Helping GO Outdoors Lead the Outdoor Sector in Organic Visibility
Over an 11-year span I worked with multichannel outdoor retailer GO Outdoors in charge of organic growth across both SEO and Social Media.
Working alongside colleagues and agency partners, we saw GO Outdoors go from their first 5-figure week online to their first million-pound month, with leading organic visibility and a sector-dominant social media following.
The role included hands-on SEO and Social Media management while cultivating internal and external stakeholder relationships.
What I did with GO Outdoors:
SEO
SEO changed a lot during my time at GO Outdoors. Internally, I was the person tasked with organic search growth. This involved both hands-on day-to-day SEO tasks while working alongside external agency partners.
During my time with the company, we successfully oversaw 2 website migrations, launched a blog that rapidly started to contribute to our weekly traffic but also fed into our social media and CRM efforts.
This led to sector-leading visibility and our work being cited in eConsultancy as a good example of the power of using content to target long-tail keywords.
Tasks included:
– On-page optimisation
– Content strategy & creation
– Technical SEO audits
– Reporting to key stakeholders
– Building relationships with external brands
– Keyword research
– Owning relationships with external agencies
– Google Business and Yext optimisation
– Liaising with internal stakeholders to champion SEO within the business
Social Media
Alongside on-site SEO, I also launched the company’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube channels. This enabled me to get a day-to-day view of the GO Outdoors customers, which fed into my content strategy.
We generated working relationships with popular outdoor Facebook groups and festival groups, which enabled us to be able to directly advise and respond to customers outside of our own channels.
Alongside GO Outdoors channels, I also launched a festival-specific channel called ‘Simply the Fest’, which led to us partnering up with Sonisphere festival through my work.
Based on pure following numbers we were 1st among competitors on Facebook (over 200k followers) and Youtube (19.5k subs), 2nd on Instagram (33.3k followers) and Twitter (49k followers)
Tasks included:
– Launched, and grew GO Outdoors visibility on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube.
– Content and Social Media Strategy
– Community management
– Tone of voice
– Content Creation
– Advising customer service in responses on social
– Liaising with video creators to create product videos and informative videos
Connecting Search and Social
We talk about multi-platform search strategies now as something that is new, but my role with GO meant that I had a good view over both search and social and naturally those strategies combined together through necessity.
The social view told you what customers were talking about, what they were asking and what they were struggling to understand. Customers won’t always use your products in the way you think, and having that view of social channels can really help produce the right type of content for the people you are aiming it at.
On the other side of that, it’s a waste of time to produce written content that doesn’t work when seeded out on social channels. So, rather than chasing search volumes, we grounded our content strategy in what we were learning daily from our customers on social media.