Where Things Started
Furniture and digital marketing is truly a match made in heaven. As a high-value item that can offer a fantastic return on investment, as well as a household essential that everyone needs and an item that is hard to ship from overseas, SEO and SEM are generally a sure-fire success for those in the business of beautiful furnishings. So, when our client came to us having had a bad experience with their previous agency, we knew that there must be a lot of work to do.
Determining the Issues
Whilst working on the site, it became clear why they had such issues ranking. From a content perspective, the previous agency had struggled to understand what exactly made the products on the site unique and had resorted to sparse, very general information that was unlikely to thrill users, or search engine algorithms. So, we set to work completing a massive overhaul of the entire website’s optimisation, with a strong focus on building out content with our professional in-house copywriters. This not only allowed us a chance to flesh out the category pages but also allowed Google to differentiate between the pages that had previously been written for. This coupled with a comprehensive technical review and the addition of high-quality link building, allowed the site to go from a slow decline to faster growth than it had seen in its 5-year history.
Refining Growth Targets
As a business, you have certain areas in which growth is most important. For this furniture store client, the area they were most passionate about was their modular and cloud sofa range. So, once we got the foundations of the new site, we set to work ensuring that their major terms were well taken care of. This came in two forms:
1. Local SEO Growth For Modular and Cloud Sofa Terms
A furniture store is most competitive when selling to local homes and businesses that don’t require long-distance shipping. So, as we built out the modular and cloud sofa pages, we also focused on getting rankings for these terms within local search rankings. This also allowed us to work within an area that was less competitive than simply targeting the entirety of Australia, which would have had diminishing returns given the feels involved in shipping nationally.
2. A Strong SEM Campaign
When developing an audience, you need to ensure that you are being seen wherever your audience is looking. So, as the site’s modular and cloud sofa terms were worked on, we supplemented their sales in the meantime with an SEM campaign focusing on strong ROAS within the local area. This allowed the client to gain sales and increase brand awareness as the SEO campaign brought more keywords into the top 5 positions.
The Results
Within the first year of the campaign, the client had gone from a steady decline in traffic and keywords to ranking within the top 3 for a wide array of high-value terms, including for their cloud and modular sofa terms that had been their major focus as a brand. This equated to over 521% keyword growth overall and traffic increases of approximately 643%. Naturally, we are thrilled to have been able to work with some of Melbourne’s many wonderful furniture stores, and we’re always looking forward to the next big furniture project.
