Heal’s – Increased Organic Traffic By 92%

At the beginning of 2020 I began working with Heal’s, a leading lifestyle and interiors brand in the UK. In this case study, I will break down the brief and explain how I managed to help increase their organic traffic by 92%.

Brief

When Heal’s re-platformed in 2015, it lost roughly 40% of its organic search traffic. Whilst their traffic made some recovery over the next four years, it began to decline again in 2019. The response proposed by Heal’s existing agency was speculative and not cost-effective, an issue many companies find when working with SEO agencies. There was a need for an SEO expert to assess the situation, make clear recommendations and help deliver them. For this company, strong prioritisation and an SEO Consultant who works in house within the team was essential.

Strategy & Approach

  1. Much tidier website structure. Whilst the Heal’s site structure wasn’t in terrible shape, there were clearly improvements to be made. I worked alongside both external and internal developers to clean up and streamline the site structure.
  2. Clearer index : follow rules. When I began working with Heal’s I realised there was a lot of confusion over this and work was needed. I created and helped to implement a set of clearer index : follow rules that now cover the whole site.
  3. More focused content on web and blog pages. For this approach I liaised with the in-house copywriter to create SEO-optimised copy. Working flexibly alongside her I was able to offer targeted keywords recommendations and help formulate a content strategy with a large focus on SEO. Whilst campaign-driven content was still necessary, my guidance meant every word was optimised for Google.
  4. Transition from Magento to Magento 2. Having lost lots of organic traffic when re-platforming in 2015, it’s no surprise that Heal’s was keen to get it right this time. I offered clear guidelines on how the Magento 2 site should be structured to optimise for SEO. I also advised on how to migrate data from the existing site.
  5. More focus on the highest opportunity areas. I identified keywords that presented lots of opportunity and were relevant to the company but that weren’t being capitalised on. On the back of this I created a series of recommendations to target the keywords. This ranged from site structure to content suggestions.

Results

  • The biggest transformation was in natural search traffic. When I first started working with Heal’s, organic traffic had been down 40% for the last six months or so. For the last six months organic traffic has been up 52% – a massive reversal.
  • Heal’s Search Metrics Visibility is now the best it has been in recent years.
  • Overall search rankings for non-branded terms have increased massively. They’re now the best the company has seen in years.
  • From the start of my work at Heal’s until now, just over six months later, their rankings on SERPs have seen a sharp rise. They’re now ranking in the top 3 and 10 positions for more keywords than ever before.
Heals SEO ranking

Client Testimonial

“With Amine you get someone who will dedicate himself to finding out what you need to do to get improvement and will then help you achieve that improvement. He has good expertise and knows how to apply this to solving your problems… Having Amine work as a consultant with dedicated days but also be ‘on call’ (within reason) has meant that communication channels are short and quick. We genuinely feel he is working as a member of our team, not as an outsider, and he gets his hands dirty whenever required. Although he’s the expert, he remains open to debate and discussion which means we sometimes amend his recommendations.”

David Kohn, Customer & eCommerce Director at Heal’s

Why did you decide to use an SEO Consultant instead of an agency?

“I have used several SEO agencies over the past decade. They tend to start well but run out of ideas pretty quickly. Their recommendations can be very formulaic. You normally get the more senior people at the start, but soon find you’re working with junior execs who know little more about the subject than you do. High charge out rates mean you rarely get good value for money for long.” – David Kohn, Heal’s