In mid-2019, Dejan was engaged by one of Australia’s largest home and furniture retailers.
Prior to engaging Dejan, the client tested website changes that were deemed a success based on an increase in overall organic performance compared to the previous year.
However, an initial assessment by Dejan identified the changes did not contribute to the increase and, in fact, categories without the change were performing much better.
The project had two key goals that would define its success:
Following our SEO audit and findings, the client agreed to cease the rollout of proposed changes to the site, and work with Dejan to deploy new tests using the suggested SEO testing framework.
Since campaign commencement, Dejan’s work across the following activities have contributed to a 100% increase in traffic YoY and a 139% increase in revenue over the same period.
Updating category URLs to follow the structure of the breadcrumb menu will lead to increased organic traffic as Google will better understand the relationship between pages.
Before: /wet-food-c73829
After: /dog/food/wet-food
Using the data analysis package CausalImpact, for the R programming language, Dejan completed a review to identify what impact URL changes had on organic traffic.
First, we established a relationship between the URLs that were updated and those that were not – both during the pre-period, before changes were made. For example, when an unmodified URL category saw a traffic increase, the same traffic trend was observed in a modified URL category.
Using the relationships identified during the modelling phase, we forecasted what would have happened if the updates were never made.
Although traffic to the category continued to grow, our forecasts identified that, in the absence of URL changes, the growth rate would have been much higher.
During the 130-day post-period, the client would have seen an additional 30,000 sessions to this area of the site. Using the site’s average session value of $6.00, this equated to $120,000 of lost revenue to this section of the site alone.
If this update was rolled out across the entire website, the lost revenue would have translated into millions of dollars in a matter of months.
