Worands wanted to develop its SEO efforts in order to decrease the amount the company was spending on paid campaigns in the Google search engine. They realized that a coherent SEO strategy would be a better investment for the company in the long term.
Being the industry leader in wholesale textiles and accessories, our client aimed for a steady increase in sales. To achieve this goal, we had to create a strategy that would drive more organic traffic that converts.
Our client knew the importance of visibility in search results. The goal here was to focus optimization on the most business-relevant keywords and boost their ranking for better visibility and traffic generation.
As we worked only on selected language versions from the client’s wide portfolio it was satisfying to observe how our domains performed compared to others. It was also a challenge too! Sometimes changes implemented globally on the store would affect the .de and .nl strategies. For us, it meant an ongoing focus on monitoring the process!
We started the whole process as we usually do – with an SEO audit that revealed a few areas for improvement on the Wordans’ homepage.
Our team was responsible for two language versions of Wordans’ websites – German and Dutch. After analyzing the homepages for these two markets, we discovered a few areas that required our attention. We decided to implement the changes right away – his is because the sooner the homepage is SEO-optimized, the better the chance for growth.
With that in mind, we optimized H1 and H2 titles within the page, making them more keyword oriented. The same rule applied to all alt texts and bold/strong tags implemented in the page content.
An example of changes implemented in the DE website title:
From:
Großhandel: T-shirts, Bekleidung und Accessoires | Wordans DeutschlandTo:
First things first – there is no effective SEO strategy without choosing the right keywords to work with.
Our client knew the importance of keyword phrases, which made the whole process a lot easier. They provided us with the list of business-relevant keywords they’d like to optimize the website for. At the same time, we prepared a thorough analysis of keywords – analyzing not only the market keywords but also the phrases used by the competition and ones complementary to our main keywords.
Together we created a list of keywords that would be our base for all SEO activities (content, link building, optimization, etc.). The key was to differentiate the list – we included long-tail phrases showing the business potential, brand keywords, more specific ones and phrases that tackled our website topic.
Examples of keyword categories we included in the strategy:
The keyword list remains confidential.
Once we had keywords to work with – we could move on to optimizing & include the phrases in the website elements.
During the audit, we discovered that a lot of meta descriptions and titles required optimization. On one hand, the titles were, in most cases, too long, didn’t include the right keywords to make the website visible to the target group, or were duplicated.
Here’s an example of a title tag displayed in search results that is too long:
We prepared new title content that met the requirements of pixel length, keyword richness, and avoided duplication.
Meta descriptions were often duplicated and a little too long.
Description duplication example.
While they don’t have a direct impact on Google ranking, meta descriptions play a big part in website CTR. For this reason, we optimized them using previously selected keywords and focussed on making them both descriptive and attractive for potential users.
Whenever possible, we aim to implement global solutions on the website to make our work more efficient.
After preparing correctly constructed titles and meta descriptions, we needed to unify the form the titles would take in search results. That’s why we globally implemented one title form. Here’s how the pattern looked in the final version:
The global ending was implemented in the website code & was automatically added to the pages.
After technical optimization, we moved on to create web content for product and category pages!
Wordans offers a vast range of products which makes their website rich in different categories and brand pages, not to mentione the number of single product pages. Such a large number of pages provides great potential for utilizing keyword-rich content.
In reality, brands and most categories on both domains (.de and .nl) were left with no descriptions, which needed to be fixed. For each page, we recommended the implementation of 300-400 words of text & prepared fitting descriptions for our client.
The text was added at the end of each page so as not to impact the current website design.
In the case of product pages – the situation wasn’t that bad. On both domains, the pages did contain descriptions, but the length wasn’t satisfactory and lacked SEO optimization within the content. This time, we decided to focus on expanding existing content on the most important product (business-wise) pages. All descriptions were optimized for SEO – we took care of the correct use of h2 headings, HTML tags, and internal linking.
An example of a worksheet for content development cooperation we used with the client
In addition to the descriptive content, we also developed the entire content approach for Wordan’s .de and .nl sites.
Knowing the importance of a holistic content approach, we analyzed the whole website in terms of content with an extra focus on communication language, brand’s tone of voice, its personality, and competitors’ content activity.
Based on the findings, we composed a Content Plan that, apart from the above mentioned analysis, contained:
An example of a part of Content Plan:
The whole document is 53 pages long.We know you’ll forgive us for not sharing all of them! 😉
Last but definitely not least – our developers took a closer look at Wordans’ website technical improvements such as page loading speed and core web vitals metrics.
Our developers analyzed both domains in terms of website loading speed and key Core Web Vitals metrics, checking desktop and mobile versions of the website and analyzing all core pages (homepages, single product, category pages, etc.)
An example of the report page
Based on the analysis, we provided the client with recommendations for improvements they could implement internally.
As part of the process, we also took care of Wordans’ link-building activities. The general part focused on developing high-quality link profiles for the website and obtaining links from local and topically-related domains.
The first phase was our standard procedure of strengthening our client’s domain authority. We used our pre-made list of referring domains and went through it to check if Wordans’ link profile covered all positions of those link sources. The list covered:
These links are easy to obtain but characterize in solid link juice to build up our domain.
Later on, we continued with our link building process – we obtained high-quality backlinks, only from strong domains that would fit Wordans’ industry topics.
During the process, we were creating 29 links per month.
Along with the regular link-building activity, we prepared sponsored content pieces. This type of activity is a perfect fit once you have keywords already ranked in TOP10 with the potential to reach higher positions.
An examples of sponsored content post preparation during the process:
Wordans.nl parameters and link profile before cooperation:
Wordans.nl parameters and link profile after cooperation:
Wordans.de parameters and link profile before cooperation:
Wordans.de domain parameters now:
During the 6 months’ cooperation with Wordans, we achieved significant improvements in terms of traffic and visibility.
After implementing initial optimizations, we observed a 25% increase in overall website traffic and nearly 15% growth in the number of transactions on the .de site within 2 months. Similarly, the .nl website experienced an 11% increase in total site visits, along with a 43% growth in transactions.
Wordans.de results April 2022 vs June 2022
In the case of the Dutch version of Wordan’s in just 2 months, e-commerce rate increases by 26%:
Organic traffic changes on .de and .nl domain during cooperation:
NOTE: During the cooperation, titles and urls were changed by a third party – the changes implemented on different markets were automatically set up on markets we were working on (.de and .nl domains). During the brief period, it had affected the visibility results until we requested a change to the titles prepared by our team. You’ll notice that on the screenshots below:
They are a really competent and committed team. The SEO process they offer is composed from the business point of view, fitting our business goals and supporting website performance. The process is transparent, well-planned and most importantly we started to see the results. They deliver detailed reports including data from analytical tools. A solid SEO provider.
