Client: online store "Basket"
Subject matter: grocery delivery service
Cooperation period: from 2020 to 2021
Services: complex SEO-promotion
In April 2020, the nationwide lockdown began. Offline stores faced a sharp decline in revenues, and purchases - moved online.
Therefore, a month before the lockdown, our client decided to launch an internet project for food delivery as soon as possible. And to make it a leader in Crimea.
Earlier, the company also thought about the organization of delivery. And even purchased the domain name korzina.su in the fall of 2019 after consultation with the SEO team. But, for various reasons, they delayed the launch of the internet project.
Lockdown has dramatically shifted priorities.
Table of Contents
- Features of promotion in Crimea
- Nuances of going online for offline business
- How to set goals for quality SEO
- Promotion strategy
- How we got fast results
- Launch an online store in a month from scratch
- How to optimize pages when the demand is not yet formed in the region?
- Local SEO for grocery delivery service
- About UX
- CTR increase
- Results
- Conclusions and future plans
- OTHER CASES
Although the home delivery service was not yet in widespread demand in the Russian Federation before 2020, we could see how it was gaining momentum in stores with millions of inhabitants. And having seen what a lockdown is like in the US and China, we realized how popular home delivery services would become with the introduction of the lockdown in our countries.
There were already 5 food delivery services in Simferopol at the time we started working with Basket. But their websites were weak in terms of search engine optimization and business organization.
We needed to not only provide call delivery, but also allow customers to select, buy and pay for products online. So we decided to launch a multi-page catalog. Imagine the situation, you have no online store, no 1C, no synchronization of product balances, no product photos, nothing. And you need to launch a working online store in a month. It was not an easy task.
Peculiarities of promotion in Crimea
After sanctions were imposed on companies and citizens of Crimea, businesses were faced with the inability to place Google My Business company cards. It was not immediately possible to place points on Google maps.
Due to the sanctions from Google, it became more difficult to punch the rendition both manually and in automatic mode.
Traffic in Google Search Console is marked as "Unknown Region". Federal companies that are not present in Crimea (Vprok, Sbermarket, Utkonos and others) rank well.
Nuances of going online for offline business
Lack of expertise online can lead to a long and expensive time to gain experience. This expertise can be gained by hiring experienced people.
By choosing the "hit the ground running" route, pre-entrepreneurs often lose the most valuable thing a person has - time. Instead, it is possible to hire people who have long since gotten the hang of it.
For an offline business to go online, you have to:
- Hire an experienced marketing director and properly motivate him/her on KPIs.
- Let him choose the contractors and form a team.
- Form a team (design, content, SEO, targeting and SMM, development, 1C, etc.).
- Choose a working environment (messengers, task trackers, etc.).
- Define KPIs for each team.
- Allocate job responsibilities and spheres of influence among teams.
How to set goals for quality SEO
The most correct goal is to become the leader in the number of organic leads in a given region compared to competitors with the most similar product range. This is a long-term goal. In our case, the niche was poorly occupied, if we take into account the quality of competitors' websites and their SEO level.
The goal of "becoming a leader" is possible only with sufficient investment. If there is not enough money, then we should start from the budget, region, and level of competition. And work first with one group of goods (services). Usually these are the most profiled for the company. You should also choose the most marginal ones.
When the margin niche is hyper-competitive, you can promote smaller margin product groups, but emphasize repeat sales to customers by keeping communication with them.
Promotion strategy
The most working of all strategies is to do 20% of the actions that give 80% of the results. But exactly how it will look like on each project depends on the region, topic, level of competition, product range, goals and budget.
The client did not have an online store. But there was a domain with age, history in the subject matter and incoming links. So the short-term strategy was basic optimization of this site.
And while he was collecting orders through calls, we were already working on the medium-term strategy - the creation of the first version of the online store.
The long-term strategy included expanding the site structure, synchronizing product inventory, implementing analytics, Local SEO, and more.
How we got quick results
When it became clear that the lockdown in Russia would start soon, the task of building a simple site for collecting traffic in 2 weeks appeared.
The client had a small information site about the food-retail.su chain of stores. They decided to use it to get traffic as soon as possible.
Confirmed in Webmaster, assigned a region. We made edits to the meta tags, wrote clear text on delivery.
Search traffic to food-retail.su in April was off the charts. We immediately got a small but clear result.
On April 15, at the peak of self-isolation, we made 150 orders per day - a record for the month.
Launch an online store in a month from scratch
The challenge became, not only to provide on-call delivery, but also to allow customers to select, buy and pay for products online.
This means that we need to launch a multi-page catalog. At this point there were already 5 food deliveries operating in Simferopol.
Imagine a situation, you have no online store, no 1C, no synchronization of product balances, no photos of goods, nothing. And you need to launch a working online store in a month. It was not an easy task.
On the client's side we had a great internet marketing director Maxim.
He managed to gather the right contractors and organize the work so that the goals were achieved on time.
We prepared and implemented optimization recommendations in the shortest possible time:
- Gathered a little semantics.
- Formed the structure of the site.
- Wrote meta tags for the home page and store pages in the cities.
- Prescribed meta tag templates for product and category pages.
- We wrote the text for the main page.
- Formed robots.txt.
- Implemented micro-pagination of https://schema.org/Store and https://schema.org/breadcrumb.
- Split food-retail.su and korzina.su by queries for more semantics coverage.
- Generated sitemap.xml
Parallel to this:
- Prepared a list of catalogs for registration, started registration in them.
- Removed any mention of the old food-retail.su site from the Yandex Directory YAS.
- We've merged korzina.su with food-retail.su.
- Added features and descriptions to product cards.
There have been problems.
There was no correct upload from 1C, the URLs of products and categories were constantly changing, so it was decided to open the site for indexing in stages.
We got the original result.
Successfully implemented FAQ markup for the homepage. The extended snippet took shape. CTR increased, but Google soon changed the criteria for the appearance of the extended snippet for the main pages, which actually led to the removal of extended snippets from the FAQ in the SERPs.
How do you optimize pages when demand is not yet established in a given region?
In our region, semantics was practically nil. Only some basic queries of the format "food delivery + [city]" and that with a very low frequency.
How to make meta-tags, if in your region and topic the demand is not yet formed or semantics is scarce:
- Analyze demand in another language using services. Usually in English.
- View the structure and meta tags of competitors from different countries.
- Find a similar topic and see how people form queries in it. Then use these patterns to build query masks for your topic.
Local SEO for grocery delivery service
A big plus for offline businesses is the presence of offline outlets. And, for a topic where Local Pack is present in the top for many queries, it is very good. Because each offline point helps to get the top in the neighborhood of the city where the user directly requests the service.
- It is clear that initially all points have to be added to the maps
- Next, populate the profiles as much as possible
- Keep information up to date
- Respond to people's feedback and questions on a regular basis.
- Utilize the new chips of local SEO. You can write a number of articles about it.
About UX
It would seem that what can be added in terms of convenience, which many people do not have, which is quickly realized and gives a good inflow of money?
And there are always such solutions.
A simple example is the "Repeat order" button in the client's personal cabinet. It allows you to do the same thing that the client ordered in the last order in one click. Over time, it has become popular among the users of the service 🙂
CTR increase
An important part of the job is working with snippets.
We investigated the topic of getting an advanced image snippet, undocumented in Google's instructions.
Implemented. CTR doubled.
Added JSON micropartitioning to product pages.
Implemented JSON micro-markup on categories.
As we said above, this all yielded a twofold increase in the CTR of snippets on Google.
Results
Number of orders
Traffic growth
KORZINA.RF is the leader in traffic in the topic "Food delivery" in Crimea. TOP-1 in organic traffic in the regions of promotion (Simferopol, Yalta, Yevpatoria) in the theme "Food delivery".
Traffic dynamics for the time of work 1.05.20 - 31.08.21.
Average ROI for SEO 2734%
Yandex
92% of marker general queries in top 3 of Yandex.ru
The leader in SEO visibility in Yandex (Simferopol) for queries with toponyms "Simferopol" and ""in Simferopol".
Average position in Yandex (Simferopol) for general queries - 2
Average position in Yandex (Simferopol) for queries with toponyms "Simferopol" and "in Simferopol".
On average, the site is ranked in 3rd position for queries with toponyms in Yandex (Yalta).
92% of queries with toponyms in TOP-3 in Yandex (Yalta).
Visibility in Yandex (Yalta) for queries with toponyms is 79%.
Average position on general queries in Yandex (Yevpatoria).
86% of general inquiries are in TOP-3 in Yandex (Evpatoria).
For queries with toponyms "Simferopol" and "in Simferopol" 54% in TOP 1 in Google.ru. The site is ranked on average at the 3rd position.
In Google.ru (mobile) the site is ranked on average at the 3rd position for queries with toponyms "Yalta", "in Yalta".
78% of queries are in TOP-3.
Conclusions and future plans
It is possible to become a leader in an unoccupied niche in the region in six months. But, to do this, you need a well-coordinated team, sufficient investment, and the right motivation. And certain circumstances must also coincide.
Future plans:
- Getting even more traffic from category pages and product cards. Search demand for these types of pages is increasingly increasing.
- Display the remaining queries on the main in the top 1.
We always tell the client that 50% of success depends on the client's team.
In this case, thanks to the organizational and business skills of KORZINA's marketing director Maxim Kolpakov and the full involvement of RM's Anna Gusarova, we managed to achieve our goals on time.
We would like to thank Sergey Savin for his work with content.
The development team and the 1C team also worked well together.
Everyone worked coherently and engaged.
We thank you, colleagues. People can do a lot together.
OTHER CASES
- How to increase traffic by 300% in Yandex and return the indicators after sanctions Proxima: SEO for the website of an engineering company
- From zero to a leader in Crimea in six months: the case of food delivery service KORZINA.RF
- SEO for a UK vitamins website on Shopify. How to increase organic traffic by 182% for a monobrand
- Promotion of the RainViewer weather application website. Traffic growth by 98% over a year
- Optimizing a trucking service website: how to outperform niche competitors from scratch
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