.png)
Optima Batteries is one of the largest car battery retailers in the USA. They were having trouble collecting data, ranking for keywords, securing their website, and driving conversions.
To help them out, we addressed their web design and website functionality, technical and content SEO, content strategy, and found and fixed tracking errors so that they had data they could trust.
To top everything off, I provided training to stakeholders to keep things running smoothly for the long haul.
Optima needed some web design optimizations to improve the user experience, guide people down the funnel, and make CTAs more obvious. I did an audit and sent off recommendations to improve the look of the site.
Optima had some of the worst core web vitals I have ever seen. That was mainly due to their site being built on a version of Angular that was over 10 years old.
To improve functionality, core web vitals, and usability, we had to update the platform that Optima was built on.
The other big issue we were experiencing was page indexing. Due to how the site was developed, the site wasn’t crawlable. While no pages blocked Google from crawling them, the navigation was set up in a way that made it extremely difficult for Google to find pages. We found some JS scripts that were blocking the spiders and fixed those issues.
After that, we went through and optimized all images including:
Other optimizations we did included:
After we got all of the technical issues squared away, we needed to improve the chances for Optima to rank for more than just brand related keywords.
I went through and audited all of the content on the site, found and removed duplicate content, added to and improved unique content, and made sure that all of the blogs followed the correct layout.
According to GSC and SEMrush, there were a lot of keywords we were ranking for, but not very competitively. Additionally, there were a lot of keywords our competitors were ranking for that we weren’t.
So we made a list of keywords that would be relevant to Optima.
Most of the articles that were being posted were updates and information about the company. To get more people on the site who might be interested in purchasing a car battery, we had to create blogs that had more targeted intent behind them.
First, we went for the obvious ones. Keywords like:
Then we started to include keywords that showed the person knew it might be time to get a new battery:
Then, we started to get clever. We identified the biggest problems someone might experience due to a bad battery and how to fix them:
After all of our keywords were identified, we ordered them:
These were mainly keywords that Optima was already ranking for, but could do better. This forced on any keywords ranking between positions 4 and 15.
Most of these were brand related. However, we saw a lot related to specific types of battery, battery chargers, and amg batteries.
There were quite a few keywords that Optima wanted to rank for, but weren’t in the quick wins section. This included things like lithium batteries and some exclusive and very specific battery types.
Finally, we wanted to steal some market share from other companies that didn’t sell batteries from Optima.
This was very difficult because we didn’t want to steal market share from sister companies or partners.
We had to be very targeted with the content that we produced.
To see the effect of the content, and because Universal Analytics was coming to an end, I set up the GA4 tracking on optima. We needed to see what traffic sources were driving sales, what blogs had the highest conversion rates, where people were dropping off the funnel, and what searches people were most interested in.
I used GTM to help set up the funnels, the explorations, special event tracking, conversions, and custom reports.
Google Search Console had been extremely useful throughout the process. It helped me with keyword research and indexing issues.
We linked it to GA4 to see which searches were driving the most sales.
I took on all of the heavy technical stuff and worked closely with marketing to help identify key actions, but we needed dashboards and reports that were clear to leadership, business, and management.
I used looker Studio to display all their GA4, GSC, and GAds data in a clear format. Our key interests were month-over-month comparisons, revenue tracking, site search terms, sales funnel tracking, and contact forms submitted.
We were running into some site security issues with pre-existing URL redirect chains and missing security headers.
We worked closely with a security vendor to fix the issues.
Optima is primarily a USA and Canada retail site, so we needed to make sure that the Optima site was in compliance with all tracking regulations. I lead the installment and integration of all cookie management.
All the work we did on the Optima site was used to help develop a marketing strategy.
We saw a substantial amount of sales come in from paid ads and organic search. So we put more efforts there. We also noticed that there was a lot of potential on social media with high conversion rates, but low traffic. We started putting more efforts towards to building an audience and pushed more social ads.
Finally, I trained key stakeholders on how to: