LOLA
Resolving technical debt to improve organic traffic and revenue.
279%
Increase in organic revenue
5.1%
Share of Voice on search (from 1.5%)
160%
Increase in recovered organic blog traffic
LOLA faced a significant drop in organic traffic following a domain migration, losing about two-thirds of their daily clicks. Flywheel was brought in for a holistic SEO strategy to improve organic revenue, but first, we needed to address their technical issues.
We worked with LOLA’s development team to recover thousands of lost redirects, then focused on product-led content and optimizing core pages. This resulted in a significant increase in organic revenue, improved AOV, and increased share of voice in the sexual wellness sector.
Context
In the summer of 2022, LOLA migrated their blog from a subdomain on Contentful to a top-level domain on Shopify to simplify their tech stack. This migration resulted in a significant loss in organic traffic—from 1,500 clicks per day to less than 500—(Fig.1) due to incorrect redirect implementation and the removal of about 500 pages.
LOLA engaged Flywheel in March 2023 for a holistic SEO strategy. But first, we needed to address their technical SEO debt.
Our challenge was to fix their post-migration technical issues and then improve organic revenue through content and core page improvements. Ultimately, our goal was to improve organic customer acquisition and conversions.
Outcomes
All results are within the date range: March 2023- May 2024 unless otherwise specified
1. We recovered blog traffic from ~2500 sessions /month to 6,504 sessions / month
2. Revenue from organic increased from $8,782 to $33,307
3. Average Order Value (AOV) increased by 10% from $39 to $43.
4. We increased LOLA’s Domain Rating from 64 to 67 (September 2023) after recovering lost indirects.
5. We increased LOLA’s Share of Voice in sexual wellness from 1.51% to 5.11%. (Measured against 26 strategic keywords in Ahrefs)
Process
We addressed our challenge in 3 steps:
- Recovering redirects
- Product-focused content
- Core page optimizations
1. Recovering redirects
Our first step was to course-correct all the missed redirects from the migration. During our initial technical SEO audit, Screaming Frog didn’t detect an abnormal number of 404 errors because none of these internal links existed on the site post-migration; however, Google Search Console identified 1,790 URLs with 404 errors originating from the former blog subdomain. Many of these pages also had valuable backlinks.
The problem was that we didn’t have access to crawl the old LOLA site to determine which URLs to redirect, and due to leadership changes, we couldn’t access an old sitemap or record of content. Here’s how we solved for this:
- We used Google Search Console to pull all the 404 errors from blog pages.
- We crawled the new site to get a list of current content URLs. We found hundreds of pages that LOLA chose not to migrate, but didn’t have redirects in place for. URLs weren’t a one-to-one match, either, making our jobs even more difficult.
- We used the GPT for Sheets plugin with OpenAI’s API to map old URLs to new ones based on the current URL. While this still required some manual review, it saved 80% of the time we would have used manually cross-checking URLs.
We repeated the steps above multiple times so that Google would keep feeding us new 404s and understand which URLs existed previously.
2. Product-focused content
Now that we had resolved LOLA’s primary technical issue, we focused on improving their content strategy to achieve their ultimate goal of reducing CAC through organic channels.
Before, LOLA took a top-of-funnel, audience-focused approach, which wasn’t driving any conversion activity from their visitors. We revamped their content strategy to be more product-focused so that we could improve LOLA’s topical authority in periods and sexual wellness and more naturally funnel visitors from the blog to product and collections pages.
We also updated our reporting in Looker Studio to understand which blogs drove clicks to product and collections pages. (Fig. 1)
Example of audience-focused content:
Examples of product-focused content:
3. Core page optimizations
Once we regularly published product-focused content and funnelled visitors to product and collections pages, we set out to update those pages to maximize conversions. LOLA was up against big legacy companies like Tampax and Always, as well as more established clean product competitors like August and Honeypot. Even though there were high-value terms we could optimize for in the natural health space, there was a legal angle to consider when making claims about their products.
We leaned into their key USPs (organic, hypo-allergenic sexual health and period products) and provided page optimization recommendations to improve the communication of this key messaging.
Examples of core page optimizations:
- Mini Vibrator PDP: “small vibrator” (#19 to #3; vol: 2,800)
- Condoms PDP: “non toxic condoms” (#27 to #2; vol: 600), “organic condoms” (#23 to #4; vol: 800), and “latex condoms” (#7 to #3; vol: 1300).
