Objectives
The new Southern Co-op Funeral Plans ecommerce website needed to deliver a succinct, modern design and great user experience that was Search Engine (SEO) and mobile optimised. It needed to provide users with a clear, consistent route to purchase either a cremation, burial, or personalised funeral plan through a new purchase funnel or a ‘contact us’ form.
The migration and launch project involved three agencies in developing the site, functionality, and e-commerce funnel integration. Crucially, the site needed to rank above the Southern Co-op Funeralcare site that offers immediate funeral arrangements, not funeral plans.
Equimedia needed to design and optimise the site to deliver:
- An easy to use site design
- A site optimised for mobile devices
- A Site that ranked for key generic terms and brand terms
Our Approach
Once the new site was live our focus was to ensure the new site ranked for the correct keywords including generic terms like ‘funeral plans’ and brand-led terms. We led Southern Co-op through a 90-day SEO development roadmap which focused on ensuring the new site ranked higher for ‘funeral plans’ than the Funeralcare site.
Our SEO strategy entailed optimising the Funeral Plans site through:
- Keyword optimisation in content
- De-optimisation of conflicting pages, including Funeralcare site pages
- Ensuring the right links were in place between the Funeralcare and Funeral Plans sites, based on search intent
- Fleshing out the FAQ section and homepage of the Funeral Plans site to increase the breadth of product information
Alongside optimising organic rankings, we launched paid search activity to jump start traffic to site and provide a test bed for future organic page optimisations.
We began paid search activity by restructuring the client’s Google Ads account, which meant we were able to group our keywords by relevant themes, improve ad copy, link to more efficient landing pages, and cover all best practice recommendations for the account.
We launched our newly structured paid search activity at the end of March 2024 with the aim of driving traffic to site and through the purchase funnel. During the initial paid search test period we tested:
- Sending traffic to different starting points in the funnel
- Deploying lead generation pages for contact
- Focusing budget on Cost & Price ad groups
- Running location-specific campaigns to support local traffic
- Launching Personalised Plans and Direct Cremations campaigns
Results
We worked alongside Southern Co-op and their website development agency to make incremental Search Engine Optimisations to the site over the three-month period. As a result of these optimisations, we achieved the following improvements in site performance from June – July 2024:
- Funeral Plans outranked Funeralcare for three key terms
- Funeral Plans jumped to Page 1 from Pages 3 / 4 for ‘cremation funeral plans’ and ‘burial funeral plans’
- We maintained 1st search engine rank for ‘bespoke funeral plans’ and ‘personalised funeral plans’ terms
In the last four months of paid search activity, we over-delivered click volume by 5% with only 92% of the planned budget and driven a Cost Per Click 13% lower than planned-for. Not only that but we’ve also achieved 83% of forecast conversions. We continue to develop and deploy a testing roadmap for Southern Co-op paid search which more recently includes testing Performance Max campaigns.
- Over-delivered click volumes by 5%
- Under-spent the budget by 8%
- Delivered a Cost per Click 13% lower than forecast
Lauren Chase, Marketing Manager for End of Life Services at Southern Co-op,
“After multiple pitches from different agencies, we went with Equimedia as our agency of choice for this project due to their attention to detail, challenging our brief (in a good way!) and obvious knowledge and experience to help us achieve our objectives. It also helps that the project team are very personable and friendly, too. They were, and continue to be, diligent, detailed and efficient in delivering ongoing success for our Funeral Plans website and we are looking forward to that success being replicated in our upcoming Funeralcare website.”
5% over-delivery of click volumes
8% reduction in spend against budget
13% lower cost per click
Interested in seeing what we can do for you? Get in touch and let us know about your requirements today.
