SEO Case Study Brico Dêpot

Today we bring you a new success story that we are passionate about. An organic increase of up to 120% in 3 months after the migration and launch of the new website. The challenge was huge. A kind of online hardware store, but with many more aisles than a conventional hardware store. We are talking about up to 1,200 different categories and subcategories.

Imagine. A customer comes into your shop. Let’s say, a conventional hardware store and asks the shop assistant.

Excuse me, where are the “screws”, sir?
Screws? Mmm in aisle 115, but it depends on the type of screw you need.
Ok… And the stuff for the “garden”?
Aisles 432 and 433 sir, although it depends on what exactly you are looking for.

This could be an everyday situation in any large department store. The bonus is that when it comes to online searches the customer often stops there at “screws” or “garden” without specifying anything else. Likewise, in online shopping, there is no shop assistant to accompany us through the aisles and bring us directly the box of screws we were looking for or the roll of artificial grass for the garden we wanted. In online purchases that start their journey on Google, the user begins with a search. After that search, Google will first present a variety of options and results, both our own and our competitors’. Then, within our shop, he will also have several paths to follow until he finds what he is seeking.

1st. Design and launch of new web structure

This was the first challenge. Matching user searches with the more than 1,200 categories and subcategories of the website as accurately as was possible. We didn’t do it from scratch, because we already had a previous web structure. The mission comprised several tasks:

Keyword research for each of the new categories: nothing out of the usual. But for a “hardware store” with more than 100,000 references, you discover names you didn’t even know existed. Furthermore, some of them have multiple names or are searched for in different ways.

Study of search intention for each of the new sections if some products and keywords in this sector are already a mystery to any SEO (who isn’t a bit of a “dabbler”), imagine finding out what the “average user” really wants to find when they search!

Creation of a new URL structure for each of the new categories: we built the new category architecture following the already famous “silo” architecture. This type of architecture is not miraculous in itself. They do not magically position your site as some people have been suggesting for a while now. The key advantages of such architectures are that while they are being implemented, they help to avoid duplication and to establish hierarchies between different categories. Once implemented, they greatly facilitate the work of analyzing the performance of each of the sections and subsections. Either with external tools such as Ahrefs or through our own Google Search Console.
Redirect mapping in order to match the old URLs with the new structure: lastly, we had to make the “match” between the old and the new URLs. A critical point in which many projects fail. We can say from the results we are seeing today that it was successfully completed.

2nd. Post-launch, Initial Performance Analysis, and Improvements

In the first few weeks after the launch of the new website, we immersed ourselves in the performance data provided by Google Search Console to analyze and detect where we could improve further. How we do this is part of our know-howand is reserved for our customers who, after all, are the ones to whom we owe it and who provide us, in part, with the resources to achieve these goals. However, a word to the wise is a word to the wise. Let’s go back to the hardware store customer.

Excuse me, sir, I went to aisle 115, but I couldn’t find “sheet metal screws”. Can you tell me where they are, please?
Yes, they were in aisle 117, sorry, it is not well indicated, but we have already ordered a new sign for that section.

And so, by identifying opportunities to better assist consumers and users landing on the site, we were able to maximize growth in the weeks following the launch.

Key SEO performance factors

The initial captures of the dramatic increase in organic traffic are the result, but what are the levers of change that allowed us to get there? The CTR and the average position. These act like a two-pedal bike to climb a mountain. The CTR increases because the average position increases. And the average position increases because the CTR increases. It is difficult to decide exactly which pedal goes first. Like the question “ “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”. Regardless of which pedal comes first, what is certain is that it creates a “snowball” effect, i.e. it sets in motion a mechanism that will not stop unless what users find when they click on it is unsatisfactory. Or to put it another way, what users find when they click on it does not satisfy the search intention.