Case Studies
Bondi Sands.
The Bondi Sands company was created when Melbourne’s Blair James came up with a new business idea following the decision made by the Victorian State Government to ban tanning bed salons.
Inspired by Australia’s most iconic beach, and a desire to make the ultimate tan accessible to everyone, the Bondi Sands product range was born.
THE NEED
Bondi Sands tanning products are designed to give the user a natural sun-kissed tan without sun exposure. The company wished to provide skin-conscious individuals with everything they wanted at a reasonable price and with a quality product derived from salon-quality formulas. They wanted to holistically grow their visibility across multiple target markets.
THE PLAN
- Increase visibility of ranking keywords to 20,000 in the AU market in 12 months.
- Increase visibility of ranking keywords to 10,000 in the US market in 12 months.
- Increase visibility of ranking keywords to 8,000 in the UK market in 12 months.
- Create a holistic strategy to uplift all global websites. (AU, US, UK + EU).
- Focus on users first, and search engines second.
- Outrank marketplaces in the US for branded terms.
THE EXECUTION
In order to execute our plan, we delved into many aspects of SEO. The specific areas of note included IA mapping, content, technical SEO, international SEO, and link acquisition.
Ia Mapping.
- We discovered a hidden URL on the site causing heavy duplication across all four regions, and resolved this to alleviate cannibalisation.
- We identified new categories relevant to the client and the end user through competitor research and content gaps.
- We identified pages ranking for ‘branded terms’ but could be translated into non-branded terms to capture the target audience i.e., ‘wash off tan’ is more commonly referred to as ‘instant tan’.
- We worked on renaming several categories to better match user intent, collaborating closely with the client to ensure brand positioning was always at the forefront of our strategy.
- We Implemented a strong internal linking strategy specifically to pages that were not highlighted in the navigation but had high potential. ‘Self Tan’ is an example of this. This page ended up outranking all marketplaces which were historically taking traffic away from the Bondi Sands site.
Content.
We front-loaded the content creation of 20 top traffic-driving pages to help aid users throughout their journey and better match the page to the outlined intent. This was a quick win opportunity across all regions.
This helped us to create a more holistic experience and guide users through the site easily, promoting multiple products and combo packages for the best tanning experience.
Technical & International sEO.
We identified legacy JavaScript redirects causing page duplications. This was resolved to better improve site performance.
There were some international SEO issues that were diluting UK and EU websites – some users in the UK were going to the EU site and bouncing, causing issues with conversion rates.
We mapped out all of our changes with clear briefs, and outlined the business impact of resolving each of these based on projected revenue improvements.
Link aCquistion.
To help Bondi Sands overtake the leading position in all markets, we decided to pursue relevant keywords that had high search volumes. Targeted link placements drove topical authority, keyword relevance, and also benefited inner pages, as opposed to just the homepage, of a site.
Some key considerations included:
- The anchor texts would be highly relevant to the content of the target URL, and would also be natural.
- The anchor texts would be diversified with branded terms, exact match keywords, and partial match keywords. This will help to create a diverse backlink profile.
- Bondi Sands are a well-known brand across the globe, meaning a Digital PR campaign would be less beneficial to them than targeting their newly created and optimised inner pages.
- We created a niche strategy using existing relationships with health, beauty, wellness, and fashion-based sites to target some of our internal category and subcategory pages.
- We aligned our chosen anchor texts based on key terms that were highly searched for.
- We linked to semantically similar pages to maximise impact, ultimately aiming to grow our visibility for these generic terms, as well as increase the authority within the site.
THE RESULTS
- 94% increase in keywords in the Australian market.
- 105% increase in keywords in the UK market.
- 54% increase in keywords in the US market.
CONCLUSIONS
Despite the technical issues the different sites suffered and campaign barriers we needed to navigate, we surpassed all of our objectives and beat the marketplace to make Bondi Sands become a prominent tanning brand, not just in Australia, but across major markets in the US and UK.
Our approach shows that with close collaboration, big results can be achieved. We identified a series of quick wins that brought in more visibility for the brand. By prioritising user experience over traditional SEO tactics, we could target the most appropriate audience and drive real business impact.