Welhof +159% organic revenue growth with second-hand products

THE

CHALLENGE

Welhof had the ambition to increase revenue via organic search. The question for us was how to beat the fierce competition, make the SEO content pay off and, of course, increase SEO revenue.

Welhof also faced a number of organic challenges: the second-hand/refurbished market competes with new products, 98% of the brand category pages were not indexed, high turnover and low stock levels meant many customers searching for products landed on a sold-out item and left the website, and there was fierce organic competition from Coolblue, Witgoedoutlet & Witgoedhandel de Zwaan.

OUR

RESEARCH & GOALS

Based on in-depth market research, we decided to focus the SEO strategy on three pillars:

Determining potential, performance and margins at category level.
Visibility and indexing of categories, products and blogs.
Customer journey analysis to increase the e-commerce conversion rate.

The budget isn't sufficient to optimise every page. Together with Welhof, we chose to focus on three categories that show a lot of potential from both a business and an SEO perspective.

THE

SOLUTION & IMPLEMENTATION

To realise growth, we focused on the three categories with the highest margins and potential. Using various data sources, we arrived at the categories washing machines, dryers and fridges. For each category, we researched the customer journey and divided it into five stages:

Awareness (article)
Consideration (advice)
Decision 1 (product category)
Decision 2 (product category combined with brand name)
Transaction (product name).

These stages produced a content plan that lets us connect potential customers with Welhof at every stage.

website was not being indexed. The question this raises: which pages are involved and is there a visible pattern? To reach a sound conclusion, we decided to split up the website's sitemap.xml. By analysing indexing per sitemap.xml, we were able to identify the bottlenecks. We then improved the indexing process by setting up pagination correctly and improving the internal link structure between category pages and blogs. This way, crawlers can also find products, categories and blogs deeper in the website via multiple references.

Finally, it turned out that a lot of traffic from search results was being sent to sold-out products, so Welhof was missing out on customers. We gave customers the option to choose an alternative product straight away or leave their email address for a notification when the product is back in stock. Through automated email, we can offer customers what they're looking for: a relevant product that's in stock.

THE

RESULTS

Whichever way you look at it, every company ultimately looks at what the SEO strategy has delivered. Often in euros, and at DGTLbase we understand that all too well. An SEO strategy has to pay off, and for Welhof it did.