How we managed a temporary client transformation during lockdown

For some that meant cutting down retainers or pausing projects to support their staff, finding new ways to market to audiences outside of usual digital means or alter their product offering to keep their business running smoothly.

Or, in some instances, assist with the current needs of the nation. That’s exactly what our client Zouch Converters did as soon as there was a call for PPE (Personal Protective Equipment). Zouch changed their core product offering from foam, sealants and adhesive tapes to manufacturing face shields in the UK, to aid the shortage of medical grade PPE for medical workers.

That meant Zouch needed to change its proposition quickly (though temporarily) for the foreseeable future. We worked with Zouch to quickly reimagine their homepage, turn around new product pages, industry pages, articles, at-home photography and social media posts in a matter of days.

Alongside that, we spent a lot of time updating and finely tuning their SEO, to help them grow their reach and impressions through organic search with their brand new offering of PPE.

Face shields and visors quickly became a popular search term and that meant a lot of research and fine-tuning went into product pages, meta titles, H1s & H2s, as well as content and articles, to optimise the website for Google, to rank higher in the SERPs, whilst steering well away from black hat SEO and keyword stuffing.

Whilst organic traffic has always been in good shape for Zouch with a content strategy in place for new and returning customers, as we adjusted the strategy for PPE, we knew we'd need a good plan for SEO to combat any potential drops in traffic.

As we all know, SEO is a long term strategy but with the demand for product, we were able to quickly understand patterns in keywords and long tail terms being used to maximise our findings. This then allowed us to strategise and see Zouch ranking between #1-5 on Google's first page during a 3-month period, for terms such as:

• ppe face shield uk supplier
• ppe face shield uk
• manual worker face shield
• face visor medical uk
• medical face shield visor uk
• face shield ppe uk

However, we still needed to maintain their position as #1 for their best selling product's keywords such as "polyethylene foam supplier", so that when we eventually flipped the website back to their standard offering (in August), Zouch would still be in position for their regular customers requirements such as foam inserts for packaging.

We saw the demand for PPE close the gap between impressions and clicks, with an average CTR of 8.1% in just 3-months for "ppe face shield uk" alone, with no previous offering or authority on the website for PPE. In that 3-month period, there were over 4.5k clicks to the new PPE Face Shield product page and we saw a 247% increase on lead conversions compared to previous, on tracked events online for organic traffic, which matched the 38% bounce rate of users moving through sessions on the website.

All sounds great, right? Here's the but...

It's important that a website has a good basis to build upon for SEO to achieve results and it's not only having good SEO in terms of keywords and content. Technical SEO is a huge factor and that boils down to website load time and optimisation, sitemaps and indexing, header tags and a solid redirect strategy for 301s. Ensuring fundamental SEO is in place allows for strong SEO content to be relied upon and easily read and understood by Google, to see higher ranking in the SERPs.

Whilst no one-size-fits-all with SEO, there are steps to take toward better content that achieves results. It's never a quick win but SEO is a long term strategy for organic growth. The problem we often see with SEO content is that it has been written to "stuff" keywords for Google's crawlers and not for humans. Alas, Google is far more intelligent and often penalises websites for keyword stuffing, so in the long run you're no better off. So when it comes to SEO, it's always a marathon and not a race.

Need help with your content strategy or SEO content for your website? Get in touch with the team and we can offer advice on the best route to take when it comes to gaining organic traffic.