{"id":5253,"date":"2018-09-06T15:02:47","date_gmt":"2018-09-06T14:02:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bronco.co.uk\/our-ideas\/?post_type=case_studies&p=5253"},"modified":"2020-07-01T13:27:10","modified_gmt":"2020-07-01T12:27:10","slug":"festive-lights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bronco.co.uk\/our-ideas\/festive-lights\/","title":{"rendered":"Lighting Up Organic Performance for A Major e-Commerce Retail Brand"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Lighting specialists Festive Lights came to us with clear aims to be the leading name in festive and occasion lighting in the UK. With a huge website in need of optimisation, this was no easy task.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As you\u2019d expect, Festive Lights are heavily influenced by seasonality. Peak season begins in the build up to Halloween, and spans over the remainder of Q4 until Christmas, with post-Christmas and January sales also seeing high levels of traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bronco have consistently delivered strong organic performance figures during this key time:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

As an ongoing strategy, the Festive Lights campaign utilises a huge array of digital marketing channels with a predominant focus on SEO. Below we detail some of the technical aspects we have covered for their large ecommerce site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Cross Agency Collaboration To Deliver Spectacular Site Speed Results<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In early 2017 Festive Lights launched their stunning new website,but following launch, we discovered that site speed had become a real issue for them. Although this launch was more aesthetically pleasing, page load times were compromised, and poor user experience plagued the website, impacting both search and sales.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To quote Google from way back in 2010…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou may have heard that here at Google we\u2019re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we\u2019re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By mid March 2017, the Google Page Speed score on desktop was sitting bleak at 41\/100, customers and internal teams noticed that the website was getting slower and slower. Back and forth communications between our SEO team and the client\u2019s development agency had begun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we think of site speed issues, poor image optimisation, or from an ecommerce point of view, perhaps too many products per page are issues that spring to mind initially. In this case, rectifying standard issues like these did not fully rectify the issue. Although the Google Page Speed score was now sitting at 63\/100 \u2013 a marginal improvement, it was still insufficient for such a popular ecommerce store that relies so heavily on website performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Server Logs<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Festive<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"Festive<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Once server logs were requested by our SEO team, it became very clear what the issue was. The extremity of this is shown in the above image. Overnight, Google had navigated its way into the Festive Lights’ faceted search, and had begun to index all of their filter page URLs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The impact of the amount of pages crawled became pretty severe, particularly in June, and required further action:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Festive<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

It was time to involve Festive Lights’ server agency to help solve the issue. Their data showed that the Festive Lights server started being put under a constant 70% load, which would explain why the time to first byte was over 5 seconds, and why pages were taking around 20s on average to fully load.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Festive<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Controlling Google\u2019s Crawl Rate<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It was time time to put the shackles on Google\u2019s crawl rate and reduce the server load. We did this by completing the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  • Ensuring all the canonical tags were correct and were behaving as intended.<\/li>
  • Nofollow all the pagination links on any category or search page.<\/li>
  • Implementing a NoIndex,Nofollow tag on the actual facet pages (anything containing the query parameter).<\/li>
  • Amending the parameter handling in Google\u2019s Search Console, this includes the ordering of product pages, and also if it\u2019s ascending or descending.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n

    Google\u2019s Caffeine Indexer = Tamed.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"Festive<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
    \"Festive<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

    A Full Content Overhaul<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    Of course, SEO strategies are more than just site speed. Our flexible, holistic approach means carrying out the essentials elements that deliver the best results and ROI. For Festive Lights, another key element of the strategy has been a full content overhaul.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Following the execution of the technical SEO audit on the Festive Lights website, the next phase of our strategy was to perform a rewrite of content to ensure we open up the exposure within the search engines. This started off with in-depth keyword research, familiarising ourselves with the industry, before setting out to review competitors and new opportunities. Keyword implementation followed, re-working the content to ensure we had all bases covered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Off the back of the new keyword optimised content on-site, we enhanced the internal linking where appropriate, utilising exact match anchor text to pass both Google and the user to the most relevant pages. This coupled with the keyword implementation led to a significant increase in rankings and engagement for the site
    .
    Now a case of enticing users to the site, we set out to review the click through rates for all category pages, using variations of wording, dates, prices and more. Data from Google\u2019s Search Console was thrown into the mix alongside keyword relevance, competitor analysis and \u201cbuzz words\u201d to find the happy balance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    An SEO Strategy Built To Last<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    The Festive Lights strategy is on-going, as we continue to push organic search performance to the next level, surpassing our successes year on year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"Festive<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

    Festive Lights Ranking Achievements<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
    Keyword <\/th> Festive Lights Start Date Ranking <\/th> Best Ranking <\/th><\/tr><\/thead>
    Christmas Lights<\/strong><\/td>11<\/td>1<\/td><\/tr>
    Fairy Lights<\/strong><\/td>72<\/td>3<\/td><\/tr>
    Christmas Lighting<\/strong><\/td>8<\/td>1<\/td><\/tr>
    Halloween Lighting<\/strong><\/td>11<\/td>1<\/td><\/tr>
    Festoon Lights<\/strong><\/td>8<\/td>2<\/td><\/tr>
    Outdoor Christmas Lights<\/strong><\/td>8<\/td>3<\/td><\/tr>
    Micro Fairy Lights<\/strong><\/td>100+<\/td>2<\/td><\/tr>
    Christmas Tree Lights<\/strong><\/td>17<\/td>1<\/td><\/tr>
    Net Lights<\/strong><\/td>11<\/td>3<\/td><\/tr>
    Wedding Lights<\/strong><\/td>13<\/td>5<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Lighting specialists Festive Lights came to us with clear aims to be the leading name in festive and occasion lighting in the UK. With a huge website in need of optimisation, this was no easy task. As you\u2019d expect, Festive Lights are heavily influenced by seasonality. Peak season begins in the build up to Halloween, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":5262,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"class_list":["post-5253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-search-engine-optimisation"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bronco.co.uk\/our-ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bronco.co.uk\/our-ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bronco.co.uk\/our-ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bronco.co.uk\/our-ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bronco.co.uk\/our-ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bronco.co.uk\/our-ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5253\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bronco.co.uk\/our-ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bronco.co.uk\/our-ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bronco.co.uk\/our-ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}