Increasing Aura-Soma's Worldwide Audience
Increasing Aura-Soma's Worldwide Audience
Summary:
Aura-Soma came to SiteVisibility with a vision: To share their mission with a world-wide audience, creating conscious change and helping them become the best version of themselves.
With a dedicated community around the globe, Aura-Soma has a presence in Europe, Asia, America, and Australia.
With their brand-new website, they wanted to connect even further with their members through creative campaigns that showcased their knowledge and message. However, when they first came to us, we identified that some technical SEO work had to be completed before start working on other campaigns.
As a result of our work with them, we saw a YoY increase of 58% in Organic users, especially from non-English speaking countries where we double and, in some cases, tripled the traffic they were receiving.
Read on to find out exactly how we achieved these results, or get in touch with us here if you’d like to find out how we can help you grow your organic audience with creative campaigns. We’d love to help you too!
The team at SiteVisibility have been a great support to us in our endeavour to connect our courses and products with our international customers. In the last year, SiteVisibility have identified and worked with our developers to implement changes to our site structure that have taken us considerably closer to finally achieving the aspirations we had for the site when we launched it in 2018. We appreciate the expertise of the team and their collaborative and friendly approach to getting the job done.
Be the Best Version of You – The Challenge
Aura-Soma had been successful in bringing traffic to their website in the UK, US, and Australia, but despite having a large community in Europe and Asia and having localised content on their website, the organic traffic was much lower than in English speaking countries.
They had a new website translated to different languages, but it wasn’t performing as expected and as a result, we were tasked with increasing their audience and the number of signups to their courses using SEO campaigns.
From Soil to Soul – The Work:
We started our work with Aura-Soma by completing a Technical SEO Audit of their website.
Our Senior SEO Analyst, Marcos, identified numerous opportunities to improve the web structure and more importantly, the International SEO optimisation.
Aura-Soma had translated their content into different languages and created international sites for each country. Unfortunately, search engines were not able to access these international sites, so they were unable to rank in organic searches outside of English-speaking countries. Before fixing the international sites, we needed to make sure that the core structure of the website was up to date to avoid these problems appearing again in the international versions.
Many people underestimate the power of Technical SEO, but the truth is that this is the foundation of any SEO strategy and if you don’t get it right you are invisible to Search Engines. We managed to turn around that for Aura-Soma and we are very proud of the results.
This required big technical changes that we included in our plan.
At the same time, Chloe, our Content Executive, started working her magic with Content Optimisation, including the optimisation of Titles, Meta Descriptions and Headings. Before proceeding with this activity, we worked with Aura-Soma to get a thorough understanding of their tone of voice and what they wanted to achieve with their messaging.
With that in mind, we were very careful to strike a balance between functional language that web users employ when using search engines and remaining authentic to the Aura-Soma distinct tone of voice.
Combining our Technical and Content SEO skills, the team created a careful plan of activities to improve Aura-Soma’s visibility.
Bringing Ease, Balance & Calm – The Plan:
- The original URLs on the Aura-Soma website had some formatting issues that were creating duplicate pages. Duplicates that, in some cases, were ranking instead of the canonical pages. Before creating new international pages that might replicate the problem, we fixed the formatting issues and redirected the malformed URLs to consolidate all the traffic into one page.
- We identified that some of the Aura-Soma products were not featured on dedicated pages. Instead, they were all included in an umbrella page, which mainly provided information about their core product, the Equilibrium bottle. Using keyword research and collaborating with the client, we created wireframes and content for these new pages. We also consolidated information from existing blog posts on each of the other products and added these to the new, individual product pages.
- We adapted the existing web structure to accommodate the new pages and made amendments to the website mega menu accordingly. By moving this content higher up the site structure, rather than forcing users to root around in the blog pages, we expected these pages to attract more attention.
- Finally, we turned our attention to the International sites. We knew it was a big challenge, so we started planning for a large international project…
Creating Conscious Change on the Planet – The International Project
We wanted to help the Aura-Soma community around the world to find the information they needed in their own language with a simple online search, and to do this, we had to rethink how the website was structured.
The new international pages had to sit on separate URLs, maintain the same functionalities as the English site, and keep the previous changes we had to make to the structure of the website.
In agreement with the Aura-Soma developers, we chose a sub-folder structure for its implementation ease and to maintain part of the existing authority that the main domain had.
Due to the platform requirements, we also had to migrate the English version to a specific sub folder, so we created a redirect map to ensure we did not lose the traffic that Aura-Soma was already receiving from English-speaking countries.
We also created the Hreflang structure required for the international websites. The English site was already ranking in some of the targeted countries, albeit very low down, so we wanted to help search engines know what content should be appearing in each country.
Implementing Hreflang tags correctly was key for the success of the project.
Spread Some Happy – The Results
The first technical changes related to URLs and Structure started being implemented in March 2020 and our Content recommendations were implemented during March and April 2020.
The new versions of the International sites took longer to implement, and they were live at the end of September 2020.
We were thrilled to report that the number of Organic users in 2020 was up by 58.65% compared to 2019, with the biggest impact happening in Q4 after the international structure went live.
We saw two large increases in traffic.
One in May after the first SEO & Content implementations during March and April, and another in October, November and December, after the implementation of the new International pages.
We hit record figures during the last months of the year that Aura-Soma had not seen before.
Although the website saw an increase in the number of users from English speaking countries, we saw an even greater impact of our recommendations in other countries.
Below we can see the increase in Organic users in 2020 compared to 2019 for each of the key countries.
All the main markets that Aura-Soma were targeting with specific translations, at least doubled the amount of users they were receiving from the Organic Channels the previous year and we also started seeing new opportunities in other countries like Belgium, Malaysia or Hong Kong.
For Russia, the organic traffic was not as large originally, so the increase was even more impressive. But for countries where they already had organic traffic like Japan, Germany or Italy, we also saw great improvements.
Needless to say, we feel these are great results that better reflect the international presence and the large global community that Aura-Soma has and we are very proud to have been part of Aura-Soma’s journey during a difficult year like 2020.
However, the work never ends for us SEO specialists and we are keen to continue providing great results like these for Aura-Soma and the rest of our clients.
If you’d like to find out how we can help with your International SEO, Technical SEO, or Content Marketing, or to help you achieve your organic targets, please give us a call on 01273 733433 or leave us a message via the form below. We’d love to help!