Client Overview
MADE.com is one of Europe’s top homeware and furniture retailers.
MADE.com provides designer furniture directly to customers without the need for third party involvement.
The Bottom Line
DeepCrawl helped MADE.com achieve the following results from organic search:
- 60% MoM growth in revenue
- 31% YoY increase in revenue
- 42% YoY rise in new users
The Challenge
After joining MADE.com as an SEO Manager in late 2016, Sam Hurley turned to DeepCrawl to unearth the site’s technical issues and reverse a downward trend in traffic and revenue from organic search. Sam now relies on DeepCrawl with his growing e-commerce specialist agency NOVOS, currently working with MADE.com and other brands that have similar aspirations.
Sam’s audit of MADE.com found the following issues:
Diluted authority
Poor internal linking from product pages to categories and subcategories meant Google was receiving mixed signals about the site’s most important pages.
Security issues
MADE.com was still using the HTTP protocol and needed to migrate to HTTPS to improve the security of their site and avoid Chrome’s ‘Not Secure’ badge.
Inefficient navigation
The site’s filtering and navigation wasn’t optimised for common queries that visitors frequently use e.g. terms specifying product colour.
International issues
MADE.com’s nine language versions did not specify alternate language versions with hreflang, meaning users might not be directed to the correct version from search.
As a fast paced e-commerce website, operating in numerous countries – it’s essential for us to track our site performance overtime and gather quick insights.
The Solution
Improved Internal Linking
After analysing MADE.com’s internal linking with DeepCrawl’s extensive link reporting, Sam identified an opportunity to give search engine’s clearer signals about the site’s most important pages.
Sam added breadcrumbs to product pages to improve internal linking as well as adding sitewide links to commercial pages and removing sitewide links to non-commercial pages. These changes let search engines know which are the most important pages which, in turn, significantly boosted their performance in search, while also creating an improved user experience through better navigation.
HTTPS Migration
Moving to HTTPS was a priority for MADE.com, as it is now a standard layer of security for modern websites and Google is now marking HTTP sites with a ‘Not Secure’ badge in Chrome.
Migrations can be a nightmare, especially with large eCommerce sites, but Sam brought in DeepCrawl to ensure the migration to HTTPS was a smooth process.
While testing the migration on their staging site, Sam ran a list crawl of the site and then verified that all pages and resources were correctly moved over to the new protocol using reports such as: HTTP pages, Non Secure Form Fields and Mixed Content.
Revamped Navigation
Sam saw that there was a lot of room to improve navigation on MADE.com especially on mobile, which was not well optimised.
Through analysing the site’s taxonomy with DeepCrawl, Sam could see how best to revamp their site architecture for optimal performance in search. New pages were created to target colour terms and this was made more prominent in the navigation as this is a key consideration for users.
These changes meant that MADE.com ranked for more queries including colours and improved the user experience because visitors could more easily filter products in the ways they wanted to. This had a profound impact on mobile performance and onsite engagement.
Successful Hreflang Implementation
After identifying the need to create connections between different language versions of equivalent pages, Sam went about implementing hreflang attributes on the site.
With DeepCrawl, Sam could target keep track of hreflang attributes on the site using reports including: Pages With/Without Hreflang and Broken Hreflang links. With DeepCrawl’s comprehensive hreflang reporting, allowed Sam to have full confidence that MADE.com’s complex international set up was configured in a way that is optimal for search engines to understand and for customers to use.
The Results
After implementing these changes across three development releases, MADE.com saw consecutive improvements in organic visibility, which has delivered some phenomenal results in terms of increases in organic traffic and the resulting revenue growth from this channel.
I’ve tried many cloud-based crawler tools and DeepCrawl is by far the best at providing actionable insights. Using the capabilities of the tool, I was easily able to visualise trends and issues to developers which helped us increase the number of organic visitors by over one million.
Here are the key results that MADE.com site following Sam’s DeepCrawl-inspired optimisation initiatives:
- The volume of new users from organic search has grown 42% year-on-year.
- The most up-to-date reports show a 60% increase in month-on month growth in revenue from organic search.
- Year-on-year revenue from organic search has grown by a staggering 31%. On top of this, 85% of that revenue growth came in the second half of 2017, shortly after Sam’s optimisations had been implemented.
Find out how you can boost your traffic from organic search
Do you want to boost traffic and revenue to your site like MADE.com? Then you need to get started with DeepCrawl now to see how we can help highlight and fix your site’s technical issues.
Samuel Hurley
Sam is an SEO e-commerce specialist with management experience across: - Technical SEO & Strategy - Content marketing - Digital PR - Paid Social - Paid Search
