Case studies

Maleomi

Case study - Maleomi

Maleomi is an online store with home accessories & decor. Customers can find there a variety of items for their homes, including kitchen and dining room accessories, as well as food storage containers. It was launched in 2015 and has been gradually increasing its online presence since then. The brand is also active on social media and has its own brand-hero: Maleo bird.

See how we increased the organic traffic by 101% in 9 months!

Industry

Household items and accessories

Domain

PL

Polish

Organic traffic

+101%

Increase in 9 months

Analysis

Maleomi store is managed with Presta Shop CMS, which we know very well. Thanks to its advanced features, it’s a great solution for any mid-sized online store. The access to FTP along with the availability of numerous modules make it possible to implement the majority of necessary SEO-related changes easily.

We started the cooperation with Maleomi in the middle of March 2018. Back then, the organic traffic from Google search amounted to 5310, whereas in January 2019 it reached 10678 visits.

A few facts for starters:

  • Presta Shop CMS
  • Not many general keyword phrases that the site was ranking for
  • Strong branding efforts
  • Ongoing PPC campaigns
  • A blog kept up-to-date
  • Strong competition
  • Great potential for driving traffic

Approach

A broad-based approach

When working on the maleomi.pl website, we decided to take a long-tail SEO approach, which works well with e-commerce businesses. In order to reach customers on different stages of the buyer’s journey, we chose to target different types of keyword phrases. Yet, we focused on more detailed phrases the most.

At the beginning of the cooperation, we came up with an initial list of keyword phrases, which was then accepted by the client. We started the optimisation process with just 87 phrases to rank for – but after 9 months, we already had 498 phrases on the list. During the first 3 months, we focused on increasing the visibility of the website and the number of its views in the search results. We improved the main page to have it ranked for relevant, general phrases and then created more complex, long-tail phrases on the top of that. We could already notice the growth in the number of website visits back then. We strove to improve the ranks of the website in the search engine results and the number of its views, which eventually led to an increase in traffic and sales.

That was precisely our plan from the very beginning 🙂

On-site activities

Problem no. 1: The website wasn’t ranking for almost any general phrases

The key to driving traffic and increasing the rank of the website properly is to have a well-optimised main page. Because of it, “the strength” is transferred all the way to every subpage and thus, brings more value to the website in terms of SEO. Without a proper main page optimisation, there’s no possibility to generate traffic effectively. Basically, it’s like having a house without a front door!

At the initial stage of Maleomi’s website optimisation, we chose general phrases that described the brand well – we left “online store”, but added the phrases connected to the store’s offer, such as home decor, kitchen accessories, etc. The phrases were not displayed directly on the main page, though, which is why we had to make sure Google actually associated them with the website’s content. We wanted Maleomi’s customers to have the website displayed for such keyword phrases since it would allow driving traffic from general queries and have more visitors who were at the beginning of the buyer’s journey, not decided for anything in particular yet.

Steps we took:

  1. Selecting the right phrases – research & consultations with the Client
  2. Adding the phrases on the website

In order to associate those general phrases with the website, we wanted to “inform” both the search engine and its users what keyword actually referred to its content. Because of that, we performed a number of activities to highlight those phrases, such as:

1. Changing the title on the main page.

Before:

Maleomi meta description before optimization
Title:”online store with best products for your home. …” Meta description: “Here you will find f.ex. best food containers, lunch thermoses, elements of interior furnishings from the best manufacturers. Check it out!”

The title wasn’t valuable for the search engines and its users. Hence, we optimised the title and description.

After:

Maleomi - meta description after optimization
Title: “Home and kitchen accessories. Toys for childres. Maleomi Store” Meta description: “Maleomi online store. Here you will find food containers, lunch thermoses, interior design elements from the best manufacturers.”

2. Optimising the existing content.

3. Preparing, optimizind and adding content to the main page

The Client wasn’t fully convinced to this solution, but the text was eventually added at the bottom of the website and didn’t interfere with the website’s design. It was divided into paragraphs and had proper headlines, words in bold, and internal links to important categories.

Main page text optimization for SEO in polish

The results:

The website started to be displayed in search results more often, also for the general phrases, not only for brand-related ones.

optimization results
“home accessories store”
SEO results
“store with kitchen accessories”; “home accessories”; “home improvement store”; “kitchen accessories store”

It was just the beginning, though. Improving the main page was actually a prelude to other activities revolving around categories, subcategories and products. These were also our next steps.

Problem no. 2: General, high-volume keyword phrases far in the search engine results

Despite the size of the website, branding activities and quality content, most of the subpages were not optimised. As a part of the broad-based approach, we focused on gradual optimisation of subpages with categories, subcategories and products. We paid attention to more detailed phrases at first, in order to increase the ranks for the general ones as well.

Our aim was to increase the ranks for phrases with the conversion potential, which was also in Client’s interest. We also wanted to boost general, competitive phrases, such as lunchboxes of food containers, and their variations.

Thanks to our optimisation efforts, we managed to increase the rank for the phrase “lunchboxes” from the 8th to the 3rd position with the volume of 121000, and “food containers” from 21st to the 6th position with the volume of 3600.

Problem no. 3: Alright, but how to overtake the manufacturer in the search results?

The Client wanted to have the site displayed at the top of search results for a very difficult, highly competitive keyword phrase, which was also the name of the manufacturer. Impossible? Not necessarily!

Pusheen is a popular cartoon cat, which can also be found on a range of products. Maleomi offers many different Pusheen products and wanted to promote them in search engines as well.

We started from the 52nd position – the phrase was searched by 495 000 search engine users monthly, which indicated that it was highly competitive.

It wasn’t an easy task – we put a lot of effort into getting the Maleomi website to TOP10 pages ranking for this keyword. We took advantage of the site optimisation along with link building, copywriting, and external linking.

We gradually increased the rank for this phrase – we were featured in the TOP5 for a while, then in the TOP3 where we had to compete with Allegro and the site of the manufacturer – but we finally made it! 🙂

SEO effects

SEO results - top3

SEO effects - first position

Off-site activities

On-site process (activities on the website) works best when paired with off-site efforts (link building). Only then optimisation is the most effective and brings the best results. During the off-site process for Maleomi, we built quality links from domains with high parameters.

We were taking care of the growing numbers of incoming links throughout the whole year of our cooperation.

Linking domains in SEO process

When building links, we focused on constructing proper anchor texts, so that they had a positive influence on the optimisation efforts and contributed to good link profiles:

Anchor texts that included different keywords made the broad optimisation process much easier. The approach we took paid off, and we were steadily increasing the ranks for long-tail phrases.

Results

Proper optimisation activities resulted in the increased visibility of the website. It started to rank higher for more and more keyword phrases, including long-tail ones. The increase of the position in search results and the number of views also led to a higher number of website visits and thus, the increase in sales.

Visibility:

Data from Senuto tool:

Maleomi visibility senuto tool

Data from Semstorm tool:

Visibility of the webpage

Organic traffic from Google Analytics:

Maleomi - organic traffic
Wzrost ruchu organicznego na stronie maleomi.pl w czasie naszej współpracy

During our cooperation, the number of visits to the website (from Google search results) increased by +101%↑ – from 5310 to 10678 visits, whereas the number of page views increased by 150%↑ – from 89 109 to 224128 views.

We managed to increase the ranks for the following keywords:

  • pusheen – from the 52nd to 1st place, increase by +51
  • lunchbox – from 7th to 3rd position, increase by +4
  • thermo cups – from 40th to the 11th place, increase by +29
  • monbento shop – from the 5th to 2nd position, increase by +3

Comparing all the data to the traffic from the previous year (December 2019 to December 2018), we managed to improve the organic traffic by 230%, and the sales by +415%.

SEO Specialist’s Comment

Stores with home accessories & decor are quite a challenge. We need to compete with market giants and it may seem like an impossible task. This particular project taught me that there’s no such thing as impossible and if we do our work well we can even beat a producer website. When, every morning, checking an extremely competitive keyword “pusheen” you see it in the first position – you know you did a good job. Maleomi captivates with beautiful and high-quality products and great visibility charts! 🙂

Gosia Tarnawska Delante
Gosia Tarnawska
SEO Team Leader

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