How to promote new categories of a brand & increase traffic with SEO | Case Study

Becoming top-of-mind in a certain niche or industry often makes a brand feel like a hostage of their own name. This means when the brand decides to change or expand the range of products they offer online, customers will need time to start associating the brand with the new product categories. Here SEO comes handy. In this article, we share a case of our client and explain how you can bring new categories of your brand to the Top 10 and increase traffic on your website with Extended FAQ Snippets.

Client

INTERTOP is a retailer of fashion footwear, apparel, and accessories for the whole family. The commercial network consists of more than 105 stores in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

Challenge

• check the correctness of moving the website to a new CMS;
• increase the visibility of the website for targeted requests;
• to ensure an increase in traffic through the growth of positions in the current and new categories.

Initial Data

INTERTOP is a well-known seller of branded footwear in Kazakhstan. With the development of the business, the range of online and offline stores has been expanded with accessories and apparel from world-famous brands: Timberland, Armani Exchange, Wrangler, The North Face, Vans and others.

One of our key tasks was increasing the visibility of the website in the new categories, which hadn’t been associated with the brand either by users or by Google. Among the limitations was the impossibility of creating a wide website structure optimised for SEO.

In addition, when we started our cooperation, Intertop was just in the process of moving their website to a new CMS.

Solution

Audit

Before starting the promotion, it was important for us to find and fix critical errors that often arise in the process of moving to a new CMS. In the future, they could negatively affect the results of our work in the future. We checked redirects from old URLs to new ones, made sure that the structure was in line with the plan, and ensured content and metadata integrity. Only after that, we moved on to the promotion stage.

SEO-optimisation of category pages

Since the main promotion goal of the client was to increase organic traffic for non-branded queries, we focused our efforts on optimising category pages:

• handwritten metadata and headings for priority categories;
• placed text content on 150 category pages;
• added extended results with frequently asked questions in the SERP to increase CTR.

Meanwhile, we generated template metadata for all types of pages, carried out regular works to promote and support the website, monitored technical problems, advised programmers of the client on new implementations, and actively built up a link profile.

Why is the FAQ page micro-markup useful?

Implementing this type of markup allows getting extended snippets with a collection of Q&As on the Google search page. These snippets have several important advantages:

• allow the user to get maximum information about a new product right in the search results;
• supplement useful content and expand the semantics on the page;
• increase the attractiveness of the snippet in the SERP and impact the growth of CTR.

As a result of the CTR growth and the constant improvement of positions, we received a tangible increase in traffic. The projected indicators were exceeded, and during the lockdown period caused by Covid-19, there was an increased demand for all categories of products. One of the reasons for that is the fact that the website was at the top positions and looked as clickable as possible.

We also managed to increase visibility of the Apparel category, which initially hadn’t been associated with INTERTOP by Google. By optimising and implementing the linking strategy, we received an increase from 0 to + 50%, and this is not at all limited.

What’s Next?

In July 2020, there was a decrease in the number of advanced search results with frequently asked questions in the Google search engine, in some cases they stopped being displayed altogether. In this regard, we worked out the alternative methods for improving CTR, which will help maintain the level of traffic in the future and gain positions on the queries that were not covered previously:

• Creation + optimization + promotion of landing pages to fit the filters
• Creation + optimization of tagged listings
• Attracting informational traffic (working with the blog)
• Improving internal linking on products and categories

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