BACKGROUND
A longtime ecommerce client of ours wanted to reposition their brand from a country-style home decor shop to one with a stronger focus on farmhouse style. The reason being is that the client wanted to attract younger buyers and those in the market for country-style decor are typical of an older demographic.
When we began optimizing the website many years ago, we focused on targeting country style keywords, and successfully developed a strong organic presence in the space. We didn’t want to hinder that success with our new goal of improving their search ranking for ‘farmhouse home decor,’ so we had to develop a keyword strategy that would allow us to see results without negatively impacting our existing rankings.
STRATEGY
According to SEMrush, farmhouse home decor has a keyword difficulty score of 66% and a monthly search volume of 2.9K in the United States.
Before making any updates to the website, we added ‘farmhouse home decor’ to our position tracking list in SEMrush to monitor progress.
We then began identifying which high-volume pages were missing the keyword farmhouse from their meta tags. The pages in question were navigation-level, including category pages. Once we had our list, we modified the tags to include farmhouse. And since we still want to remain a fixture in the country-style space, we shifted any mention of country to the second half of the tag instead of stripping it completely.
Now that the tags were appropriately optimized, we needed to take a look at our internal link structure. We conducted a site search for any mention of farmhouse that was not being used as an internal link. And once that list was complete, we hyperlinked those keywords to the category pages, using the Home Decor page as often as we could. The results? See below.
RESULTS
After a month, our client ranked on page 1 for a highly competitive and volatile keyword, all without having to make major updates to our existing organic strategy. Now, this won’t work every time and we may need to revisit this as the competition in the space grows, but it does not always take a drastic change in strategy to see positive results.