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International marketing agency doubles organic revenue for interior decor eCommerce

“SEMrush provides a holistic overview of our client’s performance. This is especially valuable when a client hasn’t set up other analytics correctly. We can depend on SEMrush to offer really useful insights into the overall traffic trends, as well as where the opportunities lie.”

Sam Makwana, Senior SEO Specialist, Impressive Digital

About Impressive Digital:

With fresh ideas and innovative approaches to digital marketing, the Impressive team works to provide clients with a truly integrated strategy. They drive business performance and deliver a truly personalized customer experience in Australia, the USA, and beyond.

Business Challenge: grow the previously stagnant organic traffic and online sales

Ivory & Deene is an online interior décor store offering a wide range of lighting, living and outdoor products. While the company had found success in its 18 years, it wanted more. The past few years had been marked by very flat growth, providing consistent sales and organic traffic but no major improvement. To remedy this, Ivory & Deene turned to Impressive in November 2019 to help develop a strategy that would propel it to new success in the new decade.

Impressive Digital’s SEO team was given the task of improving the organic visibility of the products and achieving the client’s objective of increasing their online revenue. The KPI set was a minimum of 6x ROI (retainer) in revenue each month with a $2,000 monthly SEO retainer.

Solution: Data-backed keyword strategy

Keyword research

Impressive Digital’s strategy was driven heavily by keywords relevant to the Ivory & Deene brand. They began with research via SEMrush to identify the target keywords, conducted over three phases:

Phase 1 - Indexed Keywords
The team extracted a list of organic keywords that were already indexed for the website with the Organic Research tool.

Phase 2 - Competitor Keywords
Next, they benchmarked Ivory & Deene against major online competitors, selecting based on product range and common keywords.

SEMrush’s Keyword Gap tool then allowed them to identify which keywords were indexed for the competitors but missing in Ivory & Deene.

Phase 3 - Keyword Variations
The Impressive team used the Keyword Magic Tool to find variations of certain popular keywords. An example for ‘hammocks’ is shown below:

They combined the keywords from these phases and identified three distinct ways in which an audience could be targeted for Ivory & Deene to improve organic rankings, traffic and conversions.

1. TOFU (Top of the Funnel) - these are the keywords that could be targeted on the main category pages. For example, the keyword “lighting online australia” could be targeted on the main Lighting category.
2. MOFU (Middle of the Funnel) - these keywords could be targeted for the “sub-category” pages. For example, targeting the keyword “chandeliers australia” on the “Chandeliers” sub-category.
3. BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel) - The Impressive team discovered a huge number of keyword opportunities for product pages. Although the search volumes for some of these pages would be lower than category or subcategory pages, the potential conversion rate could be much higher. For example, targeting the keyword “french chandeliers” on the relevant product page.

Next, Impressive created a shortlist of high priority search queries and URLs based on the following criteria:

Product categorization, e.g. Lighting, Living & Outdoor
Competitor Intersect i.e. volume of competitors ranking for a given query
TIDIFF (Traffic Index Differential) – to prioritize keywords based on traffic potential
Overall relevance and attainability

Once the target keywords and URLs were discussed with and finalized by Ivory & Deene, the agency began the process of preparing a detailed brief for their writers to create new content for thin pages. In addition to on-page copy, they also looked at FAQs from “People Also Ask” section on Google SERP (see below) and added those recommendations to the content brief (if relevant).

Ongoing Optimization

The Impressive technical team has been gradually working through the hundreds of product pages on the Ivory & Deene site, ensuring on-page elements comply with Google’s best practice.

Regular deep technical audits with the SEMrush Site Audit tool were done to identify and resolve technical SEO issues.

Using SEMrush’s Backlink Gap tool, Impressive researched current referring domains to each of the target URLs and compared them against competitors’ referring domains.

Results

Organic eCommerce revenue grew by 99% while organic sessions grew by 131% in 9 months compared to the same period before the transformation.: These results proved that Impressive’s strategy was not only bringing customers to the website but putting money in the till.

Total clicks almost quadrupled in 6 months.

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