Popping the Cork on a Sparkling Christmas SEO Campaign.
In retail, especially in the beverage industry, Christmas is by far the main event. And this is why taking advantage of increased demand for online gift sales at this time of year was the core aim for wine retail chain Oddbins.
With consumer buying habits making a significant shift to online, there was everything to play for in terms of getting this major player firmly placed in the search results for Christmas gifting.
Six months were all we had to do the business. With such a short time frame, we’d need to front-load our campaign with content production for the biggest impact. But there’s a lot more to a Figment SEO strategy than that.
We started with a technical audit of the Oddbins Shopify site, scanning for any issues that might conflict with Google best practice. Shopify is an impressive ecommerce platform, but it can throw up some glitches that need smoothing out to command the best potential in search.
Our tech team was quickly on the job, enhancing site structure and speed to tick those all-important Core Web Vitals boxes, and making sure everything was in place to optimise click-throughs from the search results. Once the technical side of things was taken care of, we were ready to uncork our Christmas spirited search strategy.
Achieving Search Results Success. With Bells On.
Off-page SEO tactics got everything flowing, with a link building strategy playing an important role in building site authority, showing Google it was a force to be reckoned with.
But it was our on-page SEO plan that would really fuel the drive, making sure the site’s many gift-related pages had plenty of internal links feeding into them, helping Google to better understand and rank the site for Christmas related keywords.
A content campaign also played a vital role. As well as publishing weekly blogs focused on inspiring festive shoppers with wine related gift ideas, we also added extra keyword-rich content to the key wine collections pages that we identified as having the most potential for boosting sales.
And it worked, with bells on. In just six months, the Oddbins website had achieved an impressive 80 Google Page One rankings, equating to a huge 346% increase in impressions for search queries containing the word ‘Christmas’.
Saying CHEERS! to Thousands of Top Keyword Positions.
With so many different types of gifts, from red wine, white wine and sparkling wine, to New World and Old World wines, wines from France or Spain, Australia or South Africa, corporate gifts, budget gifts and luxury gifts, there was a huge amount of keywords to target if we were to get Oddbins ahead of its competing wine retailers in the search results.
But we needn’t have worried. Because our targeted inbound and internal link building work and content creation campaign turned out to be a winning strategy, resulting in a mammoth 4,541 increase in Google ranking places across our tracked keywords, and a 1525% increase in page views for the site’s gift related pages.
Organic Traffic Hits the Big Time – We’ll Drink to That!
With a 34% increase in organic traffic over a six month period, and 42% over the Christmas period alone, Oddbins was able to reap the rewards of the festive retail period. So for us, and for them, it really was a very Merry Christmas!
