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Better Than Par in Competitive Ecommerce
The ChallengeÂ
The online golf retailer space is becoming more and more competitive every year. There is also a growing market for golf equipment. Golf Datatech states, “According to the 2019 report, the golf equipment business grew by 4.1 percent in 2018 compared to 2017, reaching $8.41 billion.” With so much opportunity, but so much competition, it is easy to get lost in the shuffle. Our challenge was to help one of the top golf retailers in the country continue to grow despite new online golf retailers popping up seemingly every day. To beat the competition and get a larger share of the growing pie, significant effort and granular focus was given to both SEO and Paid Search strategies. Â
The Objectives
Objective #1: Increase SEO traffic by 5% year over year
Objective #2: Increase SEO transactions by 15% year over year
Objective #3: Increase SEO revenue by 20% year over year
Objective #4: Increase PPC spend while maintaining a 6 ROAS or better
Target Audience
Strategy
%
Increase in SEO Traffic
%
Increase in SEO Transactions
%
Increase in SEO Revenue
Implementation
On-Page Optimization, Existing Pages:
- The SEO team focused extensively on optimizing current product pages in order to gain high rankings, generate more traffic, and increase sales.
- Significant focus was given to the on-page product descriptions, H1 tags, meta descriptions, title tags, and alt text for images.
On-Page Optimization, New Pages:
- The SEO & Content teams assisted with new product pages, creating a structure for the client to follow with content wire frames. This process helped the client differentiate their product descriptions from other golf retailers and ensure SEO best practices.
- The content team also helped the client build and structure multiple special pages, such as a general gift page, ‘Cyber Monday’ and ‘Black Friday’ Page, in order to increase sales for different queries and holidays.
Additionally, the SEO team made multiple technical recommendations including:
- Unblocking Google Mobile Bot Smart Phone user agent. The following user agent was being blocked, and unblocking it resulted in more mobile traffic: (Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +https://www.google.com/bot.html))
- Redirect mapping for site migration
- Performance testing for site migration
The Results Were Amazing
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This major national golf retailer saw huge increases in revenue through organic search. Additionally, despite early concerns that increase Paid Search spend would significantly reduce the ROAS, we were able to maintain a 6 ROAS with increased spend. This is a highly competitive space, with power brands like Dick’s Sporting Goods, Amazon, and Golf Galaxy. All these brands have huge budgets for digital marketing. We were able to not only compete but win market share in a highly competitive space.
- Objective #1: Increase SEO traffic by 5% year over year: We increased sessions by 19.59% (from 3,191,012 to 3,815,999)
- Objective #2: Increase SEO transactions by 15% year over year: We increased transactions by 32.93% (from 33,801 to 44,932)
- Objective #3: Increase SEO revenue by 20% year over year: We increased Revenue by 36.11% (from $5,630,770.69 to $7,664,156.25)
- Objective #4: Increase PPC spend while maintaining a 6 ROAS or better:
- Spend for 2018 was $1,292,967.96 and revenue was $7,800,385.92 for an ROAS of 6.03 (This includes Bing)
- Spend was increased by 27%
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