SuperCook - seo

The company sells its products via well known supermarkets and its own website. Dr. Oetker SuperCook therefore wanted its site to rank prominently in the search engine results pages when people searched for baking-related products and recipes – something it was not doing prior to the SEO campaign.

SEO brief and objectives:
Dr. Oetker SuperCook wanted to increase the number of visitors to its website, which in turn would lead to increased brand awareness and sales.

As such, the following campaign objectives were set:

• To increase organic traffic from search engines
• To improve the quality of organic traffic
• To increase search engine visibility of the website

SEO strategy implementation:
To effectively achieve the objectives set out by Dr. Oetker SuperCook, an SEO campaign was devised and conducted which comprised the following activity:

• In-depth competitor analysis was initially carried out in order to fully determine Dr. Oetker SuperCook’s main competitors and the activity being performed by them. The research revealed that competition was extremely fierce, with Dr. Oetker SuperCook being directly up against hundreds of high quality food-related websites including Nigella Lawson’s and BBC Good Food.

• After conducting the necessary competitor analysis, the keywords that would effectively drive targeted traffic to the Dr. Oetker SuperCook website were determined via additional in-depth research and analysis.

• Following identification of the keywords, the next step was internal optimisation of the website to ensure all the existing templates met the necessary requirements to carry out the planned SEO activity.

• Title optimisation – one of the most important elements of website optimisation - was then conducted and every single page within the website was given its own unique and highly descriptive title containing at least one of the relevant keywords identified at the start of the campaign.

• It was then time for content and Meta data preparation, optimisation and population to take place. This was the hardest and most complicated task in the whole process due to the Dr. Oetker SuperCook website having hundreds of recipe, product and baking-related pages that all needed to be populated with unique and well formed Meta data to ensure that snippets of text formed by the search engines read well and stood out from the competition in the search engine results pages.

• All product and recipe URL’s were then rewritten to include the keywords identified earlier in the campaign. This resulted in keyword-rich URLs, which help to ensure that pages appear highly in the search engine results pages, whilst also helping to increase keyword density and weight across the whole site.

• Once the new URLs had been written, permanent URL re-directing took place. This involved collecting all the old URLs already indexed by the search engines and redirecting them to new URLs to make the transition from the old to the new site as smooth as possible without losing any existing traffic.

• An XML site map containing absolutely all the new URLs was then submitted to both Google and Yahoo to in order to ensure that the major search engines indexed the newly updated website in full.

• Once full optimisation of the site had taken place, a Google Analytics account was opened so that traffic to the site could be effectively monitored. Furthermore, to ensure that all traffic logged by Google Analytics was genuine, filters were set up to ensure that visits from both fuse8 and Dr. Oetker SuperCook were not included in Google’s statistics.

• Finally, to complete the process, the website was submitted to various online directories and catalogues.

SEO results
The SEO campaign proved a massive success and is a prime example of just how effective organic search engine optimisation can be. Key results include:

• Traffic to the Dr. Oetker SuperCook website went up by over 1,850% in just over a year, with organic traffic from Google going up dramatically too - from 1,103 visits during the w/c 15th April 2007 to 12,305 visits during the w/c 17th November 2008 - up by 1,115%.
• This increase can also be demonstrated by average visitor figures. Prior to the campaign the Dr. Oetker SuperCook website was getting an average of around 150 visits per day, which included all internal traffic from Dr. Oetker SuperCook employees as well as third party companies. It now gets over 2,400 visits per day, which excludes all internal traffic.
• The quality of organic traffic has also improved dramatically, with traffic from some of the main keywords up by over 8,400%. Before the SEO campaign, the majority of visitors to the Dr. Oetker SuperCook website were people who were already aware of the brand name and who were actually using phrases containing the word ‘super’ to land on the site. For example, during the w/c 15th April 2007, search sent 657 total visits via 416 keywords excluding the word "super", demonstrating the number of genuine visitors to the site who were actually searching for baking-related products and services. Just over a year later, during the w/c 17th November, search sent 13,047 total visits via 4,552 keywords excluding the word "super", indicating a 1,985% increase in targeted organic visits from search engines.
• Prior to the campaign, Dr. Oetker SuperCook rarely featured in the top 200 results when people searched for baking related recipes and products. However, following the campaign it now nearly always features in the top three results – e.g. if you now search for terms including ‘chocolate fudge cake recipe’, ‘tray bakes’, ‘children's birthday cake recipes’, or ‘liquid glucose’, Dr. Oetker SuperCook always ranks top.
• Dr. Oetker SuperCook’s page rank moved from three to four.

SEO award

This award entry won a national DADI Award, which recognises the success of digital agencies outside the M25 in the ‘Best Use of Organic Search’ category.