Executive summary
Client:
Mitre 10
Industry:
Hardware
Specialisation:
eCommerce + retail store
Channel:
Organic
*Results within three months of launching Smart Pages for Mitre 10
Company
With over 400 stores across the country, Mitre 10 is Australia’s largest independent retail and trade hardware store chain.
Mitre 10’s brick-and-mortar stores are privately owned and operated and are committed to providing expert advice in helping every customer source hardware products for both trade and DIY. This commitment is reflected in their online store.
During the pandemic, Mitre 10 grew its product range to adapt to drastically changing online shopping needs and trends. It invested in new technologies to enable personalised shopping experiences for its users.
Challenge
- As Australia’s largest independent hardware network, Mitre 10 is a household name. But this recognition was not reflected in their organic performance.
- Their biggest gap was achieving high rankings at scale and strong organic traffic. Mitre 10 didn’t have the internal team and resources to test and enter new categories quickly and successfully build pages at scale that targeted critical long tail search terms. Their organic traffic and rankings were not as high as they could be, and their customer acquisition was suffering as a result.
Solution
- Longtail UX's Client Growth team worked with Mitre 10 to develop a customer acquisition strategy that prioritised organic traffic and new user growth first, with the goal of focusing on organic revenue after 12 months.
- The Client Growth team then researched hundreds of thousands of keywords before selecting the initial focus keyword list to target with LUX Smart Pages. Each keyword would have one product landing page dedicated to capturing its search traffic.
- LUX's Client Growth team incorporated hundreds of thousands of dynamic Smart Links and category Smart Links on the bottom of Smart Pages and Mitre 10's native site pages. The purpose of Smart Links is to bind together Smart Pages with the native site. Ultimately, this would drive organic performance higher, increase domain authority and improve the relevance of the entire site.
- Longtail UX also embedded blogs onto product landing pages to further drive organic search traffic.
Results
Within three months of launching Smart Pages for Mitre 10 in September 2021, the hardware retailer saw a significant impact on its organic traffic acquisition. It’s grown consistently since then.
Today, Smart Pages and Smart Links have exceeded the hardware retailer’s ranking and growth goals.
- 64% of the Smart Pages are ranking on the first page (+4% MoM) (23% of Smart Pages ranking on page 1 within two months)
- 71% of the sessions onSmart Pages are from new users
- 47% of the Smart Pages are ranking in the top 5 positions (+5% MoM)
- 10% ranking position 1
- 99.7% of the Smart Pages are currently indexed by Google.
Strong rankings across the board have resulted in solid traffic growth.
- LUX Smart Pages have driven 1,516,575 new users to Mitre 10’s site (In October, Smart Pages generated a total 308,928 sessions (+20% MoM).
- LUX Smart Pages drove 2,137,112 sessions since launch
Overall site performance
Because strong Smart Page performance lifts overall site performance, Mitre 10’s SEO agency, which they engaged shortly before signing on with LUX, saw improvements to non-LUX page ranking and traffic.
Expanded marketing team
Stronger rankings and more organic traffic have presented a need for more internal marketing resources to support this growth. As a result, Mitre 10 has grown its digital marketing, doubling the number of resources both locally and internationally.
A low-touch and scaleable category testing facility
Before LUX, Mitre 10 didn’t have the time and resources to test new categories by manually building out pages for a handful of category search terms. All the manual development work simply wasn’t worth the risk when they weren’t confident about how these categories would perform.
Today, Mitre 10 uses LUX as a hyper-speed category testing facility that gives them real-time data on the performance of the tests they run.
Testing categories is now as simple as getting a spreadsheet supplied to them by LUX’s Client Growth team, ticking off the category they want to build pages for, and sending it off to have the pages built and launched automatically.
Mitre 10 can test and launch quickly, rank and gain market saturation at scale without their internal teams losing focus. Some categories they’ve tested and succeeded in since launching LUX Smart Pages are:
- Kids play equipment
- Smart home appliances
- Security cameras
This process requires very little time and effort for their teams in return for gaining market saturation quickly.
For categories they were already performing well in, like drills, lawnmowers and power tools, they can use LUX to close keyword gaps they didn’t know they had.
100% measurability
Before LUX, Mitre 10 focused almost all of its budget on performance media to attract new users to the website, which means they were exposed to fluctuating costs. Their cost per acquisition is only increasing with ease of market entry and threats to targeting capabilities.
The strong attribution functionality of LUX Smart Pages has made it easier to present a business case to management for stronger investment in their organic channel, as opposed to relying on paid marketing. With Smart Pages, the cost differential is lower and much more predictable than ads.
Expansion opportunities
In light of the steady and consistently strong performance of Smart Pages, Longtail UX is implementing Smart Pages for their Google Shopping strategy.
The Client Growth team has also recently increased the number of Mitre 10 organic Smart Pages live by 25% and will be launching additional organic Smart Pages for their DSA campaigns.
Because Smart Pages with “sale” in the keyword combination have generated 5% of total Smart Page revenue, LUX’s engineering team are working on developing a new page template that prioritises on-sale products at the top of the page. This will ensure Mitre 10 can better capture demand for search terms that include the word “sale” in the keyword combination.
"We're going to be doubling down on LUX and are hoping to implement LUX with our other brands, Design 10 and Total Tools. We are heavily invested in the platform and want to increase the number of Smart Pages we have live because we know that it's working."