Case Study: Retail Client

Requirement: Recover favour, reduce costs of search engine optimisation and provide skills to internal web team

The retail space is all about margins. In the retail sector it is not unheard of for the business to demand that a return on investment from a project to be less than six months before signing it off. The retail market is competitive, there are constant economic demands that are affecting margins, therefore a solution that promises to reduce costs and increases competitiveness is sure to put you in the spot light.

The Challenge: Most retailers now have the ability to serve their customers via the Internet. For many, their only link to their customers is via their web site, for others it is complimentary to their traditional bricks and mortar business. So now that everyone has joined the World Wide Web, everyone is wondering how to make the best use of their web site, how to encourage the right types of visitors, how to support promotions and how to use it to increase sales. Our retail client understood the importance of search engine optimisation, ranking higher than their competitors meant more sales and increased brand awareness. When we first started to speak to them, they outsourced all of their SEO and paid a premium for the service. Unfortunately, the SEO Company did not inform the retailer that they were using some less then ethical search engine optimisation techniques. Rather more unfortunate was the fact that they found out around the same time as a major search engine decided to make a public example of the retailer, sending shockwaves through the industry.

This had a massive impact on brand, sales (they were penalised by the search engine and lost their placing) and their ability to recover.

The Solution: This was not just a job for an experienced search engine optimisation company, the task of recovering from the fallout required exceptional planning and analytical skills. Not only was there the traditional PR to take into consideration but also the question of how to recover the favour of the search engines and the industry. A transparent approach to SEO was required, an approach that the company felt they had to control in-house in order to keep a track of techniques and changes, this required in-house training and development. Generate UK were picked from a number of companies due to their experience in delivering digital sales led solutions.

The Delivery: Generate UK worked with the client to agree best practice search engine optimisation; this included detailed training sessions for staff and managers. A mentor programme was introduced and regular update sessions were planned. To aid transparency all adds, moves and changes are now logged and signed off by management before going live. Generate UK also worked directly with the major search engines in order to ensure that the site was added back into the search index.

The Result: The retail client now has a healthy understanding of how their web site works and the impact on their business. It is now seen as a strategic tool rather than just a web site, which means that it has its own team of senior directors. The site is now back to where it was in the search engines and the brand has recovered well. Generate Leadership solutions arranged for members of the web team to speak at events and in trade press articles about their learning. An additional benefit of this project was the decrease in the costs to outsource the search engine optimisation skills, bringing it in-house meant greater control and protection for the brand.