Denby

At the start of 2020, iconic British pottery brand Denby asked us to oversee their organic search, with the goal of making their marketing budget work harder. They were looking to boost rankings and domain authority, so their brand could compete in the search results against big-name competitors, like Made, John Lewis, and Habitat.

To this end, Denby set us three core goals:

Increase overall organic traffic and revenue.
Boost non-brand rankings and traffic.
Attract younger shoppers to the site through organic search.

One of the key challenges Denby faced was attracting a younger generation of shoppers. Denby wanted to shift the target demographic of their organic channel from the 35+ bracket towards 18–34-year-olds, with the broader aim of increasing revenue and future-proofing their brand. And, they tasked us with harnessing the power of organic search to help them achieve this.

Our results

+61% (+4,841)

additional rankings

+82% (+1,039)

additional front-page rankings

+65% (+4,440)

additional non-brand rankings

+171% (+636)

additional non-brand front-page rankings

+79%

increase in organic non-brand traffic

+56%

increase in organic non-brand revenue

By August 2021, Denby had experienced a pronounced demographic shift towards a younger audience, with a steady increase in the proportion of sessions, transactions, and revenue driven by the 18–34-year-old bracket.

Google Analytics data, January 2019 to August 2021

This was achieved against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, when consumer spending among younger age groups was reduced. Despite this, we still achieved significant increases in sessions and transactions.

Denby also achieved some great ranking positions for commercially important keywords — a testament to our technical recommendations and onsite optimisation work.

Keyword	Volume	Mar-20	Aug-20	Oct-21
Teapot	33,100	48th	24th	8th
Placemats	33,100	19th	17th	6th
Dinner Plates	12,100	40th	19th	5th
Lap Trays	12,100	32nd	12th	7th
Champagne Flutes	12,100	28th	10th	9th
Ramekin	9,900	No Rank	75th	7th
Espresso Cups	9,900	19th	23rd	6th
Mug Set	8,100	40th	17th	9th
Serving Platters	5,400	29th	14th	7th
Soup Bowl	4,400	No Rank	No Rank	8th
Grey Dinner Set	4,400	18th	18th	5th
Soup Bowls	4,400	56th	14th	6th
White Dinner Sets	4,400	18th	19th	10th
Stoneware Dinner Sets	2,900	34th	12th	3rd
Tableware Set	2,400	28th	19th	10th
Side Plates	2,400	89th	13th	10th
Ramekin Dishes	1,900	No Rank	84th	8th
Dinnerware	1,900	41st	35th	5th
Ceramic Bowls	1,900	94th	22nd	1st
Ceramic Plates	1,600	No Rank	No Rank	7th
Dinner Sets UK	1,600	69th	19th	3rd

We’ve also increased Denby’s non-brand front-page rankings by 171% since the start of their campaign, bringing new shoppers to key commercial pages and increasing organic revenue.

Awards and Shortlists

Our solution

We designed a three-fold organic strategy, including onsite content, technical improvements, and targeted link-building. This would drive traffic to Denby’s site to help them reach a younger demographic, as well as boosting their domain authority to help the brand take on their top competitors in the search results.

As with every client, we kept in close contact with the Denby team through real-time activity updates via our project management system and honest monthly reports covering all KPIs.

Content

Our Content team created pre-purchase content marketing that allowed us to target high-volume top-of-the-funnel keywords, with a focus on a younger demographic. We created content on topics that were likely to resonate with under-35s, like creating a trendy brunch board, or throwing a tapas dinner party.

To boost non-brand keyword rankings, we created optimised content for category pages to stimulate the relevant keywords within the 11+ ranking range.

Throughout our campaign, our experienced copywriters made sure to showcase Denby’s core brand values and USPs — such as sustainability, durability, and versatility — in all onsite copy. This helped maintain Denby’s strong brand identity, while maximising conversions and revenue from organic.

Tech

Our Technical team took steps to improve the crawling efficiency of Denby’s site, highlighting issues that were causing the size of the site to bloat. We culled unnecessary pages, removed or redirected soft 404 errors, and fixed broken HREF links across the site. This ensured Google’s crawl budget could be used more efficiently on valuable URLs, driving better results across the board.

Resolving these issues also created a cleaner, clearer navigation, which improved user experience across the site.

Outreach

From an outreach perspective, we focussed on authority growth of the domain, so that Denby could better compete in search results alongside major competitors such as Dunelm, Wayfair, and John Lewis.

As a household name with a big following, we leveraged Denby’s recognisable and highly respected brand identity to secure quality, ethical linking opportunities. Our Outreach and Content teams collaborated to create content that their target audience would love, while remaining true to Denby’s branding.

Our outreach team took a targeted approach, building links on authoritative national publications, such as The Express and Wales Live. We also strategically outreached home and lifestyle magazines that were highly relevant to our client, like House Beautiful. This helped create a diverse backlink profile that substantially boosted Denby’s authority.

“I worked with Glass Digital in a previous role and was impressed with their transparency, from communications on projects to strategy and reporting. It was always a relationship that felt like teamwork and all members of the team seemed immersed and engaged in the brand and joint strategy.

“The team were able to understand what our brand is trying to achieve and demonstrate ways we can make our current channels and budget work harder.”

Navneet Evans, Digital Marketing Manager at Denby