Delivering international SEO growth for a global fitness unicorn during COVID
SEO Strategy
ClassPass the world's largest health club aggregator, with headquarters in NYC — often called 'the Netflix of fitness'.
Challenge
With COVID-19 limiting physical movement and gym attendance, ClassPass quickly lost a vast majority of its demand and key value proposition.
Our key challenge was to pivot from fitness classes to a more holistic approach to wellness and beauty, lead the change to a stay-at-home new reality and provide the fundations for an international program that could help balance lockdowns affecting specific countries and regions. All of this while engaging key stakeholders during a period of 90% drop of branded traffic.
Our Solution
Our strategy consisted of diversifying and de-risking the SEO channel.
First, localising ClassPass to their 4 biggest non-English markets outside of the US, so that when some markets were down, due to stay-at-home ordenances and lockdowns, others could still perform.
Second, diversify content by optimising ‘train at home’ pages, including video content and 101 mobility exercises.
Third, we set the technical foundations for ClassPass to offer more wellness and beauty offerings (hairdreser, nail saloons, etc.) by expanding their information architecture and creating new templates.
Lastly, we continued optimising the areas of the business that would carry the site forward once the pandemic was over, including their studios and classes directories.
Strategic
Go to Market Strategy
Opportunity Identification
SEO Strategy
The Result
A diversified SEO channel during the pandemic. In total our strategy led to a 43% SEO traffic increase after the pandemic had ended.
From top to bottom, we drove ClassPass traffic evolution during the pandemic for their Dutch, French, Portuguese and German ClassPass sites.
By diversifying their traffic, ClassPass achieved growth across nine European countries that went from almost nothing to more than 20% of the total SEO for the brand. We also de-risked ClassPass performance across other English-speaking countries, including Australia, Sinagpore, Hong Kong and the UK.
We also improved the non-branded traffic to video trainings and exercise guides, improved the performance of the blog and expanded ClassPass into new verticals.
Finally, our improvements to ClassPass’ directories increased traffic to the US domain in 31% from the pre-COVID highs in 2023, with 100k additional visits per month going to the new European domains, meaning a 12% additional increase versus pre-COVID highs.
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