Madison Reed is an American brand delivering high quality hair care and hair color products. Founded in 2013 in San Francisco, Madison successfully took the leader spot not only through their online store and broad network of hair color bars around the United States, but also partnering with brands like Ulta, Sephora or QVC. So, starting cooperation with the client, we took on a challenge to go forward with the brand growth.
The client aimed to achieve and secure top rankings on the SERP for highly competitive hair coloring keywords (e.g.“hair coloring”, “balayage” and “brown hair care”). To help them with that, we strategically built backlinks and focused on creating valuable content based on thorough keyword research. This way we provided the target audience with the topics they want to read about, without risking content duplication.
After conducting a briefing with the client, we knew we needed to reach American women aged 18 to 70 who color their hair at home or in a salon and prioritize high-quality, trustworthy products. To do so, we had to position Madison Reed and its exceptional hair care products prominently among globally renowned hair care brands, such as L’Oreal.
To ensure the target audience completes their customer journey and makes a purchase, we need to guarantee a pleasant website experience and present the brand as an expert in its niche. We aimed to achieve this by preparing a list of SEO recommendations for the client to implement and writing highly specialized web content.
We started our cooperation by performing a detailed SEO audit, which also included our recommendations. It was done as a single project, and was delivered to Madison Reed in mid-January 2023.
Madison Reed has its own skilled marketing team but needed some help with SEO tasks. After they reviewed the findings we included in the SEO audit and being impressed with our insights, they decided to start a regular collaboration with us – which took place at the end of June that same year.
We devised an SEO strategy prioritizing work that required less technical SEO enhancements, respecting their engineering constraints and other roadmap initiatives. To improve the competitive keyword positions and increase organic traffic, we focused on:
Month to month, together we choose blog topics that fit Madison Reed’s brand values, prevailing hair trends and currently important products, and of course SEO potential. We also identify which pages need the most improvement.
In July 2024, we are planning to do another audit once their engineering team is ready to implement our technical recommendations.
Given the constraints of a custom-made CMS based on the Vue.js technology, we couldn’t implement all the changes we would like to the website. So instead, we focused on developing a strong content strategy. Madison Reed ran a blog, but did not have a solid SEO content strategy. They mostly published articles about their hair coloring products and some tips from their professionals. That caused issues like keyword cannibalization and non-optimized content that could do better in the SERP. But we knew the potential was huge because the Madison Reed’s team is made up of the best hair care specialists. We knew that together we could create content that would be useful to the user and well interpreted by search engine robots.
During our analysis of current content and keyword research for new potential blog ideas, we discovered that certain topics and keywords were causing issues like content cannibalization, where articles competed against each other in search rankings.
To address this, we started working on optimizing existing articles (to match them with the right keywords) and proposed blog topics that avoided cannibalization while still revolving around hair color and care. We prepared a list of the long-tail keywords, which our copywriter used for writing, always making sure the articles answered the search intent of the target audience.
Additionally, we aimed to highlight the unique qualities of Madison Reed’s products, such as their ammonia-free formulas or bleach-free options, by creating content around these features. Also, we incorporated trending hair care and beauty topics and optimized older blog posts for improved performance.
To keep the process of content creation organized and transparent, we compiled all crucial information – such as keywords, search volume, and comments – into a spreadsheet for Madison Reed to review and comment on before our content team started working on those pieces.
It’s important to add that each piece of content underwent a thorough review by Madison Reed for accuracy and adherence to their brand voice. Our copywriters closely followed the client’s detailed guidelines. Preparing a good brief and providing such materials always helps copywriters strongly.
Below are examples of the new content we created for Madison Reed, which have significantly contributed to increased visibility and organic traffic:
A well-planned and executed backlink building process is crucial these days, serving as a valuable complement to the onsite SEO efforts and an integral piece of the SEO puzzle.
We strived to create a link-building strategy to increase rankings of specific high-volume keywords. What made this task both challenging and rewarding was the website’s already impressive SEO metrics, including high Domain Authority (DA), Page Authority (PA), and Domain Rating (DR).
Additionally, as a well-established brand, Madison Reed engages in various marketing campaigns across multiple platforms. Running an off-site strategy for such big and well-recognized brands is somehow tricky because links to the website can show up naturally from all sorts of places.
This means we had to be extra careful to meticulously choose referring domains to avoid any adverse effects on the link profile.
Despite the challenges, our main goal with the link-building strategy was to get more referral backlinks for Madison Reed’s popular pages by boosting specific pages, aiming to increase their rankings in search results.
Alongside content creation, our ink-building strategy appeared to help deliver the desired results. For example, the Madison Reed’s site about balayage ranks in the 1st places for very important, general and highly competitive keywords now:
Here are some more examples of highly competitive keywords such as “dark brown hair dye,” “brown hair color,” and “chocolate brown hair color” reaching the first position, all thanks to our link-building efforts:
As you can see, these keywords have huge search volumes and they are very competitive.
Even though we couldn’t do as much as we wanted in terms of the technical side of SEO, we still managed to achieve better results than we initially expected. How? Simply, by focusing on what we could handle. It is always good to look for solutions, not to focus on problems. Also, working together with a committed client brings the best results.
Our approach described earlier, brought the following results:
RESULT 1
50,1% increase in search visibility in September 2023, and 76,9% in January 2024 (expected growth: 15-20%)
Source: Search Console
Source: Data from Google Search Console in our monthly report made in LookerStudio
RESULT 2
41% increase in organic traffic (expected growth: 20%)
January 2023 in comparison to January 2024
Source: Ahrefs
RESULT 3
33% increase in revenue generated by organic traffic (expected growth: 20%)
You know that overtaking your rivals in search results is all about having a solid SEO plan.
Reach out and we’ll help you figure out which SEO services will improve your brand’s visibility and drive more traffic to your website.
