Greenes Shoes is a 100% Irish business which has been offering customers in Ireland stylish and on trend footwear from top shoe brands since 1939. Since then, Greenes has become one of Ireland’s best known shoe shop brands especially across the West of Ireland due to having shops located in Donegal, Galway and Limerick.

In recent years, Greenes have broadened their market with their online shoe shop which offers customers across Ireland a fantastic range of footwear from top brands such as Skechers, Amy Huberman, Kate Appleby, Una Healy, Doc Martens and so many more.

TO BEGIN

Greenes Shoes launched a brand new Shopify website in April 2020 and the SEO team here at Core Optimisation began building and implementing an SEO strategy to help take Greenes Shoes online business to the next level. Our aim was to increase search engine visibility Greenes Shoes by improving rankings for relevant non brand keywords with high search volume. The goal was that these ranking improvements for specific footwear brands and top level shoe shop keywords would drive more targeted organic traffic to the site so that both organic traffic and organic transactions would increase substantially.

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THE APPROACH

After taking care of all of the essential post go-live checks and tasks for Greenes Shoes new online shop, we carried out in-depth keyword research as well as category & product research which assisted in finding opportunities for organic growth as well as new category opportunities.

This research was key in helping us to identify that a category and footwear brand led strategy would provide the highest possible level of organic growth to Greenes Shoes as this was where the biggest traffic opportunities were for this particular retail client.

DEVISING A STRATEGY

Growing category & selected footwear brand traffic was at the centre of our organic strategy for Greenes Shoes. Once completed, we started to optimise category pages with the following strategy:

TOP LEVEL KEYWORD RESEARCH 

Expanded our in-depth keyword research to include top level keywords and footwear brand keywords with high search value.

HIGH VALUE KEYWORDS

Using our in-depth keyword research, we highlighted which high value keywords we believed were the biggest opportunities for organic growth. We then mapped these keywords to their most relevant landing pages.

OPTIMISED CATEGORY & BRAND PAGES

Optimised category and brand pages with these key phrases so to give these keywords the best opportunity to rank on page 1.

SEO FRIENDLY CATEGORY CONTENT

We created snippets of content to category and brand pages, resulting in further keyword optimisation and internal linking opportunities.  The small snippets of copy we created for each category featured SEO-Friendly content which included USPs, delivery info, brand info, internal links to relevant categories brands as well as a call to action. There were three main aims with implementing the category content, all of which were achieved, which were to improve rankings, organic traffic as well as organic conversion rate.

RESULTS

Ranking Improvements

The implementation of category content & improvement of the site’s internal linking strategy had a hugely positive impact on rankings for Greenes Shoes especially on top level keywords and footwear brand keywords. Greenes Shoes rankings for the vast majority of the footwear brands they offer moved on to page one while their landing pages also went from page 2 up to top position on page 1 for top level phrases such as Shoes Online, Online Shoe Shop and Shoe Shops Ireland.

April 2021 vs April 2020 Growth

These huge improvements in rankings for specific high value search queries and footwear brand keywords boosted Greenes search engine visibility which led to a huge growth in organic traffic, transactions and revenue when you compare April 2021 to April 2020.

RESULTS

 Outperforming 2020 Retail Peak

It is important to note that the organic growth that Greenes Shoes experienced in early 2021 led to their site outperforming their retail peak from November and December 2020. Most retail sites do experience a peak in performance in November from Black Friday which then continues into the run up to Christmas but in April 2021, Greenes organic channel outperformed both November 2020 and December 2020.