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  • Search Engine Optimization

Global Sports & Athleisure Company

Client X, a global sports and athleisure company, is known for its stylish and functional footwear, sportswear, and accessories, focusing on merging style with performance. They cater to both professional athletes and style-conscious consumers.

229.82%

increase in the number of keywords that The Company is ranking for

2.52%

increase in impressions

47.40%

increase in clicks

Brief & Objectives

The objective of the SEO campaign and strategy is to increase the discoverability of The Company’s brand and website in South Africa. Our approach focused on improving keyword rankings to boost search visibility and driving more qualified traffic to the site. By aligning SEO efforts with business goals, we helped The Company strengthen its online presence.

Challenges

Keyword Strategy Execution 

  • Competing for high-intent keywords in the sports and fashion industry is highly competitive, making it difficult to rank. By prioritising lower-ranking keywords (21-100) and keywords that are high search volume and low competition, we were able to see the keyword ranking growth as exhibited in the results.

Content & Optimisation Hurdles 

  • Migrating and republishing old content to the new website as quickly as possible following its launch meant that as much SEO value could be carried over with the 301 redirects.
  • As the new website was published with slightly different product categories, it meant that a total review of the content was undertaken to determine what content can be republished and what the content gaps were.

Technical Optimisations 

  • Because The Company is a global brand with multiple subdomains for each market, this presents significant challenges for having technical optimisations implemented.
  • Overcoming these challenges was based on clearly outlining the priorities of the items that needed to be resolved and Ruby Digital focusing attention on the optimisations that didn’t require The Company’s resources to resolve.

Our Solutions

Ruby Digital’s SEO strategy for The Company focused on three key pillars:  

  • Technical SEO
  • Keyword Optimisation
  • Content Strategy

These efforts resulted in significant improvements in search visibility, rankings, and organic traffic.

1. Technical SEO Improvements 

  • Resolving technical issues: Focused on improving crawling, indexing, and site health by addressing:
    • No-indexing of indexed internal site search results from irrelevant, non-English terms that was bloating The Company’s indexed web pages.
  • Sitemap updates by including indexed URLs into the sitemap which were previously excluded
  • Paginated content canonicalisation to ensure that URLs with query string (/?) are canonicalised to URLs without query strings (/?) to reduce index bloat
    • This technical optimisation was applied at a global level
  • Optimising title tags and H1 tags:
    • The new Client X website was missing SEO optimised title tags and headings, which were corrected.
    • Applied appropriate boiler plate content to the title tags and descriptions to ensure consistency across the URLs of The Company’s website and the result of its brand.
  1. Keyword Strategy & Ranking Optimisation (Secondary Goal: Generating Traffic)
  • Prioritising keyword improvements from lower positions (21-100):
    • Keywords were grouped into four categories based on competition and search volume.
    • Focused on improving the rankings for high volume, low competition transactional keywords.
    • Optimised pages with internal linking for better keyword ranking performance.
  1. Content Strategy
  • Republishing optimised content from the old website of The Company:
    • Content that Ruby Digital had written for the product category pages for the old website of The Company was republished to retain historical SEO value.
    • Additional product category content was created to fill the gaps between the old website and the new website. 

Results

Our comprehensive SEO strategy for The Company delivered substantial improvements across key ranking metrics, increasing the brand’s search visibility and positioning it for sustained growth in the South African market. By focusing on high-intent transactional keywords, we significantly improved The Company’s organic visibility. 

Keyword Growth & Visibility
The focus of the campaign being the growth in total keyword rankings, which increased by 229.94% from November 2023 to January 2025.  

  • Top 3 rankings: Keywords in the top 3 keyword positions increased by 10.57%
  • Page 1 rankings: Keywords in positions 4-10 increased by 65.8%
  • Page 2 rankings: Keywords in positions 11-20 increased by 202.93%
  • Pages 3 to 5 rankings: Keywords in positions 21-50 increased by 246.72%
  • Pages 6 to 10 rankings: Keywords in positions 50-100 increased by 438.93%
  • Featured snippets and rich results: The number of keywords appearing in SERP features increased by 810.87%

Transactional Keyword Performance
Of the total keyword increases, there was also an increase in the number of transactional keyword rankings, which drives a strong purchase intent from users. The total number of transactional keywords ranking organically increased by 243.99%. This increase in transactional keywords increases the chances of a user that is ready to make a purchase discovering The Company in their searches.  

  • Top 3 transactional rankings: Transactional keywords in the top 3 positions decreased by 16.85%
  • Page 1 transactional rankings: Keywords in positions 4-10 increased by 47.98%
  • Page 2 transactional rankings: Transactional keywords in positions 11-20 increased by 455.75%
  • Pages 3 to 5 rankings: Transactional keywords in positions 21-50 increased by 364.25%
  • SERP features: Transactional keywords appearing in SERP features increased by 1,947.22%

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