Decathlon's SEO Case Study – Entering a New Market, Increasing Website Visibility by 5 Times and Non-branded Traffic by 20% Monthly

Results: Total organic traffic increased by 187% in October and 197% in November.

The Client

Decathlon is a French sporting goods retailer. With over 1697 stores in 60 countries and regions, it is the largest sporting goods retailer in the world. The promotion challenge was that Decathlon is a newcomer in the highly competitive market of Ukraine, where most of the market share in the niche is taken by large all-in-one marketplaces including Prom.ua, OLX, and Rozetka.

Decathlon's direct competitors are market leaders such as megasport.ua, terrasport.ua, extremstyle.ua, and sportmaster.ua. Over years of SEO promotion, they have managed to occupy their market shares.

The Challenge

Our goal was to identify growth points and increase the visibility of Decathlon.ua among the closest competitors for the first year of cooperation.

Objectives:

• prepare to launch the online store;
• promote the website after being indexed;
• increase the traffic originating from search engines;
• increase online sales.

The Solution

1. We compiled and implemented a technical SEO checklist for the website.
2. To easily measure the results of the promotion, we set up analytics and Google Data Studio KPI reporting.
3. We identified the seasonality for all website categories to understand the most effective timing for optimization of a particular category.
4. We added meta tags for all web pages according to Decathlon's seasonality and priority analysis. We also created a technical requirement document for Decathlon copywriters.
5. As part of the website promotion, we built an external linking strategy based on link equity and competitor analysis. 

6. We provided recommendations on how to safely move a website to a new domain without losing any traffic or revenue.
7. We conducted a detailed analysis of competitors and market share in the niche. Based on the data obtained, we built a promotion strategy and created a forecast for potential traffic, transactions, and ROMI.

The Results

1. Total organic traffic increased by 187% in October and 197% in November.

2. The ratio of non-branded traffic increased from 14% to 35%.

3. Non-branded traffic increased by 750% in October and 713% in November.

4. According to serpstat.com, we increased the website's visibility from 3.82 to 21.86.

Testimonials

Alexey Pavlov, SEO Specialist, Decathlon:

Daria Kovtun, Project Manager at Netpeak:

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