Accelerating e-commerce growth for the world's leading online diamond jeweller
SEO
STRATEGY
Since 1999, Blue Nile pioneered the online sale of diamonds and engagement rings. Today they are the global leader.
Challenge
Blue Nile had gone from indisputable leader to challenger with several newer, savvier players entering the market. They entrusted us to regain their global leader status.
New entrants to the category in the US market caused their traffic to decline. In other markets, an imperfect international expansion over the last decade led to technical and SEO debt. A decline in visibility led to to loss of share of voice. This impacted brand recognition, which in turn created challenges for branded search and authority growth.
When we took over the account Blue Nile 44 had country-specific sites, with several languages for each.
This meant that a site with a relatively small structure (50k pages) had turned into a 10M+ page website in the eyes of Google, making it more difficult to crawl, index and understand. All of this was stifling growth.
Our Solution
We helped Blue Nile regain their position as the industry leader in the US, and become a global leader internationally for the first time.
We achieved this by streamlining the basic site structure, strengthening category pages from a semantic and internal linking perspective, which made the site more competitive for short-tail queries.
We also trimmed their international implementation, removing from Google’s index combinations of countries and languages that had no SEO potential.
Finally, we supported this with a content-driven outreach strategy focused on the US and international markets, turning around the authority drop that Blue Nile had been experiencing for the previous years.
Strategic
Opportunity Identification
Deliverables
SEO Strategy
Outreach
Platforms
- Web
- iOS
- Android
Strategy
SEO
Data & Intelligence
The Result
We doubled organic traffic across multiple international markets, including the US, UK, Canada and Australia.
The outcome was a website that Google could understand better. We took the site from tens of millions of pages to a few hundred thousand of them, indicating relationships between content for different audiences and in different languages. This resulted in an average international indexation rate increase from 20% to 74%.
During our collaboration, Blue Nile also experienced the biggest link growth in the history of the domain, stabilising its previously declining authority.
Finally, the category page work owned the #1 ranking for Blue Nile for highly competitive keywords, like “Diamond Rings” and “Engagement Rings”, along with a general growth of their SOV within the jewellery market.
Combined, these changes almost doubled the performance of the site YoY (99.6% YoY SEO traffic for the domain), with the growth coming both from international markets and the US.
View more case studies
Tile Cloud
We more than doubled TileCloud’s visibility and had a 16% uplift in organic traffic, despite a decline in search demand for tiles
Expedia
Successful partnership for over 6 years across Search, Social, Content and Digital PR.
