This Case Study focuses on the results obtained with Organic Search Engineering in two years in terms of Search Market Penetration, Organic Traffic Value and volume.
Table of Contents
Abstract
The client is an emerging entity in the Digital Transaction Management and Technology industry. They covered both b2c (digital signature, certified communication..) and b2b (banking, insurance and digitalization of secured processes) services. Fuel LAB was assigned the goal to scale up e-commerce revenue exponentially both with performance advertising, and with the sustainability of organic search.
Two years later, the client is today recognized as “Large Tech Provider” by the Forrester Report, won the Aragon Research Innovation Award in 2022, and is nominated for the same award for 2023 and is recognized as business Exellence by Forbes.
This Case Study focuses on our approach and business impact on scaling up the E-commerce Revenue and Value Traffic acquisition trough Organic Search.
When we started getting involved in late 2020, The Client was facing several challenges to meet their goals, such as:
- Existing strong competitors with full Market Saturations (InfoCert, Poste Italiane, Aruba..)
- Virtual products with no visual or physical appeal, of which the target has little to none knowledge about in terms of use cases and functionality
- Little to none pre-existing Performance Marketing experience and Search Traffic strategy, with over 20 websites to optimize and monetize.
Here’s how at Fuel LAB we have driven the scale up on e-commerce digital sales and value traffic acquisition.
Why Organic Search Engineering (O.S.E.)
Organic Search Engineering is the name of the practice designed by Pietro in Fuel LAB when developing Organic Traffic projects on a large scale. Click here for more informations on Organic Search Engineering.
The power of Organic Conversion Engineering and strategic volume growth trough Technical SEO projects have met and exceeded the goals set by the Client.
While at Fuel LAB we have entirely designed, organized and managed the Performance Search Engine Advertising, largely responsible of the whole e-commerce scale to success by generating significant Organic Search demand, focusing on Organic Search is a pivoting point of digital strategy for several reason, including but not only:
- Strategic SEO and Technical SEO contribute to driving a consistent volume of highly converting traffic to the website, instead of merely focusing on volume, leading to a significant revenue impact.
- Topical Authority and Top and Middle of the funnel search volume help to boost brand awareness, recognition, retention and coverage.
- Increased search share saturation increases the user’s confidence and trust in the brand, scaling Conversion Rate also for other Traffic Acquisition Channels.
Our Organic Search acquisition strategy focused on acquiring constantly increasing volume of highly converting traffic to the website, instead of merely focusing on impressions volume.
This approach led to a yearly increasing volume of traffic from Organic Search with a significantly high revenue impact, while boosting the Brand Awareness and coverage thanks to Top of the funnel and Middle of the funnel queries.
Business Impact
Case Study data: February 2021 to February 2023.
| KPI | STARTING POINT | GOAL | RESULT |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organic Search Saturation | 384.000/mo | 700.000/mo | 1.410.000/mo |
| Organic Search Volume | 40.410/mo | 100.000/mo | 133.000/mo |
| Organic Search Value | €24.314/mo | €50.000/mo | €79.350/mo |
| Organic Share of Voice | 2% | >5% | 7% |
| Top 3 position for non branded queries | 20 | 50 | 988 |
- Organic traffic acquisition +241.4%
- Organic Search Value (e-commerce Revenue) +226.36 %
- Search market saturation +297.2 %
- First position keywords +4840.00 %
The client met and exceeded the goals set for Organic Search as a performance channel.
Furthermore, in the last two years it moved from a starting point of 78 Organic Keywords, to over 6.000 Organic Keywords. Moreover, the client moved from ranking top 3 position of page 1 for 20 search terms, to ranking for 988 search terms in top 3 position.
Worth of notice, is the fact that the highest value and volume from Organic Traffic is mostly entirely based on general queries, and not branded queries. This is of extreme strategic value.
Organic Traffic Volume growth: +231.4%
Organic Search Saturation and Volume
| Start point | Today | |
|---|---|---|
| Daily Search Impressions | 7.701 | 59.799 |
| Daily Traffic Volume | 1.285 | 6.486 |
Organic Traffic Value growth & Ecommerce Impact: +226.36%
Organic Search Traffic e-commerce Value
| Start point | Today | |
|---|---|---|
| Organic e-commerce Revenue/mo | €24.314/mo | €79.350/mo |
First page, first positions ranking Keywords +4840.00%
Ranking of pages for number of indexed keywords / search queries
| Start point | Today | |
|---|---|---|
| Ranking 1-3 | 20 | 988 |
| Ranking 4-10 | 20 | 2.472 |
| Ranking 11-20 | 38 | 2.619 |
Share of Voice and Search Market Share trough Technical SEO
Moved to top ranking entity, excluding Poste Italiane & Aruba
| Start point | Today | |
|---|---|---|
| Share of Voice | 0,3% | 7,3% |
| Traffic Share | 0,6% | 13% |
In the last 2 years, when isolating the share of voice and the traffic share for 9 top competitors, the Client has reached the largest scale up in Average Position, and growing its Search Share Voice to 7,30% and its Traffic Share to 13%. This positions the client on top of all realistic competition, where the top 2 positions are occupied by “Poste” (the Italian governative entity) and “pec.it”, Aruba’s main domain (leading, solid player with highest investment in the market since over 10 years).
Here we can see how the Client has scaled its Share of Voice over all the competitors, excluding the brand giants “Poste Italiane” and “Aruba” (pec.it).
Share of Voice amongst competitors
Traffic Share amongst competitors
Strategy and Approach
The first step in our workflow, was to determine a census of the active websites, understanding their role in the Company’s online presence and ecosystem, segmenting the monetization websites from the informative and lead generation ones (b2b and b2c).
The second step was the competition’s websites and strategy analysis, crawl, and content gaps identifications, as well as content overlap. This gave us a clear mapping of what the competition looked like, and where did the opportunities lie in order to scale rapidly the client’s key metrics.
This allowed us to identify which competitors we could have outranked in 2 years (InfoCert, Register, Lepida, Sielte), versus which competitors were positioned out of historical brand positioning, which will require large investments on mass media and more time to outrank (Poste Italiane and Aruba).
This helped us identify the major pain points and weak links in the chain of the competition’s tactics, such as:
- Average Technical SEO implementation
- Poor investment in internal and external linking
- Weak tagging and technical analytics implementation
- Slow and inconsistent content updates and Sitemap updates
While the client has been briefed and informed on the need to invest in a significant Entity based Topical Mapping and Content Clustering (leveraging Semantic Search Engine Content Engineering), a solid technical SEO plan, joined with a redesign of semantic page content and better linking logic, has in 2 years scaled significantly the company’s Organic Search results, as per the numbers shown.
In depth Data Documentation
We have focused on a Technical SEO Approach to offer maximum Search Engine crawlability, optimize Crawl Budget, and redesigning the entire internal and external linking policies.
Once the policies were in place, we have selectively optimized all the pages of the e-commerce, including product pages, category pages and dedicated Schema Markups and local+xml sitemaps.
Product Pages
1.72M impressions, 53K sessions
| Start point | Today | |
|---|---|---|
| Daily Impressions | 1.768 | 16.700 |
| Daily Sessions | 165 | 786 |
Category Pages
381K impressions, 24.3K sessions
| Start point | Today | |
|---|---|---|
| Daily Impressions | 95 | 4.119 |
| Daily Sessions | 7 | 297 |
The same approach has been run for Category pages, which offer the opportunity to showcase more related products, and direct traffic to better search-intent-matching pages.
Non Branded Searches
7.96M impressions, 190K sessions
| Start point | Today | |
|---|---|---|
| Daily Impressions | 421 | 38.685 |
| Daily Sessions | 21 | 1.478 |
The vertical growth of the client share of search and organic traffic acquisition was scaled up especially for non branded keywords, thus opening the gates for enormous amount of new opportunities to turn visitors into new customers.
In the specific business vertical of this client, branded keywords have rarely transactional purchase intent, and are more often versed towards support necessities.
E-commerce Product Vertical Queries volume growth
Product Family: Digital Identity
13.7M impressions, 1.09M sessions
| Start point | Today | |
|---|---|---|
| Daily Impressions | 6.440 | 50.914 |
| Daily Sessions | 1.153 | 5.866 |
The data shows the traffic volume over time for queries containing the word “SPID” and mispelling, trough regex .(spid|speed).
Product Family: Digital Signature
1.46M impressions, 67.8K sessions
| Start point | Today | |
|---|---|---|
| Daily Impressions | 446 | 5.465 |
| Daily Sessions | 17 | 240 |
Product Family: Certified E Mail
4.81M impressions, 250K sessions
| Start point | Today | |
|---|---|---|
| Daily Impressions | 144 | 23.409 |
| Daily Sessions | 0 | 1.636 |
The data shows the traffic volume over time for queries containing the word “PEC”, trough regex .(pec|posta|mail|pecmail)..
Informational Queries growth
374K impressions, 6.35K sessions
| Start point | Today | |
|---|---|---|
| Daily Impressions | 53 | 2.373 |
| Daily Sessions | 4 | 82 |
In growing the organic traffic volume, we have scaled up the client’s presence and reliability for Top and Middle of the funnel queries; here is a breakdown of informational (top of the funnel) search queries, isolated by who|what|when|how|why queries.
Commercial Queries growth
56.5K impressions, 1.89K sessions
| Start point | Today | |
|---|---|---|
| Daily Impressions | 22 | 211 |
| Daily Sessions | 0 | 8 |
This chart shows the growth for commercial queries (Middle of the Funnel), isolated by best|top|vs|review
Transactional Queries growth
1.86M impressions, 81.7K sessions
| Start point | Today | |
|---|---|---|
| Daily Impressions | 182 | 8.021 |
| Daily Sessions | 19 | 686 |
This chart shows the growth for transactional queries (Bottom of the Funnel), isolated by buy|cheap|price|purchase|order
Long Tail Keywords growth
362K impressions, 18.4K sessions
| Start point | Today | |
|---|---|---|
| Daily Impressions | 446 | 5.465 |
| Daily Sessions | 17 | 240 |
This chart filters search queries containing more than 4 words, thanks to the following regex applied to Google Search Console: (\w+\s){4,}\w+
Share of Voice and Traffic Market Share
| Start point | Today | |
|---|---|---|
| Share of Voice | 0,3% | 7,3% |
| Traffic Share | 0,6% | 13% |
Share of Voice amongst competitors
Traffic Share amongst competitors
Total Domain Growth
53.7M impressions, 2.69M sessions
| Start point | Today | |
|---|---|---|
| Daily Impressions | 63.120 | 269.873 |
| Daily Sessions | 2.822 | 15.987 |
Organic Traffic Value
€ 1.5M
| Start point | Today | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly Organic Revenue | € 24.197 | € 68.776 |
The directly attributed Organic Traffic Value on the e-commerce have succeeded the expectations quickly, ramping up the average monthly organic traffic value from € 24.197 to € 68.776.
This way, we brought Organic Traffic to represent 1/4 of the total Ecommerce Revenue for the tracked period (2 years), almost matching the value of paid traffic, reaching the directly attributed value of € 1.000.718. When considering indirect conversions and mixed-channels paths, Organic Traffic has surpassed the revenue of Paid Advertising, proving SEO’s and Organic Conversion Engineering as a primary and fundamental business asset for e-commerce websites.
| 2 Years result | |
|---|---|
| Paid Traffic Revenue | € 1.422.045 |
| Organic Traffic Revenue | € 1.000.718 |
| Organic Traffic Indirect Revenue | € 1.515.348 |
Direct Attribution (last click)
Organic Traffic and Paid Traffic Overlap in Conversion share
Assisted Conversions Organic Traffic added Value
Conclusions
While Fuel LAB has been responsible to the Digital Technical and Strategic Performance marketing, involving also Data Intelligence, Pay per Click Advertising, Social Media Advertising and Conversion Rate Optimization, Organic Search has represented one of the most interesting challenges, proving also in the case of a small player (in terms of digital presence) in an already established market, can significantly scale over competition and match up to paid traffic Ecommerce Revenue.
The main difference and value from an investment standpoint in Organic Search, is that traffic and results keep growing in time, offering a way lager ROI when compared to Paid Traffic, even in the field of Performance Marketing.
While traditional SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is often insufficient from an organic traffic value standpoint in today’s AI driven ranking and Search Engine evolution, the holistic approach of O.S.E. was proven capable of reaching these results with no backlink and digital PR strategy.
Additional Key Metrics
| KPI | Starting Point | Result | % Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly Organic Search Value | € 24.197 | € 68.776 | 184.23% |
| Share of voice | 0,3 % | 7,3 % | 600.00% |
| Monthly Organic Search Saturation | 1,84 M | 6,04 M | 255,56% |
| Organic Product Pages Traffic | 3,15k | 12,8k | 306.35% |
| Monthly Organic Search Volume | 47k | 131k | 178.2% |
| Organic Non branded search | 14k | 73k | 371,23% |
| KPI | Starting Point | Result | % Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daily Organic Search Value | € 305,16 | € 5.551 | 1720.00% |
| Share of voice | 0,3 % | 7,3 % | 600.00% |
| Daily Organic Search Saturation | 18,7k | 72,5k | 300.00% |
| Daily Organic Product Pages Traffic | 170 | 686 | 303.53% |
| Daily Organic Search Volume | 3.5k | 15,9k | 354.29% |
| Daily Organic Non branded search | 640 | 6.7k | 946.88% |
Pietro Mingotti is an Italian entrepreneur and digital marketing specialist, best known as the founder and owner of Fuel LAB, a leading digital marketing and technical marketing agency based in Italy, operating worldwide. With a passion for creativity, innovation, and technology, Pietro has established himself as a thought leader in the field of digital marketing and has helped numerous companies achieve their marketing goals.