Megantic won two awards for Black Mango at the 2023 APAC Search Awards here the secret to its success

Megantic, a leading Organic Search (SEO) specialist agency in Australia dedicated solely to eCommerce, continues to make waves in the industry, taking home the Most Innovative Campaign and Best Use of Data (Silver) awards at the Don’t Panic! 2023 APAC Search Awards. The award-winning entries looked at its successful collaboration with furniture retailer Black Mango and offer a testament to the agency’s ability to turn a struggling business into a profitable one through smart and data-driven SEO strategies.

The backstory

Black Mango is a true bottom to top story when it comes to SEO. In 2019, the furniture retailer engaged with Megantic to boost its Organic Search – one of the more neglected channels in the site’s past. Struggling with SEO in a competitive business landscape and with supply and budgeting issues, Black Mango needed to pivot in a competitive market.

The company had relied on direct branding and internal efforts in social media and email marketing to compete. But in order to thrive, Black Mango needed a new strategy. And the pandemic marked the perfect opportunity to initiate incredible change. With a new data-driven approach, the Megantic team was able to discover an overlooked niche within the furniture market. The team got to work, completely restructuring the website categorisation based on this data research.

The objectives were ambitious, but the results were extraordinary. Take a look:

Objectives:

● Double Organic sessions from 4,000 sessions per month to 8,000

● Increase non-branded page 1 keyword results by 100%

● Increase top 3 keywords by 100%

● Lift Organic Revenue by over 100% to make up losses in other channels

Results

● Organic Sessions: now averaging 9,100 a month

● Non-branded page 1 keywords: 355 (August 2021) to 842 (August 2022) = 137%

● Top 3 keywords: 101 (August 2021) to 259 (August 2022) = 156%

● Organic Transactions: +45.82% from the last 16 months vs prior

● Organic Revenue = up +74.14% from the last 16 months vs prior

The challenges

The project with Black Mango went through three stages. In stage one, Megantic conducted extensive research to understand the challenges and opportunities that Black Mango was facing. The team identified three main challenges: competing with larger furniture industry players, too many non-optimised product pages and slow site speed due to videos and large images.

• Challenge 1: Competing with the saturated furniture industry and larger competitors. Outcome: Megantic’s data-driven approach to basing keywords research on a site identity of “Modern” and “Designer” helped the client compete and gain a larger slice of a smaller organic market. Generic “Sofas” and “Bedheads” keywords were out of the question when comparing this small Shopify site with large big box stores. However, with chosen niche keywords, such as “Designer Ottomans” and “Modern Bed Heads” helped our client gain many top spots.

• Challenge 2: Too many non-optimised product pages to fix with budget.
  Outcome: The “Modern” and “Designer” keyword niche helped Megantic with non-branded, category-based searches, but not product-specific ones. This is where the templated product meta code had a huge impact on not only our CTRs for product-based searches but also on our ability to outrank and gain clicks over other competitors that were stocking similar products. The flow on effect into other channels has been huge from this, with gains in social, email and direct return users.
  
• Challenge 3: Slow site speed due to videos and large images.
  Outcome: Using page speed insight tests and third-party tools, however, we were able to identity the most cost-effective, quick wins for site speed and improving core web vitals scores, as LCP was hitting 10.5s on average, with 9.2s of savings for images.
  
  We uploaded embedded YouTube links and smaller format videos as well as compressed image files as much as possible to get CWV scores in check for mobile and desktop. Once again, utilising the data as much as possible and squeezing as much of the cash flow as we could.

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 Black Mango is a testament to its ability to turn around a struggling business into a profitable one.

Black Mango now outranks many larger companies in the industry with higher branded search and DA. It is hugely profitable across all channels with the help of multi/assisted conversions from Organic. With the returns from SEO, Black Mango now has the ability to invest heavily in email, paid and social, helping the business scale and extend its overall growth trend.

“Awards like Don’t Panic!’s 2023 APAC Search Awards are incredibly important. By highlighting those who are doing extraordinary things in the space, these awards lift up the entire industry. They inspire others to rise up and spark change as well – change that has the potential to save struggling businesses,” says Heath Hamilton, Technical Project Lead at Megantic.

“We look forward to an even brighter future with Black Mango, especially as we’ve increased revenue and ROI enough for the company to finally be able to invest in other marketing channels. It’s been one of our most successful turn-around stories, going from the client almost shutting shop just two-three months into the project to being a dominant player in the independent market with x5-6 the traffic and sales.”

Breaking down the stages that produce award-winning results:

Data-driven research: Extensive research is conducted to determine how large the customer-driven demand is for our client’s product SKUs and the size of that market. Megantic’s team establishes a percentage of the company’s industry‘s total market, determining realistic opportunities available to access. This becomes a blueprint for all its digital channels.

Implementation: Megantic focuses on leveraging the research data to correct the client’s hierarchy, categories, filters and other critical elements to technically reconfigure the platform and information architecture. By opening new entry points, the client’s consumers with true buying intent will land on the most relevant landing page. This leads to better purchase experience, better conversions and importantly, better eCommerce metrics. 

Ongoing growth and protection: Megantic continually consults and executes onsite and offsite promotional strategies, enabling them to become the client’s eCommerce trusted advisors. This leads to ensuring long-term market share and revenue growth. The team dynamically deals with evolving situations, constantly adapting and optimising the client’s platform, enabling it to respond to on-going market changes. Megantic project managers continue to track, communicate and report transparently on activities and results regularly.

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, Repco, Forty Winks and Cargo Crew.

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