From plateaued SEO growth to +5% revenue in 12 months for a glassware manufacturer
A ecommerce SEO consultancy case study for Dartington Crystal
TURNING ORGANIC TRAFFIC AND REVENUE AROUND FOR A LEADING GLASSWARE ECOMMERCE STORE
INTRODUCING DARTINGTON CRYSTAL...
Dartington Crystal are one of the UK's leading brands of hand-made crystal glass - selling a range of glassware, homeware and gifts through their Magento website: dartington.co.uk
THE CHALLENGE:
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Restore and increase organic traffic levels
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Restore and increase organic sales
Against challenging post-pandemic market conditions and a legacy CMS, these two challenges combined saw organic sales slipping and organic traffic stagnating.
I was brought in for a 12 month engagement to focus on on-site and technical SEO changes to restore and grow organic revenue.
THE APPROACH...
With several months before the make or break trading period of Christmas the goal was to get hand's on and identify and fix as many high opportunity issues affecting the site. That should help to begin restore organic traffic to historic levels. Then the goal moved onto implementing plans and processes to grow the website further.
IMMEDIATE SEO FIXES
✅️ Restored the XML sitemap which had stopped working, impacting the ability for new products to be discovered
✅️ Cleaned up hundreds of of old inaccessible PDF catalogues, orphaned collections and orphaned products which affected discoverability
✅️ Fixed hundreds of vital broken internal links which connected key collections pages across the site
✅️ Organised the redirection of thousands of historic products which had 404'd. Implemented automatic rules to redirect discontinued products ongoing
✅️ Reconfigured the code of various fixed H-Tag's to better align overall page intent for key collections and products
STRATEGIC GROWTH
✅️ Mapped brand and commercial search demand over multiple years and countries to see changing industry patterns
✅️ Completed a deep competitor analysis to compare domestic vs international SEO investment
✅️ Fed into the redesign of menus to allow for deeper internal linking of niche collections pages
✅️ Realigned the blog content strategy focussing more on 'how to' glassware topics; a major gap in the keyword strategy
✅️ Executed a major expansion of collection pages focussing around seasonal demand (Christmas), anniversary birthdays and milestone occasions (weddings, graduations etc) to tap into huge, untapped search opportunities
THE RESULTS
+5%
YOY INCREASE IN ORGANIC REVENUE IN FIRST 12 MONTHS
+3.8%
YOY INCREASE IN ORGANIC TRAFFIC IN FIRST 12 MONTHS
ADDITIONAL BENEFITS
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Clearer, more efficient automatic handling of discontinued products
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Long term growth potential both with the collections and with the blog based on the number of untapped keywords
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Through clean up of legacy SEO issues so focus and investment can be made elsewhere
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Clear understanding of the industry movements and search competition both domestically and internationally
"Dan's deep expertise in technical SEO resulted in substantial enhancement's to our website's infrastructure, as well as a marked increase in our organic visibility"
Matt Jarrett
eCommerce Manager at Dartington Crystal