THE OPPORTUNITY
Unique Vintage (UV), which sells vintage-inspired clothing online and in a retail store, found itself in a perfect storm of opportunity. While vintage swim styles emerged as a hot trend, the company had to begin competing against new – and much larger – retailers for the most valuable real estate on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). To prepare for the swimwear sales peak, which occurs in springtime, Courtney Lear Wallace, Director of Digital Marketing & Ecommerce at UV, and her digital agency, EXCLUSIVE, launched a plan well ahead of the 2017 season to optimize key product pages and win coveted SERP real estate.
While the team maintained organic rank for crucial topics, UV’s swimwear pages experienced a 10% decrease in organic traffic compared to the same period in 2016. Changes to the Google SERP – Google 4-pack ads, specifically – pushed organic listings for high-performing keywords below the fold.
THE SOLUTION
UV and EXCLUSIVE turned to BrightEdge Intent Signal to increase site traffic and revenue during its most critical shopping season. The team took three steps:
- Loaded UV’s top 250 Pay-Per-Click (PPC) keywords into the BrightEdge platform as a unique keyword group. These were the keywords most important to the success of the company’s new visitor acquisition campaign.
- Analyzed this PPC keyword group using BrightEdge Intent Signal to see which keywords had organic listings above the fold and whether UV content pages rankedabove the fold for those keywords. In minutes, Intent Signal categorized the keywords into four groups: Defend, Optimize, Create, and Collaborate. Defend means that both the keyword and its corresponding UV content page have organic web listing above the fold on the SERP. Optimize means that the keyword has organic listing above the fold, and the UV content page is just below the fold, but within “striking distance”. Create means that the keyword has organic listing above the fold, but UV has no content page that ranks for this keyword within the top 100 spots on SERP. Collaborate means that the keyword does not have any organic listing above the fold.
- Launched a PPC optimization test for each keyword across four categories: Defend, Optimize, Create, and Collaborate.
The team discovered that the Defend category experienced a 10% lower bounce rate on average. All other categories saw higher Click-Through-Rate (CTR) from PPC ads. The team also learned that Cost-Per-New-Visitor was comparable for Defend and other keyword groups.
THE RESULTS
UV and EXCLUSIVE now have the insights to maximize their PPC budget. “These are insights we would have never gained, had it not been for the knowledge received from BrightEdge,” said Mike Frekey, PPC & Amazon Specialist at EXCLUSIVE. To accelerate visitor acquisition, the team will increase PPC budget for keywords in the categories where UV content is not shown above the fold. To prioritize the acquisition of new visitors with strong site engagement, they will spend PPC ads for keywords in the Defend category.
It’s exciting to have actionable data to back up our strategy in the often-nebulous space of SEO / SEM. BrightEdge Intent Signal helps us take away the guesswork.