Strategic Audience Insights Raise Organic Blog Traffic +869%

Challenge

When faced with competition from big-box retailers, how do you position yourself as an authority in your space and better serve your customers? By listening to those customers and identifying their wants and needs.

With over 500 stores throughout the U.S. and Canada and a reputation as a respected retailer of quality flooring products, our client, Flooring America wanted to both attract more customers to their brick-and-mortar locations as well as bolster their online presence.

To do so, they wanted to identify impactful content opportunities to arm potential customers with information in the form of articles targeting do-it-for-me (DIFM) homeowners who are looking to improve their living space.

Approach

Seer conducted an audience analysis using a variety of tools to learn what triggered users to purchase flooring and what content helped inform that purchase.

We collected data over a two-month period and learned that Flooring America’s customer base was motivated by major life events like moving into a new home, renovating their current home, an increase in disposable income and free time.

We learned more about their purchasing habits, consumer behavior, and the factors involved (such as cost, installation options, timing, and delivery) that impact their path to purchase. We discovered the following groups of triggers after analyzing this data at scale:

1. New Home
2. Renovation
3. Free Time
4. Income Increase

Execution

One of the tools we used was Hotjar, which incorporates heat mapping technology and user polls to gain user insights.

Pop-up user polls asked visitors what brought them to the Flooring America website, and we analyzed the responses to identify keyword and topic opportunities. We also used NGrams to analyze user comments, grouping keywords and topics into larger themes and personas.

We saw a trend that people were seeking more information on maintaining, caring for, and repairing existing floors than purchasing new flooring. These users were looking for guidance and tips on topics ranging from restoring hardwood flooring to fixing carpeting that had been damaged by pets.

Based on our Audience Analysis, Seer recommended building new content to live on Flooring America’s blog that would offer visitors the guidance they were looking for and position them as a trustworthy leader in the flooring space.

Results

One month after implementing our Audience Analysis findings, our client saw +869% organic blog sessions vs the previous period and +264% overall organic sessions vs the previous year.

Newly-created content that answered audience’s questions around specific flooring concerns steadily increased traffic to the Flooring America blog, earning them Google answer boxes for several key terms.