that people’s searches wouldn’t include keywords for more than 3 filters when looking for curtains or other fabric products.
The end result was an increase in indexed pages for desired long tail keywords which also resulted in a boost in the website’s overall visibility. We’ve also improved upon the efficiency in which Google now crawls the website, making sure that the site doesn’t take up too much crawl budget.
Our next step was to improve upon the on-page optimisation of all the new dynamic pages generated by the faceted navigation. This has resulted in more increases in overall visibility and the site is now consequently ranking on the first page for many long tail converting phrases. The way in which we went about this was to produce template formulas for all title tags throughout the site that could be generated by the filters. The developers implemented an Ajax call that Google can interpret, resulting in a now visible change to the page title tag until you hard refresh (f5) the page.
Content Marketing Strategy
As well as expanding the content on the website through our site architecture recommendations. Our track record in content marketing is really impressive especially when you consider that our monthly budgets are quite low compared to many of the larger media agencies. This means we have to find ways of being innovative, resourceful and agile, whilst also building up a list of worthwhile contacts and networks over a period of time.
We don’t disguise the fact that the focus of our content marketing is on building links. We understand the hysteria around “link building” but seeing as its still largely the most important aspect of Google’s algorithm, we would rather be transparent when educating our clients. That said we keep it completely white hat and simply don’t take risks.
This is especially the case with our guest posting strategy. Our approach is modest, we generally only ask for branded or partial match anchor text, whilst also making sure that articles are engaging and also reference other websites.
You can see a couple of examples here:
http://www.maria4home.com/green-living/easy-tips-and-tricks-to-embrace-a-green-lifestyle
However, the biggest success we have in content marketing is currently through the use of infographics and on-site resources. Through trial and error, we have spent years discovering the psychology of sharing, how to get the right reaction from the right audience and how to distribute the content in a way that means the big media outlets are always hungry for more.
The big outlets that we target help our clients benefit from the huge trickledown effect that is naturally earned from these types of websites. Our infographics and resources are consistently featured in the likes of the Daily Mail, the Times, Buzzfeed, Life hacker, Mashable, Business Insider, Huffington Post and more. From here, we find that bloggers that are hungry for content will simply use these big syndicators as their resource for any relevant or partially relevant news. It’s all outreach and link reclamation from there.
Example. All done on an extremely low budget of under £500)
The first KPI that we agreed upon is increasing the website traffic over the course of the campaign (12-month period). The site build was completed in late February and our SEO campaign took over from there. Over the course of March 2015 we saw a huge spike in traffic due to the increased amount of indexed pages in Google.
Our goal from this point was to achieve a 20% increase in organic traffic over the next 6 months. So far we have exceeded that by 10% when looking at August compared to March. It is also worth noting that this is all from organic search as the client isn’t yet implementing a PPC campaign to support the organic.
To accompany our impressive growth in traffic, we’ve also witnessed a HUGE spike in the website’s overall visibility since March 2015. Meaning that they have to started to rank in Google’s index for a vast range of relevant keywords both short and long tail.
As you can see in the initial objective, we were given the task of ranking vanity keywords as part of a compromise over our long tail strategy recommendation. These were “Made to measure curtains” with a monthly search volume of 12,100 and “Designer Fabrics” with a lesser monthly search volume of 1000.
“Made to measure curtains” …
“Designer Fabrics” …
Conversions & ROI
Since the campaign started in March we have seen a revenue increase of 22.76% and a conversion rate uplift of 9.78%. This is comparing last months (August) to March.
The SEO budget is set at £1500 a month. Taking into account a 22.76% increase from March to August, we can safely say that Vanessa Arbuthnott are absolutely seeing the financial benefits of our SEO campaign.
This graph does however highlight a need to improve the average order value on the website and we will be looking at strategies on improving that in the future as well as further technical recommendations to help improve click through rate in the SERPS such as rich snippets.
