Case Studies
Murray River Salt.
Results that are more than just condiments – they’re a stand-out!
A Great Sprinkling of All That’s Good!
Murray River Salt Company is a known gourmet salt provider with products in all markets around Melbourne. They are well-known for their quality and naturally exclusive salt products in Australia.
As well-known as they were, they had the sensible inclination that they needed to be able to stand out in search results for the people Googling at home or on the go. Their biggest selling point was that they are the only natural pink salt company – acquiring their pink salt that accumulates at the darling basin.
Murray River Salt was sitting on the tip of their success; we came in to nudge them over the finish line.
The Need
- To become the salt brand company for Australian searches
- To drive wholesale sales & eCommerce sales through the website
- Build brand awareness of gourmet salt offerings
- To increase the amount of product distributors
The Plan
StudioHawk came along to add some pepper to the objectives:
- A heavy focus on backlink acquisition and maintaining a strong backlink profile
- Simple technical fixes through metadata and title tag optimisation to fine-tune to the correct search intent
- An emphasis on client communication to provide education on SEO and to keep the momentum going through the campaign
- A plan to increase the sales of the large variety of products through organic search
- A plan to increase the visibility of the brand to encourage and promote distributors and boost stock inquiries
The Execution
During the first month of the campaign, we were brought into a small website migration and assisted with generating a rigorous redirect list. This was followed by some backlink outreach. This provided us with a good foundation as we pushed to dominate the salt lakes of the Google SERPs.
Although Murray River Salt was positioned relatively well for their target market, organic traffic was notably stagnant. There were a few minor technical issues on the site, such as broken internal links, mixed content, duplicate title tags, and incorrect language tags – nothing out of the ordinary, but enough to see why they were on the edge. We began to identify their keyword spread and picked out those that were highly relevant and well endowed for the campaign ahead.
We made quick progress through the technical fixes in the first couple of months while preparing for the backlink outreach to take effect. In the first month, Optimising the homepage title tag was a top priority for establishing the company as an Australian salt expert in the SERP.
During the second month of the campaign, we got our first featured snippet: ‘Australian Pink Salt’. Our second featured snippet came through in the following month: ‘Australian Salt’, establishing Murray River Salt as a leading Australian salt company.
Some other tasks included:
- Configuring WordPress for eCommerce Tracking
Due to a difficulty with the CMS implemented, there was no defined method to track the eCommerce sales going through the website. Rigorous knowledge of ‘go-to-market’ was required to ensure tracking could begin. This was done through a step-by-step procedure to configure some enhanced ecommerce tracking on custom events, data layers, and Regex matching of the event of purchase.
- Improving The Website’s Recipe by Reducing Category Page Bloat
A separate task we had to undergo was to improve the crawl budget of the website – helping Google focus on the priority pages. This was done by adjusting the search appearance taxonomies in Yoast. As the website has a section for blogs, recipes, updates, and awards, turning off these taxonomies was a great way to improve the efficiency of a crawl.
- Internal Linking & User Navigation
Internal linking is a critical website aspect that lets you create a spider web of useful information within the website itself. Having internal links to the shop page and specific products helps users purchase the salt on the spot. As Murray River Salt has some really strong positioning across their recipes, this gave us some ample room to serve links to the salt products themselves.
- ‘Wooden Box’ – The Unexpected Boon
During a product review, we noticed that Murray River Salt had other products which can help drive sales – particularly a boutique wooden saltbox. In the investigation, we noticed that the current product could be refined in the SERPS as being so much more than “just a wooden box”. Updating the relevant metadata was crucial. The content on the page was updated, along with the H1 heading. Within months, the landing page climbed the ladder – ending up at #1 for some time, beating out some major competitors. What a gift!
The Results
- 155% keyword growth ranking in the top 10
- 970% backlink growth
- 21.4% increase in referring domains
- Truffle salt went from position 48 to now ranking in position 6
From starting the campaign, we have seen continual growth for the keywords we were wanting to target. Some keywords have moved from the last page to some really strong positions.
As the site has also been able to establish itself as one of the market leaders, organic acquisition of backlinks has skyrocketed to 7k backlinks and is continuing to grow.
Conclusions
Revenue continues to grow month on month for Murray River Salt considering the pandemic and fluctuations in user search. Strong positioning continues to increase across the primary keywords being tracked. Now that’s a tasty additive!