How Decathlon improved Non-Brand traffic by 62% using SEOTesting.com
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Challenges
Patrick Cunningham, the SEO Leader at Decathlon (Ireland) has the crucial role of increasing search engine performance for Decathlon, whilst being able to report clearly on this to stakeholders. Patrick explains:
“We wanted a clean and simple report to share with Stakeholders on Clicks, Impressions and CTR for Content groups and more advanced Rank Tracking.”
Previously it was a very time-consuming process with multiple steps involved for the team to pull the data for analysis:
“It took up a lot of time to gather the data we needed by segmenting URLs and pulling out large volumes of Exports into Google Sheets, and then segmenting them weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly.”
It was also a frustration for the team that they were unable to add Search Console Data to analyse changes, meaning another extra manual step in the process for them.
SEOTesting has improved our SEO, Content, and Merchandising Processes.
Patrick Cunningham
SEO Leader, Decathlon (Ireland)
Patrick and his team found it difficult to report on the performance of new content on their product listing pages. He explains:
“We wanted to start building out our content on our product listing pages and reporting on this, but we had limitations in other tools for tracking of keywords due to the sheer volume of keywords we track.”
These limitations made life difficult for the SEO team at Decathlon and meant manual workarounds.
A need to report more efficiently
It wasn’t just the team of SEO specialists at Decathlon that needed access to data, but also multiple other key stakeholders all playing a role in the Search Engine performance for the brand. Patrick describes:
“We have lots of members on our team such as Copywriters, Developers, Merchandising Team, Graphic Designers, all needing to be part of our SEO processes.”
Patrick explains how the team trialled several other tools prior to SEOTesting. He found that the requirement of needing his team and the wider stakeholders to be able to use an SEO tool collaboratively and in a cost-effective way, made it difficult to find a good fit.
“Many others charged extra for additional seat, and were then outside our budget.”
A collaborative tool was needed that was cost-effective
Solution and Results
When Decathlon first started using SEOTesting in their company this year, Patrick was thrilled with the benefits it delivered with reports.
“I really was impressed by the reports, particularly the Brand vs Non-Brand Performance; because Non-Brand was a key focus of low hanging fruit for us.”
SEOTesting made life much easier for the team. Now, they could reliably view results of changes made and set clear priorities based on this.
“We are able to review Pages by Low CTR and Low CTR Queries so we could set priorities and analyse what keywords were working for us and what was not.”
Patrick explains how his team is currently benefiting from running reports and content groups for Decathlon.
“Using SEOTesting, we are now able to analyse our data much better, and more visually. This has allowed us to make quick data driven decisions on priorities of where we need to focus in terms of our Content.”
The team are now also able to track the high volume of keywords they have, which is something they experienced difficulties with before.
Data-driven decisions
Since implementing SEOTesting, Decathlon has seen improvements in their processes across the board within a very short space of time.
“After only 3 months we really started seeing significant results. We have not only improved our SEO, Content and Merchandising Processes, but also Non-Brand Traffic by over 62% YOY!”
One of the things that Patrick appreciates the most about SEOTesting is the sheer amount of time it has saved the team on SEO Processes. He doesn’t need to worry about the team spending hours on pulling large amounts of data manually anymore.
“We now save on average 3-6 hours per week using SEOTesting. Previously it was a very time-consuming task to gather the data we needed, so this reduction in time spent on gathering data means we can be more productive in other areas.”
This gain in efficiency means Decathlon’s SEO team save up to 26 hours each month.
3-6 hours time saved each week
That’s not all, SEOTesting has enabled multiple users across Decathlon to now analyse and be part of the SEO data and processes. Patrick explains:
“The fact that we could add as many users to it as we liked with no additional seat charges, meant this was an affordable tool for us. All our Copywriters, Developers, Merchandising Team, Graphic Designers could get their hands on SEOTesting and understand the platform.”
His team’s feedback has been very positive on the tool since it was introduced to Decathlon:
“The team find it really easy to use, and easy to understand the data and the reasoning behind decisions we take.”
Patrick was pleasantly surprised with how simple SEOTesting was to implement.
“Implementation was very simple – we simply connected our Google Search Console and we were off in around 3-5 minutes! The Content Groups did take a little more time setting up as Decathlon has over 70 sports; so each individual sport has multiple different sub categories. But still it was easy enough.”
As a bonus, Decathlon have free report credits for the newly released InternalLinking tool for being an SEOTesting customer.
“I am really impressed by the new tool InternalLinking.com and how we could use this for our Copywriters and Merchandising Team to identify Internal Linking opportunities.” says Patrick.
Simple and quick implementation
Enable your teams to gather and determine clear results of SEO tests, whilst saving considerable time.
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