Megantic took home a hat-trick of awards at the APAC Search Awards

Megantic, a prominent eCommerce-focused Organic Search (SEO) specialist agency in Australia, continues to make significant strides in the industry. Their outstanding achievements were recognised at the 2023 APAC Search Awards, where they proudly received awards in three categories for the one client: Best SEO Campaign, Best Use of Search (Health), and Best Use of Search (FMCG). The award-winning entries looked at its successful collaboration with health store, Supplement Mart and offer a testament to the agency’s ability to grow a website, even during a migration.

The backstory

Supplement Mart is one the largest supplement and sports nutrition retailers in Australia, selling protein powders, pre-workouts, vitamins and other nutrition and general wellbeing products.

Megantic was engaged to assist in a migration from Magento 1 to Shopify– a more user-friendly CMS platform. However, this transition posed significant risks to Organic Search, particularly considering the authority that had already been established over 4+ years using the Magento structure. Megantic’s vast experience in migrations and post-migration damage recovery for failed Shopify migrations was one of the key selling points for partnering together.

The goals were set high, and the outcomes managed to surpass all expectations. Take a look:

Objectives:

• Minimise damage from the Magento to Shopify migration
• Increase organic sessions by 50%
• Increase first page keywords and top 3 keywords by 100%
• Increase organic transactions & revenue by 50%

Results:

• Huge growth was seen throughout all metrics, despite the migration
• Organic sessions: +76% increase
• Top 3 keywords: +513% increase
• First page keywords: +427% increase
• Organic transactions: +62% increase
• Organic revenue: +69% increase

The challenges

Projects with Megantic go through three distinct stages, and Supplement Mart was no different. In stage one, Megantic conducted extensive research to understand the opportunities for growth and challenges that Supplement Mart was facing. The team identified three main challenges: achieving growth post-migration, increasing CTR through custom meta descriptions and optimising the crawl budget.

• Challenge 1: Recovering AND achieving growth post-migration to Shopify.

Outcome: Shopify is an easy-to-use CMS platform, but it has certain limitations for SEO. Migrating from Magento after building authority over 4+ years with the ideal Magento structure, posed risks for organic search losses. After a temporary (and expected) downturn in Supplement Mart’s organic rankings post-migration, we were able to return the site’s total SEO-based non-branded keywords to growth. Megantic’s careful pre-planned and extensive pre & post-migration SEO actions have completely turned the business around.

• Challenge 2: Low CTRs on products & poor autogenerated meta descriptions.

Outcome: As the health and supplement industries are so competitive, it is tough to obtain traffic share, and even tougher to drive CTRs against larger competitors. Google was pulling metadata in a non-optimised format. To address this, we used our custom Shopify code to automate product page meta descriptions using a customised template. We still have the ability to write custom meta for priority products, but this automation gave the client quick results for the meantime and a stronger CTR across their ever changing range.

• Challenge 3: Improving and optimising low crawl budget

Outcome: An SEO issue in the past with Shopify (and during this migration from M2) was inability to add to the robots.txt file. Being a relatively small website at the time, with a low crawl budget, we were unable to add Disallows for non-value URLs and other duplicate, dynamically generated queries. Once Shopify announced this addition, we jumped straight in to create a new robots.txt liquid and optimise accordingly. This also helped us to block some of the older M2 URLs still being crawled by bots. We continually add to this file every few months when required, using our internal bot tracking tool which collates data on bot visits.

Turning the ship around

Megantic’s strategy focuses on using data-driven approaches to understand the challenges and opportunities of each client, creating a unique strategy that fits the client’s needs. By executing specific tasks to achieve set objectives, Megantic’s work with Supplement Mart is a testament to its ability to turn around a migration to see sizable results.

Our work has pushed Organic Search up into the top performing channel across all metrics for Supplement Mart. Prior to our work, it was dominated by a large Paid Search budget, and a close second was Direct as a channel. We have hit all our original KPIs and goals for the client, most of which were ambitious and seemed hard to achieve (especially as it was new to the Shopify platform).

“I am thrilled to be a part of the experienced team who managed to achieve excellent results for our client across what can sometimes be a complex migration process. However, our strategy and outcomes in this instance unequivocally demonstrate the effectiveness of our process, reflecting substantial growth across all metrics,” says Bryce Fullerton, Project Manager at Megantic.

“The recognition we received at the APAC Search Awards further supports this outcome and the dedication of our team during this time. These prestigious awards not only validate our achievements but also serve as a significant endorsement. The exposure and credibility obtained through receiving this award is invaluable to our business, creating opportunities to demonstrate our expertise in the field of SEO and affirming us as industry leaders. We are more excited than ever to leverage this success and continue the Megantic mission of delivering exceptional results to our clients.”

Consistency and expertise are essential for SEO results

Megantic is a leading Organic Search (SEO) specialist agency based in Australia, dedicated to eCommerce. A multiple award-winning global agency, Megantic has created a unique strategy for online retailers that enables them to target educated customers that are traditionally ignored by most SEO campaigns and substantially grow their online revenue.

With offices in the UK, Macedonia, Canada and a flagship office in Australia,

Megantic is used by many of Australia’s top brands like The Good Guys, Forty Winks, Aquila and Cargo Crew.

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Written by Emily Bencsics, Marketing & Digital Coordinator at Megantic.