One of the great joys of working in SEO is that you always get the chance to help consolidate projects in their launch phase, like the Incapto SEO Case Study.
Incapto.comhas an innovative and sustainable take on the coffee world. Helping them consolidate the organic channel, free up resources from the SEM campaigns and improve conversions in a short time has been quite a challenge:
Below, a preview of the results achieved by our team, made up of Josevi and Jorge, regarding the organic channel for the Incapto site:
You'll agree that results like these are within the reach of very few SEOs.
Now let's look at the case in depth:
Starting point: what Incapto is and what their immediate goals are
Incapto.com was born as an alternative to capsule coffee consumption.
Its mission is to democratize ground-coffee consumption to become a real alternative to capsule coffee.
A market segment dominated by multinationals such as Nestlé (Nespresso, Dolce Gusto, ...), Jacobs Douwe Egberts, domestic roasters, and so on.
From iSocialWeb, they expected our support to diversify online acquisition channels immediately reducing dependence on the paid channel, while also boosting the brand.
All of this in a market where ground-coffee consumption isn't as popular as in central and northern European countries.
However, the project's differentiator:
A ground-coffee subscription service that includes super-automatic coffee machines capable of grinding beans on the spot and brewing a rich espresso in 30 seconds without leaving your home.
An all-in-one that packs the bonus of being tastier and healthier for the environment.
This sealed the deal for us to get involved with Incapto's founders, led by Joaquim, Francesc and Beatriz, supported by Arnau, Chief Product Manager at Incapto.
A huge asset for the whole project.
Opportunity in a saturated coffee market
We were aware that competition in the sector is tough, but the recycling issue posed by coffee capsules and their high cost offers a great market opportunity.
We got to work to build the alternative to Nespresso in the online channel.
We all know that Nespresso is a great brand and a dominant player.
Nestlé, the parent company, also owns Dolce Gusto and Nescafé.
And controls 50% of the national B2B and B2C market.
Also, ground coffee is residual in Spanish homes and businesses.
On top of that, to brew it you need a coffee machine with a grinder, which is much more expensive and complex to use.
Problems that don't exist in the omnipresent capsule-coffee market because of how easy and convenient that format is for consumption.
So there was doubt about whether we could open a gap in the SERPs for our client.
Despite the need being there and the ground-coffee subscription business model having proven its validity in the offline and B2B channels.
The challenge: knocking coffee manufacturers and distributors off the SERPs
The truth is that in an industry with such strong players as the aforementioned Nespresso, and even ecommerces like Amazon or Media Markt, it's dizzying to start working.
In that sense, going straight after the juiciest transactional keywords is madness.
But how can you avoid a head-on charge without alternative keywords?
There lies the real challenge for a new entrant.
Identifying valid opportunity keywords that can be monetized in the short term, and then setting bigger goals.
In this case, the answer came from focusing on creating and optimizing a product-category page (machines capable of grinding coffee beans quickly), tailoring it to user search intent.
Something that proved to be a great move by the iSocialWeb team, based on the results obtained as shown in the chart:
An x3 in organic traffic for the entire new coffee-machine cluster:
At the same time, we decided to work on the side aimed at the B2B business market.
Much less attractive in terms of volume but easier to rank for.
The big jump in qualified organic traffic and keywords ranked on the first page of results speak to how spot-on the applied SEO strategy was.
All this with the added merit of working with a lower-authority domain than the competition and launching brand-new URLs across almost the entire cluster.
So… what did you do at iSocialweb to blow up the SERPs?
The solution: consolidating SEO signals on a new category page
Incapto's site was built from day one with a strategy and planning oriented toward SEO performance.
However, up to that point, the type of URLs being sent to be indexed had been neglected, causing many unnecessary URLs to get indexed. Also, the main structure and the way traffic was being channeled toward the key transactional URLs wasn't properly organized and didn't account for the customer journey and conversion funnel.
In addition, the search intent of the most business-critical URLs wasn't properly addressed.
Let's look in more detail at what we're talking about:
Issues detected and a differentiating strategy to fix them
Here's a summary of the main points to fix that we identified:
All of this could be solved without much hassle by fixing each of the points in the conventional way.
However, we decided to talk to the client and propose an alternative strategy where the focus would be on solving the search intent of the project's Top URLs:
And then work on all the other points mentioned but consolidating signals around new business Top URLs.
That way we'd kill two birds with one stone.
So right after finishing the SEO Audit, at iSocialweb we got to work.
Consolidating signals around the new category URL
Instead of attacking the SERPs by product, we built a new category page (https://incapto.com/cafeteras-superautomaticas/) where:
This way we consolidated the ranking signals toward the search engine.
Redirect to a new category page: super-automatic coffee machines
So, we moved from an approach focused on capturing traffic for the product (black coffee machine) to concentrating efforts around the category page that better matches the user's search intent for "super-automatic coffee machines, bean-to-cup machine, etc."
This also allowed us to optimize the internal linking and reinforce the strength passed to the 3 types of coffee machines sold by Incapto.
In total, we created up to 4 new URLs in March for the B2C segment:
Giving all the love to the main category: https://incapto.com/cafeteras-superautomaticas
A simple and straightforward strategy, yet very effective.
Final outcome:
Consolidating ranking signals is a risky SEO strategy if you don't know what you're doing.
It's very easy to get it wrong.
Because putting the focus on a single page or a set of TOP URLs can turn against you.
Fortunately, we had a clear picture of what needed to be done and how, so that results were immediate that same month of March:
As you can see, the new URL was pulling in nearly 4,000 monthly visits from 284 different keywords within days:
This way we managed to rank the category page for the target keyword cluster: bean-to-cup machines and super-automatic coffee machines.
Plus all their derived keywords.
As we can see in the following table:
We also took advantage of the opportunity to optimize from a conversion standpoint by changing the design.
Working at the same time on the B2B vertical, across several specific landing pages with long-tail keywords that are easy to rank for but highly profitable.
Specifically, we created all these new URLs:
and this one for coffee subscriptions:
Getting them to rank on the first page for almost all of them as you can see:
This explains why the newly captured web traffic has translated into a much greater relative growth in conversions for the project as a whole.
Finally:
It's important to mention the success achieved in creating entities.
Thanks to a proprietary methodology, in a short time we generated the brand entity for Incapto and team members, such as: Beatriz Mesas Lopez, Q Arabica Grader at Incapto and professional coffee taster.
Which has helped improve the visibility of the entire project.
Final thoughts on the Incapto Case Study:
Without a doubt, the fact that Incapto has a great team that has developed its own product with a differentiating market approach, author ground coffee by subscription
Has been decisive in our strategy to ensure success.
This combined with:
Has allowed us in just over a month to achieve:
To which we must add the indirect benefits for the paid channel.
Because this SEO success has allowed Incapto to free up valuable resources to invest in its PPC campaigns.
This is where you realize that SEO and PPC are complementary.
And investment in both can be balanced to optimize results while diversifying risk.
For all of this, we take pride in having contributed our grain of sand to making coffee a more sustainable and fairer world.