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SEO strategy delivers 300 per cent growth per year
High-quality fencing & barriers
This article was produced in collaboration with HekwerkOnline and Twinkle.
“We are an atypical online shop: we are primarily a manufacturing company, having grown our business in steel products such as reinforcement and fencing. We saw opportunities for online sales of fencing to the consumer market. It began as a journey with an unknown destination, but it is now a serious business with 300 per cent annual growth.”
Jan Landman is responsible for the website www.hekwerkonline.nl. Together with Pascal Eskes, Head of Quality and Senior Online Marketer at Traffic Today, he speaks enthusiastically about their collaboration and the explosive growth of the online shop.
Why not?
Landman: “Van Merksteijn is a huge steel processing company; here in Almelo, around 700 people work in production. Among other things, we manufacture reinforcement products and fencing, which we supply across Europe, mainly to wholesalers. As a well-established family business, we have 70 years’ experience in the steel industry. However, our company’s knowledge of online business was limited. But we saw an opportunity in the untapped market of direct online sales to consumers. For us, the question isn’t ‘why?’, but ‘why not?’. And so, in March 2018, we began building the online shop www.hekwerkonline.nl.”
“E-commerce?”
As a financially sound company, there was scope to invest in e-commerce, and the partnership with Traffic Today began. In addition, we created internal capacity for online staff and hired a web developer (Stimmt). “It started as a pilot, met with some scepticism as it was uncharted territory,” explains Landman. “But if you’re going to do it, you have to do it properly, and we took it seriously. After the first year, we weren’t dissatisfied with the results, but we did realise we were missing out on opportunities and that specialist help would be welcome. Our products are high quality and we know a thing or two about logistics, but we know far less about e-commerce.”
This was when Traffic Today came into the picture; it quickly became clear during our discussions that we were on the same wavelength. Pascal Eskes: “Our corporate cultures are a good match: when we see serious opportunities and potential, we go all out for them. What’s more, the lines of communication are short at Hekwerkonline; that means we can steer the project, make adjustments and see results quickly. As Traffic Today , we work on-site for about one day a week, alongside the web developer and the in-house staff at Hekwerkonline.nl. Following our suggestion, they’ve now taken on someone for online marketing, which makes the collaboration even more effective.”
Reaching number 1 within a year
Initially, the opportunities for improvement lay primarily in online visibility.“SEO is our foundation; that’s what we’re good at,” says Eskes. “We identified various opportunities in this area. The start of the project coincided with the start of the gardening season, so to achieve quick results we got straight to work using, amongst other things, Google Ads and various international marketplaces. The next step was to improve organic search results. To achieve this, we significantly optimised the website in terms of technical aspects, content and external link building. The results are impressive: for the keyword ‘fence’, we were in 30th position at the start and are now in the top 3 to 5. For ‘fencing’, we were in 4th position and are currently in 1st. We’re working towards sustained long-term growth, and organic results are crucial for this; they’re also accounting for an ever-increasing share of our traffic. We want to become and remain discoverable across an ever-wider range of search queries.”
Landman: “By the autumn, there had already been such a significant rise in organic search results that Traffic Today dared to predict a threefold increase in order growth. The question was: are we ready for that growth? Can we continue to deliver effectively? Because you can’t afford to squander opportunities like this – that’s why Traffic Today highlighted the potential growth to us. We’ve invested in inside sales and the warehouse. We’re constantly striving to strike that delicate balance: having enough capacity to keep performing well. Fortunately, we’re succeeding – customer reviews on independent review sites are 9+. Growth is soaring, partly thanks to the online campaign, but we’re still in control.” Eskes: “We’re now seeing that threefold increase in growth in Germany too, where we launched a year later. Building visibility takes a bit of time, but it pays off in the long run. We combine our SEO expertise with market-specific factors such as language, online marketplaces and local information channels.”
What does the future hold?
“We chart our own course; we don’t pay much attention to the competition. We simply want to reach the top,” says Landman. “Following Germany, the website is now also live in the United Kingdom, all managed from the Netherlands and in collaboration with Traffic Today. Furthermore, the range in the online shop is also expanding. As well as double-bar fencing, we now also stock wooden fence panels and related products such as flower pots and leaf baskets. To manage this, we’re building a stable organisation that can cope with peaks in demand and use the quieter periods to further professionalise our operations.” Eskes adds: “And we’re going to approach the market more actively, for example through email marketing and website personalisation. This is now possible because we’re actively building up the database so that we can further roll out data-driven marketing internationally in the future.”
Landman: “Service and quality are, and always will be, the foundation. In fact, we’re a down-to-earth online shop: we always answer the phone, always ring back, and sometimes send a bouquet of flowers if things have really gone wrong. We do this because we do things our way, and that’s exactly what suits us – we love the human touch. That’s why I also really like it when Pascal Eskes talks about ‘we’ and ‘our figures’ – we genuinely feel like one team.”
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