HOW TO INCREASE SALES 16 TIMES IN 2 YEARS

A story with a good ending about how correct budgeting, sometimes against the wishes of the client, patience and an ironclad strategy helped to increase organic traffic and sales several times. Read to the end and find insights for your business.

See the review of Sergey Parnyvoda, founder of furniture webstore roomdepot.in.ua, about our work.

Client

The main specialization of the Room Depot web store is the sale of kitchen furniture and beds (metal, wooden, bunk beds, etc.). The company’s competitive advantage is high-quality raw materials and low delivery costs, which should be especially appreciated by customers from distant regions.

The сlient does not set up a Google Ads and implement SEO. The client made independent attempts to promote the company on forums and social networks. The average website traffic at that time was 250 visits per month, the number of sales per month was one.

Strategy

Our client Sergey was only focused on SEO. After analyzing its competitors in the furniture market, we proposed a strategy of combined work — SEO and Paid Ads. We decided to divide the marketing budget. Spend 80% of the total budget for search engine optimization and only 20% for Google Ads.

At the start, three specialists worked with the project, now there are five marketers (analyst, account manager, link builder, PPC specialist, head of the advertising department), and copywriters.

SEO

The Room Depot website was developed with OpenCart. The difficulty was that we did not have all the necessary access to it. We couldn’t start to operate fully with the project.

We thought about how to solve the problem. There was an idea to create a new website. We started to test the waters. We estimated the cost of design, programming and plugins. We came to make a website on the Horoshop platform. From the point of view of spending time and finances, this option seemed to us the best.

Content

Since the new site was without content, in the first month we started to intensively create content for it. We did some keyword research and started working on the main pages of the website. A month later, we had ten key sections of the website ready. Originally $ 42 was spent on content.

Our client could communicate with copywriters, edit their texts. This way the work progressed more quickly and efficiently. Over time, we gradually updated the content — from two to six and even seven thousand characters.

Check out the worksheet that has been updated as the content is posted on the website:

The size of the text that we were updating could be insignificant. The main thing is that the content is updated systematically. This is how Google understands that the content is being worked on, the posts are fresh, which means that the website has advantages over its competitors. The result is a rise to the top positions of the search.

We have improved all titles and descriptions. We also started technical optimization of the site: duplicates and redirects.

Take a look at the modified SEO tag setup we added on the first day to our test version of the website:

Backlinks

We used the Miralinks service to search and get backlinks. Бюджет на ссылки составлял 2 500 грн (~ $ 105) в месяц. The budget for building backlinks was $ 105 per month. It still allows us to gradually build up our backlink profile. When the website crossed the mark of 100 domains, organic traffic has started to grow faster.

Backlink results:

Pay attention if SEO work continues but organic website traffic is not growing. The problem may be in the domain. Check barracuda.digital/panguin-seo-tool for search engines penalties. This will save time for website rollout.

Search Ads

Along with the SEO launched Google Ads.

We have identified the target audience — people who are recently purchasing of a dwelling and people who are doing extensive repairs.

Since we are a Google partner, we started with a small advertising budget: of $ 84. Google gave a bonus: another $ 100.

If people are looking for a bed or kitchenette, they are already aiming to purchase we anticipated. Our theory was true with the kitchenettes. Selling the beds was more difficult. It turned out that people who just googled beds did not always understand exactly what they wanted. The conversion rate was higher when users searched for a bed from a certain material or a specific brand. Moreover, the competition for branded keywords is lower, which means less cost per click.

We tested different ad formats. We tried search, dynamic remarketing, and similar audience targeting.

For a month of work, we increased sales and reinvested more funds in advertising and got even more applications. We made the right bet on the budget division, setting Search Ads with SEO. It was inappropriate to spend the budget on search engine optimization alone, waiting for results, perhaps several years. Sales increased to 15 in a month, in line with our plan.

Growth chart of backlinks on the old Room Depot domain (roomdepot.com.ua) to the redirect to roomdepot.in.ua. It is the quality of backlinks that negatively affected the website promotion:

Facebook Ads

We launched product and dynamic advertising. We came to the conclusion that the results depend on the goods. For example, advertising for wooden beds was unprofitable. There was a problem with Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics. For example, Facebook was showing 1,200 clicks, while Google Analytics was showing 650 clicks. Not all people reach a website with ads. But in our case, more did not reach than expected.

There were few sales. Therefore, we stopped advertising on the bed. But we are actively testing and improving ads on the kitchenette on Facebook.

Marketplaces

We noticed that the competitors of Room Depot are getting growth of visitors from Hotline. After talking with our client, we started testing this platform: we prepared a feed, uploaded and set an advertisement. We connected Price.ua, but quickly realized that cooperation with this is not profitable. Thanks to Google Ads, we knew the cost of the application. On Price.ua, an application cost three times more than on Hotline.

Results of work

We started with Room Depot with one sale per month and 250 visitors per month. Exactly one year later, the site was already visited by 685 people. On the one hand, site traffic tripled, but on the other hand, there were few orders.

How can this be explained?

There are many factors that affect the rate of website growth. Including the quality of the domain.

For example, if ten websites on the same subjects perform the same SEO, then some of these sites will shoot up to the top in the first months. Will be some websites that grow slowly but surely. And a few more websites with very slow acceleration. So a website with a slow but steady acceleration for us became Room Depot. We attracted the first thousand visitors to the website only after a year and a half of work. But the growth from one thousand to one and a half thousand visitors began in just four months.

After two years of operation, there were 1,434 organic conversions to the website. The quality of traffic has also improved. If before the conversion was below 0.5, now it is more than 1.

Our work with this client is not over yet. We continue to test new options and methods for increasing the number of applications.

Traffic growth from October 2017 to November 2019:

Opinion

Basis of working with Room Depot, we can say that digital agencies should not be afraid to take the initiative and offer clients their own promotion methods. For example, if we worked with Room Depot only with SEO (as the founder wanted), our cooperation would probably end in three or four months, due to the lack of any significant results. And thanks to the marketing tactics we proposed, in the first month of work we managed to receive ten times more applications than before.

One more tip. Take your time and give undue expectations to the client, promising the moon and the stars. SEO gives good results, but not instant results. As we said, if earlier it was possible to promise a visible effect after six months of search engine optimization, now the terms are from six months to two years.