Performance Marketing, Retail

Head of the Class – MERGE (formerly BlueMoon Digital, Inc.) wins BrightEdge Edgie Award

BY: Matt NeSmith

PUBLISHED: 10/11/2018

We are pleased to announce that Blue Moon Digital, Inc. (now MERGE) has been selected as the recipient of a BrightEdge Edgie Award in the category of Performance and Results!

“BrightEdge’s awards program recognizes the excellent work done within the BrightEdge community by brands and agencies.”

Let’s look at how we worked with our client to achieve outstanding results.

So, here’s a little background to kick things off. We have been providing ongoing SEO strategy and execution for a prominent online and brick and mortar department store for the last 2 years. Over this time, they have continued to lean on our team more and more for digital strategy, requesting insights into their business and the direction they are looking to go.

In early 2018 this client hired a new Sr. Manager of Digital Strategy and our engagement and SEO involvement has continued to evolve. As part of this change grew a deeper relationship with their internal marketing teams as well as a better understanding of the initiatives they were putting into place. This meant we could align our strategy with their merchandising decisions and apply seasonal trends and other insights in conjunction with those initiatives.

We used Data Cube heavily to analyze each major site category. By pulling down the current search queries they were ranking for, and the performance of those queries, we could determine if we were hitting our mark regarding optimizations.

In some categories, we had begun to test using ‘affordable’ and ‘discount’ modifiers and were seeing great traction through those queries. This client is a discount retailer, but they sell name brand products. We found that these modifiers provided the relevance we needed for attracting the right type of customer without diluting the brand.

The next step was to then compare our site to the competition to identify any gaps in keywords or optimizations we had missed. Again, we turned to Data Cube and began to develop an updated strategy for core site categories with a heavy focus on capturing transactional search intent.

We then implemented this updated strategy in key areas to support the client’s Spring Marketing Calendar. This was done through updated metadata optimizations to increase CTR in the SERPs and through the addition of content on high-value landing pages. Additionally, we provided technical recommendations to clean up duplicate content (through canonicalization) and worked with their development team on updating their H tag elements.

With these optimizations in place, BrightEdge was updated with our newest keyword sets and we began to track the results of our efforts.

More importantly, the keyword strategy we developed sought to increase the relevance of the pages we were optimizing with the keywords we were targeting. This paid off greatly as we created a 39% increase in site conversion rate. This shows that the traffic we are driving to the site is highly relevant having found this client’s specific niche.

Ultimately all these increases in traffic and CVR resulted in an 80% increase in revenue, year over year for January through June.

Moving forward, this targeted strategy will be rolled out to other site categories, specifically those that pertain to the fall and winter season.

Congrats, team! Excited for what you guys accomplish this year!

 

Originally published on bluemoondigital.co and authored by Matt NeSmith, Senior SEO Strategist.