The online furniture niche is one of the most competitive ones in most countries in the world, with powerful brands dominating the search results and new retailers launching every year. Despite this, few businesses have dipped their toes into creating informational content for their users, thus providing a large opportunity for any brand to capitalize on.
In early 2020, our SEO approach for Mobexpert, an online and offline furniture chain and one of the oldest known brands amongst the Romanian furniture companies, involved creating a comprehensive blog strategy that would provide added value to the site’s audience, leading to significant gains in organic traffic and ROI.
Besides successfully achieving our KPIs, this is a story about how we managed to promote furniture to an audience more and more interested in locally-made products “at home”, for their home.
Objectives
With Mobexpert, our aim was focused on helping them reach new heights in the furniture market’s organic traffic, as well as helping them increase awareness for locally-built Romanian products.
To set our objectives, we first analyzed over 4,000 highly relevant keywords for their commercial pages (totaling ~5M monthly search volume), focusing on the online store’s product offering.
Based on their rankings, we estimated their overall organic visibility to be only around 22%, despite having overall more traffic than some of their competitors with higher visibility. Digging deeper using ahrefs, we managed to separate the branded and non-branded traffic for Mobexpert and its direct competitors, and the image became much clearer:
| Competitor | Visibility* | Estimated** Organic Traffic (Total) | Estimated** Organic Traffic (Non-brand only) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mobexpert.ro | 22% | 200K | 90K |
| Jysk.ro | 34% | 350K | 180K |
| Favi.ro | 29% | 130K | 123K |
| Kika.ro | 27% | 145K | 110K |
| Ikea.ro | 27% | 460K | 140K |
| Vivre.ro | 15% | 193K | 60K |
| Acaju.ro | 12% | 54K | 52K |
**Traffic estimations are using ahrefs data
It became obvious that, despite us having more overall organic traffic than most competitors, the majority of it was coming from the brand’s notoriety, not from regular non-branded searches.
Using this information, we’ve decided to set the following objectives for the next 12 months (February 2020 – February 2021):
Primary objective (e-commerce):
Increase the overall visibility, organic traffic, and sales to the commercial pages within the next 12 months.
- KPI 1: Reach at least 30% visibility, which would lead to
- KPI 2: Reach +50K non-branded organic traffic per month
Additionally, given that the site already featured a blog subdomain that was getting a small number of visits per month, the objective had to translate into a significant increase in organic traffic that would also support visitors in discovering Mobexpert’s products.
Equipped with this information, we eventually decided we would want to triple the monthly organic traffic coming to the blog within one year.
Secondary Objective (blog):
Consolidate Mobexpert as the ‘go-to source’ for inspiration for furniture-related research while promoting locally made furniture within the next 12 months
- KPI: Reach +2,000 monthly organic visits to the blog vs the existing traffic
SEO Strategy
In terms of audience, really any adult person could be Mobexpert’s client, no matter their demographics, just as long as they were interested in buying new or replacing their current furniture.
It wouldn’t matter if it were their first studio apartment, if they just rented, renovating their old home, creating a work-from-home office, or decorating a luxury penthouse – we started from the premise that customers always need ideas and inspiration, no matter their living situation – and they often go to Google for to find those answers.
When it comes to strategy, we kept in mind that furniture shopping is typically expensive, with transactions averaging 500 EUR or more. Since most people purchasing these types of products are not only interested in their utility, but also their look and fit into an overarching design, the volume of informational searches on this topic has always been quite considerable.
Additionally, since we were dealing with a highly competitive niche, we realized that a heavy focus on informational content would allow us to differentiate ourselves from the competition better, attract a steady flow of new users to the site, and ultimately provide a better experience for users researching ideas. We were ultimately looking to consolidate Mobexpert as the ‘go-to source’ for inspiration for any home refurbishment or redecoration project.
This was reflected in the search data we analyzed, which proved just that: there were thousands of searches with an informational intent just waiting for the right content piece to guide them in buying the best products for their homes. The keyword data assured us we were on the right track with the strategy of delivering helpful and inspirational buying guides to people in search of ideas for their homes.
Besides offering helpful how-to’s that included consulting with Mobexpert’s specialists, our strategy needed to bring more attention to locally-made furniture, making more customers consider these products and choosing higher quality furniture for their home while making sure brand messages on sustainability and longevity were received.
Implementation
Given the highly competitive nature of the niche, we knew on-page optimizations alone wouldn’t provide enough benefit to help us reach our goal — pretty much all competitors had made sure to properly do their own keyword research and category/product page SEO.
As such, helping people define their own signature interior and find a sense of security and comfort while at the same time providing support and ranking signals to the commercial pages was the creative way we approached this project through the means of our blog content strategy.
We started work right at the beginning of March 2020, when the COVID lockdown had started, and all of Mobexpert’s offline showrooms had been closed.
Blog:
We audited the site’s existing blog and repurposed the content that had potential for search. Besides reinvigorating the old content, over 30 posts were newly created and published over the course of the following 12 months:
New content pieces detailing info by room, style, type of furniture, and budget were published in order to attract those customers in need of guidance:
The new content was meant to show what is possible in your home and always presented products from different tiers of budgets, integrating Mobexpert’s 3D technology to picture some of the products right in your living space.
Media:
We also used content to attract media exposure – our agency doubled as a PR firm. Starting from the insight that, during the pandemic, your home takes on a whole new meaning, and lots of people turned to redecorating as a way to find peace of mind and security during an uncertain time, we created a data-based visual content asset that shed light on what type of furniture Romanians bought during lockdown:
We promoted this study with an outreach campaign to nationwide publications that presented the furniture sales in a storytelling visual format, and the campaign resulted in ~40 organic media placements from some of the most visited news sites in Romania, with zero media budget:
Our on-page optimizations, together with the blog strategy and our link achievements had constantly increased the amount of ranking signals for the mobexpert.ro domain, thus getting us closer and closer to our goals.
SEO Results
With February 2021 closing, we drew the line after one year of implementing our SEO strategy. As for the results? They definitely did not disappoint.
Primary objective (e-commerce):
- Visibility KPI: Proposed 30%, reached 33%
- Traffic KPI: Proposed +50K non-branded traffic, reached +110K
| Competitor | Visibility* Mar 2021 | Visibility* Feb 2020 |
|---|---|---|
| Mobexpert.ro | 33% | 22% |
| Jysk.ro | 35% | 34% |
| Favi.ro | 38% | 29% |
| Kika.ro | 0% | 27% |
| Ikea.ro | 34% | 27% |
| Vivre.ro | 34% | 15% |
| Acaju.ro | 7% | 12% |
As such, we’ve not only broken through the stale traffic state that the site had experienced in the previous years, but we’ve considerably outperformed even against our own e-commerce objectives, providing a much-needed increase of capital to navigate through the COVID environment.
Our greatest achievements, however, were on the blog side:
Secondary objective (blog):
Traffic KPI: Proposed +2,000 visits/month versus existing traffic, reached +10,000!
The blog traffic reached the ‘snowball effect’ somewhere in August, where we passed the threshold that continued to push us to an exponential rise:
Also, even if it’s not one of our monitored KPIs, the success of our PR campaigns and visibility also directly lead to an increase in branded searches for the “mobexpert” term:
Through our articles, we’ve ultimately found an excellent mix between getting people informed and providing business value to the brand while also giving them a competitive advantage in the market.
Combining that with increasing the brand’s awareness and providing more trust for users visiting the site, we’ve been truly happy with the impact our strategy has achieved as part of our SEO efforts for Mobexpert!
Final Words
Obtaining SEO results and ROI during difficult worldwide economic times is something we all strive to do both for ourselves and for our clients, the latter who, in the case of offline retailers such as Mobexpert, have been severely affected by the COVID pandemic.
In addition to the results, the project’s success also managed to achieve a coveted 2021 European Search Award for Best Use of SEO in B2C!
We’re proud to have helped Mobexpert navigate these difficult times and grow its online presence, traffic, and revenue to fresh new heights while putting the spotlight on locally made furniture.