Case Study: Goal-Oriented SEO Program for Macron Brings +65.8% Revenue YOY

With scandiweb, we immediately found a clear, efficient and effective working method, goal-oriented, as well as daily support. We benefited from their experience and knowledge to start a journey together into the world of international SEO and to optimize categories, contents and products on our site. The results are already starting to come up and we are delighted!

Alice Politano
eCommerce Specialist at Macron

About

Macron is a European leader in the production of leisurewear, merchandising, and active sportswear for professional and non-professional football, basketball, rugby, and other teams and referees, including UEFA EURO 2020 official referee kits. 

The collaboration between Macron and scandiweb was kicked off in 2021. After proactively supporting Macron’s B2C store for several months and helping them expand into the B2B sector, the project got onboarded to scandiweb’s eCommerce Growth Accelerator. We set a 4-month SEO program to get the ball rolling for our SEO cooperation, continued active SEO efforts in 2022, and have successfully kicked off 2023.

Macron’s SEO program has been focused on the global market. As part of the cooperation, scandiweb did SEO discovery and worked on website optimization for Macron’s B2B store as well as their main B2C site with English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and German store views. The project is ongoing.

Objectives and expectations

After the initial SEO audit, we discovered a lot of unutilized opportunities that can improve the website’s technical SEO with the correct configuration in Mageworx. We also observed a lot of product listing pages (PLPs) that lack optimization and have the potential to rank a lot higher. 

The goal of the proposed program was to ensure all technical SEO issues were fixed, introduce new content and optimize existing content to target new keywords and improve positions for existing ones and build authority by boosting rankings of optimized pages using backlinks building.

Organic traffic KPIs, eCommerce performance, and any project-specific metrics are tracked within personalized SEO reports shared with the client bi-weekly.

Our approach

To begin, the SEO team performed a general website quality audit to review the page performance, collect data about backlinks, and perform analysis from: 

• Tech perspective (XML sitemap, internal linking, etc.)
• Content perspective (metadata, content analysis, main keywords, etc.)

Given the findings, we developed Macron’s optimization program based on all 3 whales of SEO—technical, on-page, and off-page SEO, with each area contributing to overall website improvements.

Technical SEO

After auditing the website and reviewing Macron’s current SEO setup, we worked on the following technical SEO fixes:

• Robots.txt updates—resolve rendering issues and reformat robots.txt file according to Magento best practices
• Mageworx configuration—remove noindex follow for informational pages, disable canonical tag for noindex pages, hreflang setup investigation
• XML sitemap setup for non-native Magento page types
• Broken URL rewrites—compile a list and fix URL rewrites for multiple store views
• 404 error fixes for News posts
• Add structured data for News posts to potentially feature Macron in rich results
• Restructure the sub-category pages and fix their URLs, as well as fix outgoing links for the Load More button for better crawling
• Investigate “#” symbol usage in URLs and recommend changes for better indexation.

Technical SEO improvement areas were identified and recommended by the scandiweb SEO team and executed by Macron’s in-house development team in collaboration with scandiweb developers.

On-page SEO

Our SEO strategy for Macron has been heavily focused on optimizing the content on the site, especially niche product pages with the most potential.

We performed an on-page website quality audit to identify opportunities for PLPs (outdated content, content that should be merged, cannibalization issues), find low-hanging fruits where content tweaks will bring the biggest impact, create an action plan for content cleanup and strategy, and build a list of target pages that allows us to segment websites and hyper-focus on improving key sections of the website.

Workflow after on-page website quality audit:

1) Develop a new, more accurate strategy for meta titles and meta descriptions of both products and categories

2) Prepare meta, product page, and category page templates for all store views and apply them via the Mageworx plugin

Meta templates were differentiated by the line of business. We drew the concepts for expanding the keywords from the corporate mission, characteristics, and strengths of each business line.

3) Category page keyword research in 5 languages and clustering for all categories

4) Identify keyword intent to decide what type of page to assign it to (PLP, PDP, informational content)

5) Prepare content guidelines, different for B2B and B2C audience

6) Develop optimized PLP content and upload it on the site in a prioritized way based on the ranking potential (content uploads are split between scandiweb’s and Macron’s teams to save time)

7) Content creation in other languages for ES, FR, IT, PT, and DE markets

The Padel category was identified as one of the main niche categories to optimize. We did keyword research in 5 languages, improved meta titles descriptions, and created landing page content to enrich the categories and respond to users’ search intent.

8) Segregate the informational topics to later use them for the editorial content on separate, newly created landing pages

9) Informational content hub research, recommendations, and content development.

Padel category optimization

Optimizing pages of the Padel collection was the strategic objective for the cooperation to increase awareness and traffic for the collection. In total, Macron padel-related pages were seen by over 1,000,000 people in 2022, drove close to 50,000 sessions, and received over 13,800 clicks, often outranking sports giants like Nike and Adidas.

Teamwear category optimization

Similarly, we optimized the whole Teamwear collection with a strategic focus on increasing traffic to these pages. We observed traffic increase across all markets after implementing the localization of SEO efforts and a significant increase in non-branded keywords and teamwear-related terms.

B2B highlights

Within the Teamwear collection optimization, the scandiweb team explored ways to target and spread awareness about the customization attracting B2B customers. We added optimized content and managed to increase keyword positions and awareness of the customization options if a user lands on one of the Teamwear category pages.

Off-page SEO

As for our off-page SEO efforts, we performed a full backlink audit and created an in-depth link-building strategy by:

• Reviewing strategies that have worked before as the main focus point
• Preparing a list with landing pages with the most backlinks
• Identifying missing backlinks with a focus on newly created content
• Preparing a list of spammy, lost, and broken backlinks to fix

Results

Macron’s SEO program is ongoing and the optimization efforts continue, bringing new and improved results in keyword performance and overall search visibility every month.

KPIs highlights as of September 2022

• +24.7% clicks MOM
• +57% clicks YOY
• +60.4% impressions YOY
• +16% revenue from organic traffic YOY

Main highlights of 2022 YOY

• +47.69% users from organic search
• +44.79% keywords (over 2.2k total) in top 3 positions
• +65.8% revenue from organic traffic.

Plans for 2023

In 2023, scandiweb’s SEO team intends to keep up the good Technical SEO performance throughout the year, focus on new collection launches while continuing to generate interest for existing collection pages, increase rankings for Macron’s Official Kits, create editorial content support user purchase journey, and boost pages already ranking with backlink acquisitions.

Need assistance in improving your site’s position in search results? Have additional SEO concerns? Let us help you! Feel free to get in touch by dropping a line at [email protected] or booking a free consultation.

Share on: