Sports Direct tasked us with finding the biggest organic growth opportunities that would drive the greatest financial returns in 2022. We found that the website was underperforming for queries surrounding England football shirts and we needed to get them back in position ready for kick-off.

We completed keyword research to understand the specific queries users were searching for in 2022 to find their replica kits and investigated terms that were gaining popularity year-on-year.

Keyword targets defined, we cleaned up any outdated references to England kit from previous years (2021/22 for example) within the landing page copy and metadata. We also set up an inhouse tool that allowed us to quantify how well we were optimised for our new keyword targets within key on-page elements, and PLP header copy. This data-led approach served us well when benchmarking new suggestions vs. what already existed and also allowed us to quickly compare against SERP competitors.

To maximise landing page relevancy, we then ran the content through our proprietary tool Salient, using Natural Language Understanding to remove the guesswork when providing tweaks to the existing copy and aligning with search intent. 

Finally we crawled the Sports Direct site and extracted internal link opportunities that could boost the authority of the England Football shirt page. This exercise also allowed us to optimise existing internal links by improving anchor text relevance and keyword signalling – cementing Sports Direct’s position for when customers came searching for England football shirts.