Search engine marketing and paid media for a perfume manufacturer

Collaboration with a Client operating in the luxury segment is always challenging for every team. Why so? The audience interested in purchasing certain products is always narrow, and ad customization also aims to narrow the audience.

Thus, the team's skill lies in selecting the most efficient AC and the correct account settings.

Our Client produces perfumes for home and business.

1. About the Client

Poetry Home is a manufacturer of luxury perfumes. The company has been operating in the Ukrainian market since 2018. This is the most famous brand in Kyiv. However, one of the tasks for our team was to popularize the company throughout the country.

The following products are featured on the company's website:

• candles;
• diffusers;
• perfume;
• sprays;
• sachet;
• soaps, gels, lotions, bath bombs.

Fig. 1 - Home page of the website

In addition to the products themselves, Poetry Home spreads the philosophy of fragrances. For example, customers can order a fragrance for their own brand or a fragrance for an event. The Poetry Home team studies companies and develops a unique scented identity - branding - that is, how the brand's fragrance will be distributed in addition to the smell itself.

Our team began to work with Poetry Home in July 2021 with the Google contextual advertising setting service.

2. Сompetitors analysis

An analysis of competitors and a niche always precedes the implementation of any promotional work.

The peculiarity of our Client's business is that in many categories, Google and TOP-10 searches are overflowing with aggregators and large online stores. So we are dealing with a hypercompetitive niche.

Fig. 2 – Our competitors are mainly large online and offline stores

Our Client is the one who is willing to pay more for the quality and brand of the product, although he enters the most common queries into the search engine.

3. Setting up the advertising campaigns

Setting up contextual advertising always shows a quick result and is ideal for advertising any product or service. A feature of this advertising model is the payment for each click of the ad (pay per click).

The Client came to our team with a specific request: to achieve a lead cost indicator of 10-15% of the order.

Before we started, the indicators in the online store of perfumed goods were as follows:

Fig. 3 - As you can there was no paid traffic at all

First, our team drew up a work plan and identified phased tasks when setting up an account and launching advertisements. Among them are: collection of semantics, selection of negative keywords, setting up an advertising account, etc.

Search campaigns by product types, campaigns with dynamic search ads, shopping (later reasonable shopping) and branded advertising campaigns, remarketing and GDN were set up on launch. We launched advertising campaigns in two languages: Russian and Ukrainian.

Due to the fact that the competitors are large marketplaces, after a monthly test period, they refused to promote by general keywords and from a campaign with dynamic search ads.

Fig. 4 - Ad Examples

In the process of maintaining an account, we tested video campaigns, Discovery.

Video for a video campaign with the participation of singer Tina Karol.

Also, retail residential complexes were segmented by types of goods and geo-displays (the brand is better known in Kyiv, respectively, they divided AC into Kyiv and other regions). Campaigns for advertising corporate gifts were set up for the New Year. The last ad campaign set up was Performance Max.

Cooperation on the contextual advertising setting service continues to this day.

4. Search engine optimization

After the effective launch of AC in Google Ads in July 2021, the Client decided to cooperate with us on another service - search engine optimization of an online store. Our team of SEO specialists joined the project in October 2021.

Together with the Client we formed the main goals and expectations for SEO promotion:

1. Increase organic traffic.
2. Increase depth of view/time/% conversion.
3. Improve website visibility.
4. Increase the dynamics of the website positions.
5. Increase the dynamics of brand/commercial inquiries.

Fig. 5 - Indicators before optimization work

A standard technical audit was carried out at the start.

4.1 Technical audit

We performed the audit using the following services:

• Screaming Frog — looks for errors on the website;
• Apollon — designed to search for duplicates;
• Search Console — finds problems with indexing and website duplicates;
• PageSpeed Insights — checks the website loading speed;
• Ahrefs — analyzes external links of competitors and is required to build a mail-order strategy;
• Schema.org — checks the microdata on the website.

Based on the results of the audit, our team identified critical errors and formulated recommendations for their elimination. So, for example, there were problems with the Canonical tag. This is a tag that tells the search engine that the page is not a duplicate. The programmer adds a tag to the code of each page, after which all pages of the website will point to themselves as a canonical page.

Fig. 6 - 75% of the pages were not indexed due to problems with the published tag

The solution to the problem with the tag also depends on the CMS. Our team recommended that if it is impossible to correct the situation on your own, change the CMS to a more loyal one for SEO promotion. After consulting with the Client's programmers, we decided to leave the CMS, but monitor that these settings remain unchanged.

Also, many non-existent pages appeared due to canonical. Solution: set up proper URL generation. Fixing this issue has already increased website traffic.

The Poetry Home website has two languages: Russian and Ukrainian. In this regard, the website requires the addition of the hreflang attribute, which points to a link to the website's pages in different languages, so that there are no duplicate pages.

The robots.txt file, which tells search engines which pages to index and not to index, was optimized on the website but needed some work.

After the website moved from www to a non-www address, many pages with 301 redirects appeared. To fix the problem with redirects on the website, it is necessary that the page immediately links to the desired URL. We recommend that you always leave an internal redirect on the website to prevent such errors.

Fig. 7 - You need to fix all links to the correct ones

After checking the page loading speed in Search Console, the algorithm recommended increasing the speed for mobile devices.

Fig. 8 - Speed scan

A whole pool of work with code and content was carried out to improve the speed.

There were no serious remarks regarding the improvement of the website usability, the structure and appearance were optimized from the very beginning. 

Minor recommendations include:

• the markup on individual pages;
• individual images are missing or not displayed;
• linking in the blog;
• errors in text data.

Fig. 9 - As you can see from the screenshot, the errors are minor

In addition to the above problems, our SEO specialists recommended fixing circular links, duplicates, and micro-markup, in particular: blog markup, breadcrumbs, and FAQ on the refill page.

4.2 Metadata

As you know, metadata plays a very important role in search engine optimization and SEO promotion. They are scanned by search engines, thanks to which they have an idea about the information being indexed. In addition, it is easier for each user to find the content that suits him.

So, 95 duplicates of Title were found after a technical audit. The Title tag or title tells the search algorithm what is being conveyed in the message. Tag duplicates on products and pagination pages arose due to the fact that products do not use a template to fill in metadata.

After the semantics was approved, ITForce SEO specialists wrote down unique metadata with keywords for all categories. In the data template, we used the liquid language.

Fig. 10 - Metadata analysis

Images were also not optimized, although they can serve as an additional source of traffic. The Alt attribute should contain and describe the picture, consisting of 3-5 words, but no more than 250 characters (it's really difficult to describe the picture in two words) and, if possible, contain a key query.

Fig. 11 - Analysis of image metadata

It is better to check the already entered metadata using the SEO META 1 CLICK extension in the Google Chrome web store.

4.3 Link building

After the introduction of all the recommendations, our team began to gradually increase the mass of links.

Among the main requirements for placing links:

1. Posting only on trust forums.
2. Post posts only on thematic resources.
3. Attendance of the resource from 1000/month.
4. DR (rating) of the resource from 20
5. The pages on which the post is posted must be in the index.
6. Around the anchor text should be as natural as possible and flow into the general topic on the forums.
7. Domain zones mainly: /ru/com/com.ua. /net/info/org/su/biz are also allowed. It is important that traffic from Ukraine prevails.
8. Do not use links that were in previous link reports.
9. The publication of all links is divided into 2 weeks (moderate placement).

Brand queries were worked out even before working with us, at the beginning of work, the main emphasis was placed on high-frequency (HF) requests in the category. The site is growing, so you can easily promote keys with a frequency of 1000+. In particular, because of the good behavioral factors on the site.

In general, the tactics of promoting an online store of perfumes is based on the use of the MUM algorithm from Google, which provides more relevant and diverse content for common (they are also frequency) queries. It was possible to follow general requests with the help of detailed articles that answer the user's questions and increase the user's trust in our website.

5. Deliverables

As for contextual advertising, the launched advertising campaigns demonstrated their effectiveness from the first days after the launch:

• revenue of Poetry Home increased by 264.59%;
• transactions by 162.99%;
• transaction ratio by 189.11% with an increase in costs by 50.68%.

Reasonable trade and brand AC work most effectively.

Fig. 12 - Increasing the level of transactions

As a result, as a result of SEO promotion, traffic and sales for commercial queries increased, that is, individual products in the online store. Although at first, the Client focused on branded traffic. Good traffic also comes from the blog for particularly competitive queries.

Website visibility was 0.12, now it is 1.69. The number of keys by which the website is ranked was 6K, it became 14.44K.

Fig. 13 - Search engine optimization results

So, the whole range of promotion works (setting up and launching contextual advertising + SEO optimization + maintaining social networks + collaborations with stars) demonstrates a positive trend in increasing sales in the Poetry Home online store.

Work with the Client, the owner of the Poetry Home store, continues on both services: search engine optimization of the online store and the launch of contextual advertising on Google.