Achieving £10.4m Non-Brand SEO Revenue Growth for Made.com

Working with Made.com

Made.com is one of the case studies for pure-play eCommerce 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 and, after 2 years in-house, NOVOS was born, and Made.com became one of our very first clients. In fact, the tactics and growth framework formed the basis of NOVOS’ delivery to all eCommerce clients.

The Challenge

Made.com consistently saw 40% YoY growth for 5 years, which was largely driven through brand and paid media. The only SEO activity had been ad/hoc agency technical audits. Prior to Sam joining the company, the site's SEO was starting to see a decline. He quickly noticed that after each Google Quality Update throughout 2017, the site's performance had taken a hit. 

At the time, the Made.com Magento platform was also incredibly limited and any ‘new features’ created by the developers had been built without any SEO input, meaning that quick changes were not possible.

Headline projects included:

1. One of the largest (if not the largest) migration of an eCommerce brand to React and Headless CRM at the time
2. Developing a new mega navigation working closely with the UX team, based on SEO data
3. Renaming all products inline with said SEO data and creating templates for all future product releases
4. Supporting the buying team to identify gaps in Made.com’s inventory vs. key competitors
5. Dynamically indexing filters for Made.com’s core product offering to effectively target long-tail keywords
6. Create a how-to and ideas hub for SEO-led content
7. International backlink generation across France, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium
8. Transforming the internal linking structure and site architecture

Our Strategy

Our strategy focused on onsite cleanup and site architecture improves to enable any natural PR activity to maximise the SEO performance quickly. From this, we focused on growth activities across the navigation, categorisation and keyword targeting on the site, before eventually focusing on offsite backlink generation to core search categories. 

Throughout year 2 of the campaign, a large volume of growth incentives were forced into the new react and headless CMS platform which was built from SEO initiatives across all elements of the CRM. This meant the new Made.com site was built from said search initiatives and needs, meaning it’s no longer restricted by previous Magento limitations. This provided a scalable solution for Made.com’s future SEO teams and strategy.

Our strategy can be mapped out as:

1. Identify what caused the quality drops throughout 2017
2. Once identified, create a plan of action to fix this alongside the product managers and developers
3. Carry out company-wide education of SEO and how different departments actions can positively or negatively impact SEO
4. Focus on navigation, categorisation and product renaming, whilst working closely with the buying team, which eventually led to using SEO data to inform new product purchases
5. Develop an SEO-dedicated Content Hub
6. Carry out an offsite campaign that was scalable across all European markets