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Shopix, an e-commerce store, uses SEMrush to move away from ad-dependent ROI to organically driven sales, reaching a turnover of €480,000/year
"It is our main tool for monitoring SEO work. There is a high correlation between business success and SEO metrics. Taking into consideration only paying customers, the overall success of Shopix’s SEO strategy now brings in 400,000 users per year, resulting in an annual turnover of more than €400,000/year coming from organic sales only."
About Shopix:
Established in 1980, Shopix is one of the oldest household and gardening goods stores in France and French-speaking overseas territories, with a total of 35 shops. A family business, Shopix specializes in the sale and distribution of products designed to make your daily life easier: tools, DIY, gardening, auto-moto, outdoor, household, kitchen and wellness products. With a storage area of over 6,000m² in Andrézieux-Bouthéon they are able to quickly serve their customers and deliver any goods in the shortest time.
Business challenge
Having a historically well-built business process Shopix has been doing well over the years. However, once Shopix started selling on Internet practically all of its sales were coming from advertising efforts and there was a severe lack of any organically driven sales. “Shopix’s ROI was solely dependent on investment in advertising, which you have to constantly renew. With organic you can get sales for life,” explains Romain Pautrat, Shopix’s Traffic Manager.
Since they have launched online services, Shopix’s visibility on the web has become crucial. “As an e-commerce website we always need to boost traffic and analyze competition. It is also very important to have page rankings in the top 10 of Google. Two years ago we ranked for 2,000 keywords and had about 10,000 visitors per month,” Romain describes the key pillars and challenges of every online business.
Further, Romain needed a SaaS solution that would make online reporting easy in order to provide key statistics and results to the company executives. “It was essential to show the impact of our SEO work and the results we have achieved. With our legacy report that wasn’t easy at all,” says Romain.
Solution
When deciding on the new SEO platform Shopix didn’t have many doubts. “We chose SEMrush as it is the leading SEO product offering a lot of tools and regular updates. It is the best-known software with most keywords,” says Romain. “SEMrush was recommended by a lot of people in the industry and the choice was easy.”
“It is our main tool for monitoring SEO work,” continues Romain. “There is a high correlation between business success and SEO metrics as SEO visits engage more visits through SEA and retargeting. We use the classic SEO metrics such as page bounce rate, keyword position, number of indexed pages, backlinks and referring domains, authority score and so on.”
Romain began his SEO work with website optimization. “The first strategy was to identify the best keywords with the most potential. Then we categorized them, reclassified the whole website according to those keywords and relaunched.” For example, keywords like ‘bâche’ and ‘jardinage’ have been discovered and introduced.
“SEMrush helped us discover our competitors’ strategies through their adwords and organic search mix. Competitors analysis facilitates ideas generation too,” says Romain. “It is also SEMrush’s ability to identify where referrals are coming from and where new opportunities for link building are. That enabled such an improvement in our SEO.”
The results are truly impressive. The number of keywords Shopix ranks for has grown tenfold, amounting to 20,000 keywords, whose positions they check in the Position Tracking tool. Bounce rate used to be 70%, this has now gone down to 50%. “And these are better quality customers who are more interested in our products. They spend more time on the website and make more purchases,” highlights Romain. Shopix not only drove traffic to the website - they have now got customers with a buyer intent.
Inevitably that affected sales performance. From about 10,000 monthly organic visits to the website, in just about 2 years Shopix have now reached about 40,000. “Taking into consideration only paying customers, the overall success of Shopix’s SEO strategy now brings in 10,000 active customers per year, resulting in an annual turnover of about €400,000/year coming from organic sales only,” summarizes Romain. The SEO revenue is growing, and the advertising costs, which could easily reach €20,000/month only for SEA, are going down.
Moreover, such intense work is done by only three specialists. “We don’t have to hire additional SEO specialists as so many processes are automated and we have all the data we need for our analytics needs.”
Results
- Shopix established a strong online presence in the market, achieving a SEO turnover of about €400,000 per year
- Being mostly physical with truck stores and brick and mortar shops since its foundation, SEO played a paramount role in adding and developing an online branch to Shopix’s business. With the help of SEMrush, they drove organic traffic as well as more engaged customers to the website.
- Advertising and labour expenses are minimized thanks to SEMrush’s efficiency
- As the tool provided so many capabilities to improve organic traffic and to select better keywords for ads, Shopix even managed to gradually reduce their advertising expenses. Process automation optimized the workload and removed the need to grow the team.
- Fast, regular and informative reporting
- Shopix can now clearly demonstrate the results of their SEO work and its positive effect on the business to the management in a simple and comprehensible format.
