SEO
Scotland Kilt Co: Increasing revenue by 280% in the UK and US
THE RESULTS
761% | UP IN DIRECT REVENUE |
456% | INCREASE IN VISABILITY |
382% | INCREASE IN TRAFFIC |
280% | IN ORGANIC REVENUE |
The Scaling Problem: Resource and Expertise
The Scottish Kilt Company were ready to grow substantially, in the UK and the US. But they didn’t have the resources and knowledge in-house to do it. So they came to us. We used our SEO expertise to drive some spectacular results, including a massive 280% increase in revenue through the site.
Want to know how we did it? Keep reading…
The research phase
First up was research. We dug into their website and analytics to figure out what was working and what wasn’t. That gave us a list of improvements to help them hit their goals.
Technical SEO Set Up and Optimisation
A solid tech foundation is vital for any website to succeed. Our research picked up several issues that were stopping The Scotland Kilt Company from reaching its potential.
Indexing and crawlability issues
There were a lot of pages on the site being indexed by Google that didn’t need to be. This was causing crawl bloat. Things like checkout pages, account pages and many search filter pages were all indexed, stopping more relevant pages from ranking.
We fixed this by deindexing the pages we didn’t want to show up in search. This improved Google rankings almost immediately.
Next, we made sure that the site had optimised, indexable pages for all relevant keywords. We created dedicated category pages for the highest-ranking search terms, rather than the dynamically generated pages that had been in place before. This got the site ranking for a ton of highly relevant search terms.
It increased visibility, traffic and - more importantly - sales significantly.
International Targeting
When you have two identical sites targeting two different markets - as The Scotland Kilt Company did - it’s important to let Google know. Otherwise, it sees the two sites as copies, and flags them as duplicate content. This meant that the US site was treated as a copy, and had next to no visibility in search rankings.
As soon as we showed Google the relationship between the sites, using hreflang tags, rankings improved for both sites.
After a year, the UK site’s visibility had increased by 27%. Four years later, it was up by 133%.
The US site increased by 28% in the first year, and a massive 223% after four years.
Duplicate content
As the Scotland Kilt Company grew, so did the website. But because old pages weren’t deleted, and product descriptions were reused, there was a lot of duplicate content. This limited the site’s authority, and how well it could rank on Google.
To fix this, we started by finding all pages with duplicate content and either deleting or updating it. Deleted pages were then redirected to existing ones.
We also used noindex tags on pages which had value to users, but didn’t need to show up in search.
Bulking out valuable content
Addressing the technical issues saw great performance improvements off the bat. But this was just getting the site foundations ready to build on further. Next, we focused on increasing the valuable content on the site.
The Scotland Kilt Company site had a lot of thin content. Everything was focused on the product. We reviewed competitors and saw that we could add value for users that would set the site apart.
So we built a plan that prioritised the highest-value pages on the site. We considered the sales each page was generating, but also the overall traffic driven to pages, the search terms we wanted to rank for and the business priority of the products and categories.
Finally, our search behaviour analysis highlighted some international variations. For example, users in the US were more likely to search for ‘womens clothes’ whereas in the UK ‘ladies clothes’ was more common.
So we adapted both sites to focus on location-specific search terms. This gave an uplift in visibility and traffic and, most importantly, an increase in revenue too.
Page Speed
The site’s page speed needed improving. Because it was a big site, with many products and a configurator, there were several areas for improvement. To boost speed we:
- Optimised all images, switching to super-efficient next-gen image formats
- Implemented lazy load, where images only load when needed
- Tweaked the configurator to:
- Reduce choices to the most popular options
- Cut down on images by using text cues wherever possible
defer code until specific actions or stages were met, reducing initial load time
These changes (plus a few more) saw the site’s core web vitals improve significantly. This increased visibility on Google and improved the overall user experience. And because user experience is tied to conversion rate, revenue and sales increased too.
Showing their subject matter expertise
Having valuable, useful supporting content on a website is a great way to boost authority with Google. So we reviewed the blog section of the Scotland Kilt Company’s website to see how well it was highlighting their industry knowledge.
And we found that it wasn’t. It was full of sales-focused and company news articles - the kind of thing that no customer ever wants to read. There was some quality content there, but it was hidden so it wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. And that meant it wasn’t having any impact.
We’d already removed a lot of irrelevant content when resolving the crawl bloat problems, but there was more work to be done. So we cut a lot of blog content.
Then we created a content plan with articles focused on relevant topics with high search volume. The kind of things that show Google and users that The Scotland Kilt Company really know their stuff.
And you know what? These articles are still some of the biggest traffic drivers on the website, and still delivering commercial value for Scotland Kilt Co.
The Results: 280% increase in revenue
As soon as we started optimising the site, we saw results in visibility and traffic. More importantly, we saw a real commercial increase for the business. The Scottish Kilt Company’s revenue through their website increased by an amazing 280%.
Want some more stats?
- Traffic up 382%
- 456% increase in visibility
- Organic Revenue up 280%
- Direct revenue up 761%
This was all driven by our work, which was designed to get vital commercial keywords into top positions on Google. Search the word ‘kilts’ on Google at the time of writing and you’ll see The Scottish Kilt Company right up there in position one. The site was unranked before we started work.
Here are some more stats:
- 82% increase in keywords ranked in the UK
- 78% increase in keywords on page 1 in the UK
- 108% increase in keywords ranked in the US
- 163% increase in keywords on page 1 in the US
Not too shabby.
Reckon your business could benefit from that kind of website boost? You know where to come.
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Our Work
We’ve worked with a variety of companies to produce outstanding results. From internationally recognised brands to small family-owned businesses, we’ve gotten to know our clients inside out to produce perfect projects and create captivating campaigns that truly express their message and values.
