Growing online sales by 325% for retail giant
Technical SEO & strategic marketing build top line monthly sales for online powerhouse
The Very Group is the UK’s largest integrated retail and financial services provider, and operator of Very.co.uk and Littlewoods.com.
With over 100 years of history they bring together almost 2,000 brands that customers love, a seamless customer journey, and a range of flexible ways to pay.
The challenge
The team at Very.co.uk approached us initially to assist in reviewing their technical implementation of the then ATG 7 platform.
The Solution
Off the back of 3 initial projects our relationship developed into an on-going technical SEO campaign with the overall aim of increasing traffic generated from organic search channels.
Technical review & log file analysis
We delivered a series of technical consultations throughout the course of the campaign, including server log file analysis to better understand crawl frequency and efficiency for Very.co.uk. This in turn assisted the identification of issues that may be causing a block to organic visibility.
These reviews uncovered a wide range of technical issues, including large-scale content duplication, keyword cannibalisation, crawl inefficiencies and externally linked to errors. To put this into some perspective, we found over 11.2 million indexed URLs for a site that originally contained around 160,000 unique pages.
Keyword research & site architecture
The objective was to understand the full breadth of keyword search patterns and trends within Very’s UK retail market, through a search behaviour profiling study to understand market size, and prioritise for generating more organic search traffic.
Based on this data we identified opportunities for expanding existing keyword / page level targeting, and new content types to assist in capturing additional traffic. This lead to a full site architecture review in order to best assimilate those pages and maximise the flow link equity through the site.
Migration support – ATG 7 / ATG 10
We assisted in Very’s migration from ATG 7 retail platform to ATG 10 that provided enhanced capabilities for its users. We mitigated risk to organic stability by providing a full technical scope of the new ATG 10 platform, pre-migration checks & testing, followed by a post migration log file analysis to ensure there were no further issues.
Link auditing
As part of the technical campaign for Very.co.uk, we carried out on-going link auditing & clean-up work as a risk mitigation process to annul the effects of updates such as Penguin and negative SEO attempts that can harm the organic performance of URLs on the domain.
114,000 URLs across 6K domains were assessed for levels of risk, with 20% of the links requiring further action (disavow, manual removal, nofollow etc). This process has ensured stability and growth to Very’s organic visibility.
On-going consultancy
As part of the on-going campaign we executed a number of other consulting projects were executed, including:
- Competitor analysis
- Link realignment
- AJAX multi-select integration
- Structured data / knowledge graph opportunities
- Mobile SEO
- Crawl error monitoring
- “Classic” mobile search results
- App suggestions via App indexing
Very Case Study
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The results
This technical SEO campaign was part of a wider online marketing strategy resulting in a 220% increase in organic traffic, and a further 325% in organic revenue vs August 2012.
This was driven by the significant growth in organic search visibility, up 143% since campaign start according to data from Search Metrics:
