2021 articles for the year 2021 - Bluerank & Empik

Strategy

Increasing the number of articles in the blog section (Empik Pasje)

• Keyword research based on Customer journey approach and driven by Bluerank’s custom SEO tools
• Regular crawls of competitors content sections
• Implementing Content Manager tool to improve content workflow management (50 articles produced weekly)

Improving user engagement in the blog section

• Crosslinking blog with category pages
• Creating a blog category tree that relates to the category tree of e-commerce section
• Implementing the quality control process (10 articles produced on a daily basis)

Content monetization

• Internal crosslinking to category pages
• Solution that inserts context product links in the content (inside articles)
• Continuous content re-optimization in order to improve conversion

Realization

2021 articles were published in 50 weeks of 2021.

The project team consisted of:

• 10 people on Empik's side
• 13 SEO & Content specialists on Bluerank's side
• 7 consultants in the field of Digital Strategy, Data Science, Outreach, Google My Business, R&D and SEO Analyst on Bluerank's side
• 15 tools, also ones dedicated to the needs of this specific project

The keyword research was the most time-consuming phase. The main goal was to find and assign the keywords to important micro moments on the user’s Customer journey. The keyword research process resulted in more than 5000 analyses carried out within the 50 weeks of 2021. The core part of our professional activities applied data-driven approach – we have been consistently pursuing that strategy thanks to our custom tools developed by Bluerank.

The Team automatized the process of finding the most effective content topics by creating the custom scripts to crawl and analyze the competitors content sections. The results of those analysis were used as inspiration for producing the key-content per each category. Ahrefs data base contains a lot of valuable insights, this project however required non-standard reports, that were not foreseen by the authors of that tool.

We blended the Ahrefs data in our database to obtain the information so far inaccessible to others and to take advantage over the competition. By mixing Ahrefs, SERPs and crawl data we have received the valuable information such as the category of the analyzed article, the length of the article or even the number of images and videos used within the content.

Such complex content projects require structured and effective teamwork. Empik was the first big project carried out by Bluerank, in which we rebuilt the so far internal Content Manager tool to a coworking platform shared between Empik and Bluerank’s teams to manage cooperation of 30 people. The content workflow management has included setting the statuses of content orders, sharing SEO specifications, managing file versions.

We have put content section with links to thematically related articles on product listings pages. The crosslinking has been done for all important categories, brand pages and ranking pages.
The aim of crosslinking was to improve the SEO rankings for categories and to encourage users to take part in purchasing process.

Previously the majority of content in the blog section focused mainly on ”edito” area related to books, music, films reviews and interviews with artists. There was pratically no “non-edito” content related to parenting, pet care, sport equipment, household goods, interior design, gardening and other categories. We’ve created a new category tree thematically corresponding with the structure of e-commerce section. Each e-commerce category has now its own equivalent on the blog. .

The beginnings were tough. Both teams had to increase both the number of members involved in the workflow and the number of meetings (more than 50 meetings were held in Q1). Understanding the reciprocal expectations and adhering to the agreed process allowed to carry out the project smoothly. The role of Content Manager was established. The regular status and coworking meetings have been set. The copywriters were grouped into the thematic areas they excelled at. The publishing schedule has been adjusted to seasonal trends. The partner cooperation of Bluerank & Empik teams remains the key element of the project success.

The created articles were to obtain the traffic and transfer it to thematically related product listings (most often the category pages, but also brand pages and other content pieces that could be interesting to the user). Crosslinking also aimed at top products of each category. Usually, the graphic links with CTA have been used, but we also created lists of the related articles with the standard text links.

A few months after the commencing of the project we’ve found out that there’s a need to polish up the visibility of the older content as it did not match the assumptions. We’ve decided to implement the re-optimization process that included:

• rewriting an out-dated articles with information related to new products and categories available on Empik
• expanding the content with the use of new key phrases and the new data sources
• analyzing and re-writing the headings and meta titles
• A/B testing on internal product crosslinking to test which links convert better – for example we checked that a single article describing “how to care for a cat” converted better when product URL’s linked to cat’s accessories than when linked to books for cat lovers