Challenge
In a shrinking market where high street retailers are facing difficulty, we worked with Paradox London to diversify their business away from Wholesale and increase their direct to consumer sales through SEO. There are around 235,000 marriages per year in the UK and this creates a huge demand online for high quality products at competitive pricing. POLARIS inherited a website in its infancy and was tasked with identifying how to improve rankings for core terms to drive traffic and then working to increase sales and online exposure as well. Working in unison with the business owner and marketing team, we developed a strategy designed to hit all three targets. With a small window of opportunity to capture brides and bridal parties a plan was put in place to focus on user experience, trust and authority to ensure both the initial visibility for people researching for a product and secondary searches for the final purchase was apparent. This included creating stepping points for web development to ensure the website meets what is now known as E-A-T or YMYL. The final element of the campaign had to focus around the needs of the business in terms of future growth, movement into new markets and negating the risk associated with a wholesale supplier to the struggling highstreet. By understanding these challenges, the market and the competition - we were able to distinguish the most valuable route to market for the business for long term revenue growth, not just short term online success.
Solution
Using Industry Data and Ecommerce SEO Experience to Capture Key Moments in the Buying Journey. Working with the client we created a core foundation for SEO success that would allow the business to grow in the future. This started with initial research into micro moments and research factors within the buying phase - such as the most popular websites for wedding advice - and a paid search campaign to identify average conversion rates within the website. With this we developed landing page layouts based on best practice and Google Search Engine Guidelines and provided our client with wireframes to follow. From this we improved category and product content and information, adapted returns policys, enhanced product purchase options, added new payment gateways and built a targeted onsite content and outreach plan to increase the equity of the website. By doing this we allowed opportuniy to increase rankings and traffic and subsequently audit this traffic for conversion or drop off points. We also looked at two types of competitors at this stage - highstreet retailers with an online presence and online competitors only. This ensured we were best placed to surpass both. We worked periodically over the course of 18 months to improve both on-page experience, content and offsite profile through exposure in the right magazines to increase rankings for core terms. Within 6 months of launching the account we aimed to be on page 1 for these terms, with the next 12 months spent working our way up the page to surpass competition.
Results
954% Increase in Organic Traffic By building exposure from outside of the blog we were able to drastically increase traffic to categories and products on the site 831% Increase in Visibility By working to increase core rankings, the website now shows over eight times more in search results than previously 245% Increase in Conversion Rates Based on UX work and testing, we have increased conversion rates significantly on the website
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