WELHOF +159% ORGANIC SALES GROWTH WITH SECOND-HAND PRODUCTS

By focusing on the customer journey, technology & email.

Growth in number of turnover YoY

+ 0 %

ROSS (Return on SEO Spend)

+ 0 %

Increased market share

+ 0 %

About Welhof

Welhof is the market leader as a supplier of refurbished/second-hand white goods. However, Welhof also competes with parties such as Coolblue and Mediamarkt with new products.

Second-hand/refurbished products can be of great environmental benefit. This is because the life cycle of a second-hand/refurbished product extends its lifespan. Good for the environment and your wallet!

The issue

Welhof’s ambition was to increase turnover through Organic search. The question for us was how to beat the tough competition, make the SEO content pay off and, of course, how to increase SEO revenue.

Besides that, Welhof was facing a number of challenges organically: second-hand/refurbished market competes with new products, 98% of the brand category pages were not indexed, due to high turnover rates and low stocks of products, many customers searching for products land on a sold-out item and leave the website and strong organic competition from Coolblue, Witgoedoutlet & Witgoedhandel de Zwaan.

Research, potential and organic ROI

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

Category-level determination of potential, performance and margins.
Findability and indexing of categories, products and blogs.
Customer journey analysis to increase E-commerce conversion rate.

The budget is not sufficient to optimize every page. Together with Welhof, we chose to focus on three categories that show great potential from both a business and SEO perspective.

Welhof has a webshop with more than 200,000 pages, three quarters of which were not indexed by Google.

The solution & implementation

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

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

From these phases, a content plan emerged with which we could connect the potential customer with Welhof at each stage.

The website was not being indexed. The question that arises here: which pages are affected and is there a pattern visible? To formulate a solid conclusion, we decided to split up the website’s sitemap.xml. By analyzing the indexation per sitemap.xml, we were able to identify the bottlenecks. We then improved the indexation process by correctly setting pagination and internal link structure between category pages and blogs. This way, crawlers can also find products, categories and blogs deeper in the website through multiple references.

Finally, we found that a lot of traffic was being sent from search results to sold-out products, which meant Welhof was losing customers. We gave customers the option to choose an alternative product directly or leave your email address for a notification when this product comes back in stock. Through automated email, we can offer the customer an option they are looking for: a relevant product in stock.

The results

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