Off The Grain

How We Outranked Amazon, Etsy & Wayfair

Off the Grain is a humble handmade furniture retailer based in Yorkshire, which had considerable success during the lockdown due a peak in interest in home décor and a premium quality product at a fair price. SEO had not previously been a consideration due to the success of other channels, and the site was affected by Core Updates, Product Review Updates and Helpful Content Updates

Conversion rate had also plummeted since COVID due a drop demand, so the challenge was to use the modest budget efficiently to drive as much non brand traffic as possible in a competitive sector.

Key Objectives

• To increase revenue from the organic channel from around £4k p/month to £10k p/month

• To increase organic non brand traffic to the site by 20%, based on the keyword universe research and what we deemed was realistic with current authority levels. Taking it from double digit clicks to 500+ in order to maximise conversion

• To restore organic rankings for key products such as coat racks, which had been adversely impacted by the Helpful Content Update

• To establish rankings for new products that has been established from keyword research and considered viable for manufacture – such as wooden slat panels, personalised toy boxes and wooden mantle beams

Audience & Demographic

The audience demographic is customers in the UK, looking for premium quality handmade furniture, but at a slightly lower price point that the established leaders such as Oak Furniture Land and Cotswold Co – but without a reduction in quality.

As a company that prides itself on this quality and gained excellent reviews and testimonials, strong E-E-A-T signals were already existent but visibility was hampered by SEO issues. Therefore the strategy has been focused on:

• SEO Cleanup – this was from a technical SEO perspective following deep auditing and content related issues such as keyword cannibalisation and over-optimisation.

• Keyword Mapping – as there had been no SEO strategy to date, the Off The Grain keyword universe had not been fully mapped to its respective PDPs and PLPs.

• Product Review Update Optimisation – Due to the excellent product quality and advocacy from customers, an opportunity existed to take the Product Review Guidelines and work with the client to optimise PDPs for these fully.