Groupon is a global eCommerce marketplace
It connects subscribers with local merchants by offering things to do, travel options, goods, and services in 15 countries.
Services Provided
- Content Strategy
- Content Development
- SEO
The challenge
Monitoring consumer trends, Groupon identified a growing demand for Things To Do content within search engines
Seeking new ideas and a fresh approach to capitalize on the trend with efficiency and agility, Groupon partnered with Investis Digital to investigate the landscape, find a competitive advantage, and provide content recommendations that addressed user’s needs for both dynamic and static content. The ultimate goal of the relationship is to improve rank for Things To Do search terms, increase traffic, and by default clickthrough rate.
The solution
We compiled additional research to deepen our understanding of the “Things To Do” keyword set. Auditing and research activities included:
- Competitive opportunity report: Discover what makes competing content successful and create a strategic roadmap to overcome them at scale
- Keyword Research & SERP analysis: Identify a primary and secondary keyword set, identify challenges of target keywords, discuss value of each relevant position and SERP features
- Content gap analysis & technical audit: Audit existing content from a user experience and technical standpoint, identify baseline data, document strengths of relevant pages, and identify what additional content must be produced
We discovered that successful website content in this category had the following attributes:
- High relevancy to tourists and residents alike
- High authority, sourced to websites people trusted
- High topical density, with bigger cities requiring even more information
- High content length to account for many topics, landmarks, and attractions
- Easy to skim
- Imagery integration
- Actionable language to encourage exploration
- Freshness, with static content updated frequently, at minimum per season but at most monthly
- Fast load speed, especially for mobile devices
- Responsive web design for mobile, desktop, and tablet
To improve average position, we needed a deep understanding of SERPs. We identified that positions were more valuable for primary Things To Do target keywords for each city due to the inclusion of carousels, knowledge graphs, events, and travel guides. These SERP features absorb screen real estate as well as clicks and clickthrough rate. This made increased positions even more valuable for Things To Do keywords, and it also made related Things To Do keywords where SERP features did not exist more valuable.
Since Groupon.com already had Things To Do URLs that had some existing rankings, they made the perfect place to start
Since each page already had dynamic, search engine-friendly deal content, we needed to find a way to integrate static content that relevantly matched user’s needs for each city. We needed to create a way to create a scalable content framework that:
- Integrated the strengths of competitors
- Accommodated a research- and copywriting-intensive process
- Increased rank for Things To Do keywords with SERP features
- Increased rank for related Things To Do keywords without SERP features
- Leveraged Groupon.com’s strengths, such as fast load speed
- Maintained Groupon’s voice, tone, and standard of quality
The outcome
Once published, we observed positive growth for average rank, traffic, and clickthrough rate for Things To Do keywords
For the below, the observation period was January 2018 – February 2019:
Together, we put together a strategic roadmap to produce, publish, and report on updated content at scale. We developed a copywriting template that comprehensively integrated priority keyword themes, matched dynamic deal categories to new content, and provided the minimum requirements for writers to produce relevant content in Groupon’s voice. This copywriting template was created by the Investis Digital team prior to leveraging their own writers to produce evergreen content for a group of 160 Things To Do pages, each eligible for a seasonal refresh when relevant.
This copywriting template served another purpose — for Groupon web developers, it also provided a look at what the static content would include for developers to create an updated new page layout. From an SEO and website operations standpoint, it enabled the Groupon team to engineer a way to publish all updated h1s, body copy, deal categories at once.
All content produced by Investis Digital was published by Groupon July 2018.