SEO Benefits to using Headless CMS

It's been a while since we first started running websites using our new headless CMS and we've learnt some really rather interesting findings about the benefits of using headless when search engine optimisation is a requirement for your marketing strategy and your website.

We've been running websites on Jolojo for around one year now. We're not going into loads of detail about Jolojo here, so for those of you who aren't aware of Jolojo or want to find out more, take a peek at jolojo.com.

What we're exploring here is some real world data and search engine optimisation strategy for a client of ours.

The client: Measure Monitor Control, technical specialists in the supply of valves, sensors, monitoring systems and software.

Domain: www.measuremonitorcontrol.com

Overview

Measure Monitor Control wanted to update their website using a mobile-first design, deployed with an SSL for HTTPS domain protocol. It needed to be secure and flexible enough for Measure Monitor Control to add and change a lot of content on a regular basis, without prohibitive expense or data security risk.

Long story short, after 17 months developing a Wordpress site, Measure Monitor Control became disillusioned with the capability of Wordpress to deliver a functional site that met their needs, and approached BarkWeb to press on with a new website deployed on our own platform, Jolojo. The basics of the design were retained from their existing project, and advanced under our own designer using Measure Monitor Control’s sales brochures as a design steer and to keep the branding consistent across marketing channels. 

Our SEO experts helped to map out a new and more efficient site architecture that meant a complete rethink around products and categories. As a result, the site architecture was rebuilt using content silos of relatable products, resources and content, optimised URLs, and clever URL mapping from the old site using 301 diverts, which both helped the user navigate the site and for search engines to crawl the site more effectively. Proper attention to Google indexing ensured maximum exposure of content to organic markets, helping with business development.

The purpose of the site also changed from ecommerce to lead generation. This stripped out a lot of the restrictive functionality that often goes hand in hand with retail ecommerce sites and meant we had more freedom to design the user flow in a bespoke manner. The result was that we could more dynamically create pages with different layouts and functionality that benefited a specific product set without having to rely on a single layout.

What we ended up with was an elegant and on-brand digital presence that affirms Measure Monitor Control for what they are – a high-quality, global, specialist distributor of valve and instrument solutions.

SEO results

6-months on from launching the new website, we've documented many impressive results, including the improvement in organic keyword rankings. We’d conducted some initial keyword research involving the client in the process and analysing data such as search volume, competition and scoring keywords based on an efficiency index system that we use to identify “low hanging fruit”. This included around 300 keywords that we placed in the important category for Measure Monitor Control, and helped to form the SEO strategy going forward.

Monitoring those keywords on a monthly basis, we can plot a clear improvement in avg. positions and keyword rankings, with overall visibility scores up by +27% net improvement from 21% visibility to 48% visibility, more than doubling the efficiency of organic rankings in the process. Here’s some stats from the SEO project so far:

  • 233% increase in top 1 positions
  • 700% increase in top 10 (page one) positions
  • 678% increase in keywords ranked in top 50 positions

What this meant for Measure Monitor Control was more relevant traffic going to the website from Google search than ever before. The website has seen these impressive growth in key marketing metrics since launching on Jolojo:

  • Overall website users +107.23%
  • Google/organic website traffic +202.3%
  • Bing/organic website traffic +400%
  • Baidu/organic traffic +400%
  • New users +108.2%
  • Sessions +78.85%
  • Bounce rate -85.17%
  • Pages per session +35.52%

Speaking to the client, they’ve been receiving approximately double the number of enquiries per month on average too!

Take a look at the new Measure Monitor Control website at measuremonitorcontrol.com