Case study
From zero conversions to two hundred and seventy-six
Certified organic livestock farming with direct online sales · When the product is good but the website doesn’t do it justice
Do you remember when buying meat online seemed like a bit of a novelty? This client had been rearing certified organic, native-breed cattle on a 100 per cent grass-fed diet for years, and was selling directly to consumers via their own online shop.
The product wasn’t the problem. The problem was that, in the period leading up to our intervention, the shop was recording zero conversions. Zero – not just a few.
In the equivalent period afterwards, there were 276. Let’s get started:
0 → 276
conversions during the period
+45,01%
organic search users
83
keywords ranked No. 1
80%
maximum visibility achieved
1. The starting point
The audit was carried out in March 2017: website technical audit, backlink analysis and organic search ranking analysis. From there, the analytics baseline was defined for the period from 30 April to 9 October 2017, and the intervention was measured from 10 October onwards.
The snapshot of the baseline period:
- 6,120 users and 9,132 sessions in just over five months.
- Conversion rate 0.00% and zero objectives achieved. The shop had traffic but was not making sales through that channel.
- The email channel was negligible: 7 users and 8 sessions over the entire period.
- Organic search brought in 3,681 users, 56.85% of the total.
2. What we did
A meat catalogue has one particular feature that works in its favour: people search by cut. Let me explain 🙂 They don’t search for ‘organic meat’; they search for ‘entraña’, ‘morcillo’, ‘aguja’ or ‘espaldilla’. And they search for specific cuts. It’s clear that there is much greater demand for these specific terms than for the generic term, and that demand is also much better qualified.
That’s why the strategy was to build a structure where every cut and every batch had its own dedicated space, rather than a flat catalogue where everything competes with everything else.
Work carried out between October 2017 and July 2018:
- Sitemap and new architecture delivered in November 2017, with a dedicated SEO strategy launched that same month.
- Category content and articles to cover the long tail of cuts, batches and culinary uses.
- Eight monthly social media reports tracking the community, reach and engagement, coinciding with the opening of a physical retail outlet and participation in two industry trade fairs.
- Ongoing monitoring of 142 keywords across four search engines, with a monthly ranking report since March 2018.
- Launch of the email marketing channel, which went from non-existent to achieving the highest conversion rate on the entire site.
3. The results
| Metric | Baseline period | Intervention period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Users | 6.120 | 8.578 (+40,16%) | Analytics · measured |
| Sessions | 9.132 | 12.815 (+40,33%) | Analytics · measured |
| Conversion rate | 0,00% | 276 | Analytics · measured |
| Organic users | 3.681 | 5.338 (+45,01%) | Analytics · measured |
| Organic sessions | 5.123 | 7.518 (+46,75%) | Analytics · measured |
| Email users | 7 | 222 | Analytics · measured |
| Email conversion | - | 7,11% | Analytics · measured |
Comparison of two equivalent periods: 10 October 2017 – 21 March 2018 versus 30 April – 9 October 2017. The organic channel accounts for 133 of the 276 conversions, or 48.19 per cent. Email, with just 222 users, accounts for 31: it is the site’s channel with the highest conversion rate.
In terms of search engine rankings, the set of 142 keywords across four search engines achieved 80 per cent overall visibility in May 2018, with 83 keywords ranking first in desktop search results. And something rarely seen: simultaneous first-place rankings across all four search engines for virtually the entire product range – the cuts of meat and the five batches in the catalogue.
4. A warning sign
June 2018 saw a decline. The number of top-ranked positions fell from 83 to 72, and visibility dropped from 80% to 78%. Projects do not follow a straight line, and neither does this one: in a seasonal catalogue such as this, with stewing meat seeing a dip in demand during the summer, this trend is to be expected and was reported as such.
I suggest you always ask for the full series rather than just the best month. A project that only shows you the peaks is hiding the shape of the curve from you, which is precisely what you need to know to plan for the following year.
To sum up: does your website speak the same language as your customer?
Basically, that’s the job. This catalogue didn’t win because it talked about ‘high-quality organic meat’. It won because it had a page for the shank, another for the shoulder and another for the family pack, and because that’s exactly what people are looking for.
Three things for tomorrow. Firstly, make a list of what your customers call the products you sell, not what they’re called in your internal catalogue. Secondly, check that you’ve set up your targets: if your analytics show zero conversions, it might not be that you’re not selling anything, but that nobody’s tracking it. And thirdly, don’t dismiss email as outdated: in this project, 222 email users converted better than 5,000 search users.
Remember, at the end of the day, it’s all about giving a name to everything you sell 😉
