SofaSofa

The problem

For years SofaSofa ranked on the 1st page of Google for the 2 most popular keywords in the sofa industry – “sofa” and “sofas”, which provided a steady stream of traffic and revenue for the company.

Since 2011 the online sofa market has grown increasingly competitive and Google has developed a strong Big Brand Bias in organic results. This means that large corporations like IKEA, John Lewis, and Argos that don’t necessarily specialise in sofas monopolise the 1st-page results for some of the most valuable terms, including “sofa” and “sofas”.

Digivate was tasked to find alternative ways to retain SofaSofa’s organic traffic in a highly competitive market.

The mind approach

Our research found that there were dozens of long-tail keywords with 1000 – 10,000+ monthly volume that were overlooked by the competitors and hence presented an opportunity for us to rank high for them.

To retain organic search traffic, we:

1. Created new content to target valuable long-tail keywords

We created a blog strategy targeting some of the most popular long-tail queries sofa buyers search for. We then utilised creative blogger outreach and Digital PR campaigns to promote the content and earn high-quality backlinks.

2. Improved the rankings for the existing pages
   

We redesigned the website categories for better user experience, improved the content, metadata, internal linking and increased the number and quality of external backlinks.

3. Managed Google Ads with 40% ROI

We drove valuable paid traffic while building up organic visibility. The challenge was to keep cost-per-acquisition to the minimum, so we could scale our ads without increasing the advertising budget. The 40% campaign ROI was achieved by diligent keyword and location targeting as well as ad copy optimisation.