2011 Winners & Shortlists

Results and Effectiveness

After 6 months the traffic to the site multiplied 2.5 times. Between 1st Jan 2010 and 29th September 2010, campaign saw an increase of 58% of new visitors to the website every month. Campaign saw an increase of 87% of visitors vs 2009. Over the course of 9 months link-popularity increased by 5 times – as of September 2010 there were approximately 400 links to the site. The campaign successfully met Geant’s objectives of increasing the organic visibility and driving traffic towards their website.

Creative Execution

With the resources available on the website, several key things was focused on: identifying relevant, highly searchable keywords, focusing on onsite optimization, and later on the offsite optimization exercises. Competitor positioning was monitored and improved on-page optimization and off-page content promotions in addition to the user’s website experience. Many difference channels worked simultaneously to maximize this campaign: Integrating relevant social media properties (such as Facebook) with search to accelerate search activity and promote the Geant Hypermarket website content. Blogs were also used to enhance the search listings and develop offsite content, using article sites to bring the SEO campaign into the spotlight. The strategy was used to increase the website credibility to search engines thereby holding the site up in top search engine rankings and increase the niche search traffic on a website.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Geant Hypermarket is an international chain of retail outlets. When the SEO campaign started, Geant’s website had a very low keyword visibility on SERPs. Geant wanted to improve their organic search traffic and receive high rankings with both generic and brand key terms. The central business objectives were to improve natural search rankings on Google, Yahoo and Bing, drive search traffic to the Geant UAE website, drive new visitors from organic search and convert them into return visitors, ultimately driving online traffic to the offline store. The target audience were all shoppers with an online presence. Google search tool was used to determine how many people searched for individual key terms in a one month time period and identify the respective values of the terms relevant to the client’s services. Using SEO, the target audience was reached with a very cost-effective strategy.