How 247 Blinds used SEO to put competitors in the shade

Journey Further received the ‘SEO‘ class at The Drum Awards for Marketing 2021 with its work with 247 Blinds. Here, the group behind the profitable entry share the inside story on this profitable venture…

The problem

247 Blinds compete in a extremely aggressive house, going up towards a lot larger and well-known manufacturers resembling Argos, Dunelm and Hillary’s. These competing websites have a lot bigger and extra authoritative hyperlink profiles – metrics that historically correlate with higher natural visibility.

Objectives for this marketing campaign couldn’t have been clearer, with 247 Blinds tasking Journey Further to obtain the following:

  • To enhance market share by 2%
  • Increase periods and income by 30%
  • Improve the hyperlink profile with excessive authority related protection
  • Carry out a clean migration to Magento 2

The technique

It’s not sufficient to be standard, you additionally want to be related. The relevancy of the content material that hyperlinks again to your website is necessary, nevertheless measuring and analysing how a machine understands content material and its context has traditionally been troublesome.

Instead, the business nonetheless depends on Domain Authority and hyperlink volumes – metrics that may simply be measured. Relevance is commonly the lacking piece of the puzzle.

We have developed our personal proprietary expertise – Salient – that makes use of IBM Watson’s Natural Language Processing machine studying engine to analyse and perceive content material in a approach comparable to how engines like google do. This permits us to analyse URLs in bulk – be it a hyperlink profile or website content material – and achieve perception into what subjects and phrases that content material is related to – in addition to different metrics resembling sentiment.

We can then align this perception with key phrase analysis and establish gaps in relevance. This perception then underpins our PR led hyperlink improvement exercise – to enhance the relevance of linking protection.

The marketing campaign

Our technique focussed on aligning the relevancy of linking protection to commercially worthwhile key phrases. We created 226 items of linking protection by means of a variety of PR led exercise with the major intention of accelerating the relevancy of hyperlink protection to be higher aligned with business search phrases.

Although the hyperlink profile stays one in every of the smaller, and the area one in every of the ‘least authoritative‘, the shift to improved and focused relevance has pushed substantial natural progress.

Our product led PR technique ensured the protection we generated was extremely related – each the copy on the web page and the publication itself. Fuelled by the NLU evaluation, our proactive press workplace exercise is tailor-made round key merchandise. Each month we tie these into topical themes and trending subjects in the media – from sleeping in a heatwave to an Easter themed mind teaser (on a blind, after all).

Our sturdy media relations inside the dwelling interiors and life-style press permit us to react shortly to advert hoc media requests, from sending merchandise for dwelling makeover shoots, to life-style imagery for a function. Our marketing campaign exercise is all the time centred round merchandise too, from motorised blinds serving to to forestall break-ins to the key objects that assist to promote our houses.

The technical SEO group was given a deadline to migrate the 247 Blinds web site from Magento 1 to 2 in This fall of 2020. We labored carefully with the consumer’s in-house dev group from the inception of the venture guaranteeing SEO fundamentals had been in place, finishing up; URL and content material mapping, technical audits and creating CMS requirement documentation.

As a consequence, there have been no decreases in visibility publish migration and 247 Blinds now has a stable base for future progress with the Magento 2 platform.

The key phrase ‘blinds’ attracts the lion share of search demand in the blind business, so to meet our market share progress goal we would have liked to enhance rankings for this particular time period.

We knew we had a stable hyperlink technique however on-page content material, in specific homepage copy wanted enchancment and with restricted house on the web page we knew we would have liked to have an clever, data-led answer – to obtain this we made diversifications to Salient for on-page content material use. When working the web page by means of Salient we noticed it was missing towards competitors and located a number of alternatives to make extra distinguished point out of goal subjects and in addition sub merchandise, eg venetian, shutters and samples.

The outcomes

Originally tasked with rising market share by 2%, we noticed it enhance from 5.1% to 8.6% (2019 to 2020). We overachieved the authentic goal and delivered a rise in market share of three.5%.

The exercise additionally elevated periods by 63% in addition to rising income by 58% (This fall year-on-year) – once more smashing the authentic goal of 30%.

We additionally managed to get 247 Blinds featured a number of occasions in excessive tier nationwide publications – The Daily Mail, The Sun, The Times, The Mirror, Evening Standard, Metro, Daily Express, Good Housekeeping, House Beautiful, Country Living, Ideal Home and so on – which hyperlinks properly again to the goal to enhance the hyperlink profile with excessive authority related protection. As you’ll be able to see, all of the above titles will not be solely extremely related but in addition have excessive authority.

In complete we achieved 320 items of product centered protection, 226 hyperlinks with a median Domain Authority of 62.5.

All of the above contributed to the common rank place enhancing from twenty sixth to 18th – up 30% (2019 to 2021). Plus, we additionally noticed periods enhance throughout all excessive precedence product areas eg Roller Blinds (70%+), Wooden Blinds (100%+) and Venetian Blinds (54%+), to title only a few.

Lastly, the migration over to the Magento 2 platform was successful and consequently, there have been no decreases in visibility publish migration and 247 Blinds now has a stable base for future progress with the Magento 2 platform.

“From the outset Journey Further recognized we had weak point in the relevancy of the hyperlinks pointing to our web site contributing to disappointing SERP given the ranges of SEO we had finished beforehand. Immediately they set about altering this with a centered plan the entire group purchased into. The outcomes got here shortly and have gained traction month on month with every beating the one earlier than in phrases of income and clicks. Great work!” – Glenn Parkin, e-ccommerce supervisor, 247 Blinds

This venture was a winner at The Drum Awards for Marketing 2021. Find out which competitions in The Drum Awards are currently open and don’t overlook to go to our new interactive calendar.

Recommended For You

Leave a Reply