The Business Challenge
With hundreds of stores across North America, the beauty retailer's website is its largest store and the foremost prestige beauty destination on the Internet. Despite its online success, the company found its growth potential limited by legacy aspects of the site's design.
The site's structure made it difficult for Google to find and index valuable content beyond the top pages. They needed a way to scalably grow their share of organic search traffic despite the limitations of the site design.
The BrightEdge Solution
The company's marketing team knew it could help Google better find its content by building out internal links. However, doing so in a scalable, sustainable way remained a challenge.
The retailer's senior manager of SEO noted another challenge to internal linking. "We're limited in the real estate we have on the page where we can place links. We needed a way to scale internal linking in an intelligent way across the site."
BrightEdge approached the challenge with Autopilot, a new marketing automation technology that leverages internal links to move more high-value, non-brand keywords to page 1 of search where 75% of search clicks originate.
Intitially, the company's marketing leader voice some doubts about automating internal linking. Would it impact site performance? Would the links be high enough quality? Would it be able to support different markets and different languages?
The team decided to test Autopilot on its shop pages, saying of the implementation, "We had good communication with the BrightEdge technical team throughout the integration process. BrightEdge provided us with testing URLs, profiles and use cases, so that when it came time to release Autopilot, there were no issues."
The Results
Most importantly, the BrightEdge client saw rapid and significant results.
"We saw an increase in keyword visibility immediately. More significantly, we have seen a better conversion rate on pages that include the Autopilot link block and we've measured an increase in average order value on visits that engaged Autopilot."
Despite robust in-house SEO and technology operations, the company notes that Autopilot offered speed, scale and a "secret sauce" that further benefitted them.
"From just a cross-linking point-of-view, we could have built some sort of service back-end feature, but that doesn't get to the secret sauce, which is BrightEdge's Data Cube. That intelligence is where a lot of the value comes from, and it's not something we would have been able to develop. We couldn't put a price on that."
Following its initial success with Autopilot, the company has begun to expand its use of the technology. "We are expanding Autopilot into other product categories and other pages types. There is additional untapped value that we're really excited about."
That untapped value, according to the marketing team, goes beyond linking purely for SEO. "It is something we can enable on different areas of our site for different use cases. For example, I could use Autopilot to cross-link my support pages. There would be SEO value in doing that, but it would also improve my customer experience."
"In addition to measurable SEO value, we have also seen an increase in average order value on visits that engaged Autopilot. I would absolutely recommend Autopilot." - Senior Manager of SEO, Beauty Retailer
If you're interested in learning more about Autopilot, contact your BrightEdge CSM or request a demo of the SEO platform.