Better Collective has been crowned Best In-House Team at the inaugural SEMrush Nordic Awards for the work between its in-house Organic Performance and Digital Intelligence teams on the optimisation of Brazilian facing website Sites de Apostas.
The leading igaming affiliate, who this week reported Q1 revenues up 97 per cent, said that the award was proof that its growing stable of websites can reap the rewards of combining SEO with user experience (UX) research to improve site performance and conversion rates.
Alexander Rehnborg, Organic Performance Team Lead at Better Collective, told SBC News that the award is also confirmation of the company’s “multidisciplinary” online marketing work.
He went on to explain the importance of understanding the Brazilian search market, and how changes made have brought about a better experience for Sites de Apostas users.
SBC: What did it mean to Better Collective to take home Best In-House Team at the recent SEMrush Nordic Search Awards 2019? And who did you beat to the prize?
AR: The award was confirmation for us on being on the right track when it comes to collaborative and multidisciplinary online marketing work. We think that UX and conversion rate optimisation are a major part of doing modern SEO work.
On SEO conferences, you often hear “Google cares about UX” and “if you nail the user journey, you can achieve top rankings” – but how many SEOs later actually get involved in UX studies or push conversion rate optimisation (CRO)?
Simply put, the campaign that won us this award, and that beat Ekstremsportveko Home Grown to the prize, proves that CRO needs to be based on SEO research. This, and dedicated UX expertise, is needed to succeed with major CRO changes.
SBC: Can you explain some of the key updates made to Sites de Apostas by the Organic Performance and Digital Intelligence team?
AR: In the beginning, we had seen a massive increase of organic traffic growth (+250%), but the conversion rate for tips on the site remained below 2%, so we knew our betting tips weren’t delivering the optimal user journey.
The most important update we then made was to make it mobile-first indexing ready. This essentially consisted of going from a separate mobile site to a single, responsive, website where content, design and links became identical between all devices.
We also overhauled the layout and the content structure based on a market search analysis that we conducted. That is how we acquired a deeper understanding of the Brazilian search market, and what punters there are expecting of a betting tips website.
SBC: How does this translate to a better customer experience and overall site performance, specifically on Sites de Apostas?
AR: It didn’t at first. After the implementation, we actually witnessed negative results. People didn’t understand where to click, and which odds marked the actual betting tips.
This is when we brought in our UX specialists at Digital Intelligence, who continued to refine the layout, based on both heatmaps and our own SEO research.
The second time around, we instantly saw that we had finally improved the user journey; heatmaps showed people clicking on the right content elements, organic sessions increased by 45%, conversion rate went up by 62%, and we even saw a moderate ranking increase. Since then, we have continued to refine the layout even more, seeing further positive results on the conversion side.