Kitcentrum started offering professional sealing products through a webshop in 2010. Since then, it has grown considerably and is still expanding. Kitcentrum focuses on the professional end-user such as the kit worker in construction, glazier and painter, but also increasingly on the home handyman. The latter market, of course, received a big boost during the pandemic.
Kitcentrum knocked on our door in early 2021 asking if we could bring structure to the SEO approach. A great challenge!
Not every market or search term necessarily needs a giant bucket of inbound links. That is a pipe dream. So a SEO strategy zonder link building is certainly possible. Kitcentrum competes with authoritarians in Google, but through relevance (a website that is entirely about kit and glues), a good SEO strategy and hard work, we come out on top!
Tendrils on kit?
For the very moderate handyman that I unfortunately am myself, there are very few types of sealant and glue to imagine. But nothing could be further from the truth, as there are quite a few different types of sealant and glue. In a comprehensive search analysis we scrutinised all the product groups on the shelves at Kitcentrum. And that yielded quite a list, and therefore quite a lot of potential:
More than 850 search terms with potential
Onderdivided into more than 30 different search term groups
Many search terms around a type of product with lots of variations around brands, colours, applications and materials around it
At a later stage, we added some 140 more search terms around tips and tricks (for the handyman like me, who doesn't know how to kit a bathroom)
In short: a sweet shop for the SEO specialist.
First things first
A list of search terms and associated pages is nice, but ultimately it is about increasing the market share of the search terms and thus the number of sessions from SEO (and thereby revenue). And that requires a plan. In the first month, we used analytics to create this plan.
Crawling, indexing and relevance
The fit between the search terms and the actual category and product structure of Kitcentrum was and is quite large. About 70% of the total set of search terms we could link to a buying intention (transactional). The remaining search terms are mainly informational. Consider, for instance, 'silicone sealant removal' and 'how long should sealant dry'.
So from the SEO perspective, it was mainly a matter of increasing the relevance of the category and product structure. And of course making sure there are no issues in crawling and indexing this structure.
Crawling and indexing
A comprehensive technical check should provide enough ammunition to facilitate crawling and indexing. We still see these two aspects go wrong a lot with websites unfortunately. But not with Kitcentrum, as it already had a solid technical foundation in place. Kitcentrum runs on a custom platform, where very good consideration was given to architecture and an eCommerce structure (both literally and figuratively).
We were eventually able to identify quite a few technical areas for improvement and resolve them together with the web builder. Some examples:
Automatic redirects were present on product pages, but they had the status code 302 where it should be 301
Canonical tags i.c.w. filtering didn't quite go to plan
Extensions of product pages with different colours
The Cumulative Layout Shift was too high, too much shifting took place while loading a page:
The biggest technical improvement was changing the URL structure. We agreed to make this change just after the summer, because otherwise there was too much risk regarding the season. Every category and product URL was moved at that time, which Google always has to get used to. That looks like this in Search Console on the search term 'silicone sealant':
Surely, you can see a clear dip in position after migration. We have only returned to the correct position 1.5 months after the migration. Still worth the risk as far as we are concerned, as the URLs are a bit cleaner anyway!
Relevance
So how did we ensure that a search term like silicone sealant (mentioned above) has such a good ranking? As far as we are concerned, it is in one big area of improvement: relevance.
Together with the team from Kitcentrum, we:
Created cornerstone pages for the big onderwerpen. Obviously with rows of products on them, but certainly also with enough information on, for example, silicone sealant
On the pages you will not find 'SEO text', but actual text that adds something for the user. The bigger the onderwerp, the more text can be found on this. After all, we have seen that a search term group around 'silicone sealant' consists of 60 search terms around silicone sealant and applications, colours and materials. Technical specifications of products just have to be right
The tips and tricks section further expanded so that even the handyman with two left hands can see how something works
In the top 10 landing pages these days, we also invariably see 2 to 3 tips and tricks pages!
Product page taxonomies devised for short texts, meta title, descriptions and other onder parts
We are currently working on further optimising the above onder parts. There are quite a few products and product groups namely.
Result
The results are impressive. After 3 months, we already had the results on the biggest categories that we had actually anticipated only after 6 months. Kitcentrum now seriously competes with the larger DIY stores and outranks these players quite often. Apart from the migration dip at the end of August, we can also report a nice growth in organic traffic:
We prefer to compare year-on-year, but this has proved difficult due to the pandemic's churning behaviour. By the way, the above graph does not include seasonality.
In terms of estimated traffic / organic traffic, we have now grown almost 100% compared to April 2021!
Cooperation and modus operandi
One of our core values is cooperation: we only believe in an optimal SEO result when we bring together SEO knowledge, product knowledge and development knowledge. In our collaboration with Kitcentrum, this also comes across well. We have monthly consultations with the eCommerce managers and technical guy. In this consultation, we discuss what worked well last month and what we will do next month. This way, there is a continuous flow of SEO improvements that push up the market share. An added benefit is that this also greatly increases SEO knowledge within Kitcentrum. And that since this collaboration, we at Onder can also sealant (the bathroom is happy)!
Whether it's about content or technical adjustments, it doesn't matter. Martijn briefs this in a very clear way so that it can be implemented locally or by our head office in France. [...] Since the start of our collaboration, we have achieved great results. Keep it up!
Marien van Stegeren
Eigenaar Kitcentrum
When your online onder venture grows, expectations often grow too, in every area.
To a large extent, we were in control of SEO and its interpretation ourselves. We found out that our own "general view" was no longer sufficient, so we engaged Bureau Onder. Surprising and clear. We have built up a fine collaboration, partly because Martijn also regularly visits our office with Eline or Mariska (depending on the case), which is very valuable to us!
Marten Stellingwerf
Webmaster
Martijn and Mariska make the SEO story understandable for the layman and are happy to think along with us. It is nice that there is a personal contact moment every month with an extensive report and the opportunity to talk everything through.
After just a few months, Onder has already managed to achieve number 1 positions on Google with some of our webshop pages. We are very satisfied with Onder.
Mark Prummel
SEO Specialist Stella Fietsen
For several years, Onder has been a valued partner of Stella. Martijn is my sparring partner for complex SEO issues and the extra pair of critical eyes that keeps us on our toes. Together, we have achieved nice growth in online visibility, visitor numbers and leads. Onder onder stands out for its short lines of communication and professionalism. They speak our language: don't nag, get down to business. That is what we love!
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