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Made.com

Made.com is one of the case studies for pure-play e-commerce growth over the past 5 years. Despite this their SEO wasn’t in a great place. Sam joined Made.com in 2018 to lead their SEO across all international markets. After 2 years inhouse, NOVOS was born & Made.com become one of our first clients.

Over a 3 year period, we’ve dramatically transformed made.com’s SEO performance across all international markets, achieving a staggering £10.4 million non-brand growth.

The tactics and growth framework we used for Made.com’s SEO formed the basis of NOVOS’ delivery to all eCommerce clients. These tactics have been built on and adapted wit the more eCommerce brands we work with.

Headline projects included:

  • One of the largest, if not the largest, migration of an eCommerce brand to React + Headless CMS at the time
  • Working closely with the UX team to generate a new maga navigation that’s was built from SEO data
  • Renamed all products inline with SEO data and created templates for all future product releases
  • Supported buying team to find gaps in made.com’s inventory vs key competitors
  • Indexed filters dynamically for core product offering to target long-tail keywords
  • Created a how-to & ideas hub for all SEO led content
  • International backlink generation across France, Spain, Netherlands and Belgium
  • Transformed the internal linking structure & site architecture
IndustryLifestyle
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The Challenge

Made.com was consistently seeing 40% YoY growth for 5 years. This was largely driven through brand & paid media growth. The only SEO activity had been ad hoc agency technical audits.

When Sam joined in 2018 SEO was starting to see a decline. He quickly noticed that after each Google quality update throughout 2017 Made.com’s performance had taken a hit.

This resulted in average growth, yet a huge opportunity to grow.

On top of the above challenge, at the time the MADE.com Magento platform was incredibly limited and any ‘new features’ created by the developers had been built without any SEO input meaning quick changes were not possible.

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Our Strategy

Our strategy focused on onsite cleanup and improvements to site architecture so that natural PR activity maximized SEO performance quickly.

From this, we focused on growth activities across navigation, categorization, and keyword targeting before eventually focusing on offsite backlink generation to core SEO categories.

Throughout year 2 a large proportion of growth incentives was forced into the new react & headless CMS platform which was built from SEO initiatives across all elements of the CMS.

This means the new made.com site was built from SEO initiatives & needs which means it’s no longer restricted to previous Magento limitations. This offered a scalable solution for all future Made.com SEO teams & initiatives.

Our strategy can be mapped out as:

  1. Identify what was causing the quality drops throughout 2017
  2. Once identified put a plan of action in place to fix this with the product managers & dev team
  3. Once this was in place our focus involved company-wide education and awareness of what SEO is and how the different department’s actions can either impact SEO or help boost SEO growth
  4. Next, we focused on navigation, categorization and product renaming, working closely with the buying team which eventually lead to using SEO data to inform new product purchases
  5. Finally moving onto the creation of an SEO dedicated content hub
  6. Followed by offsite campaigns and tactics that were scalable across all European markets and so much more!

“The performance speaks for itself, but we've never worked with a team that can explain SEO in such a simple and clear way that seniors and other departments can buy into "

Farhan Miah, Head of Acquisition

The Results

  • Non-brand SEO revenue growth of over £10.4 million.
  • New user acquisition of close to 1 million
  • Successful migration of the domain to React & Headless CMS set up
  • Number 1 rankings for Furniture, Sofa, Chairs, Canape, Tables, Sofa Beds, Armchair, Cushions, Rugs

(Note: number below are rounded and changed to protect the data and rights of the brand, growth uplifts and percentages are representative of this case study)

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Below illustrate when offsite Digital PR activities were undertaken in the European Markets

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