Summary

Pasta Evangelists is a recipe box subscription service that specialises in delivering fresh artisan pasta to homes across the UK. When the UK lockdown hit, Go Up put together a pandemic-proof plan, creating informational resources perfect for inspiring those stuck at home.

The plan ultimately drove organic growth, engagement and subscription signups, achieving a 444% growth in organic traffic year on year and an 831% increase in first-page keyword rankings year on year.

Objectives & Aims

Go Up has been Pasta Evangelists’ SEO and content agency since March 2020. Pasta Evangelists is a recipe box subscription service that specialises in delivering fresh artisan pasta to homes across the UK. Pasta Evangelists approached Go Up looking for help in delivering four key aspirations to drive the next phase of its digital growth strategy:

• To position Pasta Evangelists as the online authority on pasta, not just in a transactional sense but also an informational sense, gaining organic search visibility across relevant pasta-related terms.
• To increase non-branded organic traffic to the website for both transactional and informational search queries.
• To increase conversions and subscribed customers through intelligent user journey funnelling towards transaction.
• To enter the generic recipe delivery box organic search landscape, challenging the likes of HelloFresh, Gousto and Mindful Chef.

The website had already achieved prominent organic search visibility for relevant transactional terms such as “pasta delivery”, “pasta box”, “pasta making kit” and “pasta making course”. However, the website had little visibility for informational queries that would build both topic authority in the eyes of Google and brand awareness within the consumer market.

Implementation, Execution & Tactics

To become an online authority on a topic, it is crucial to have a good degree of organic visibility across a range of subject-relevant keywords. However, first-page visibility is worthless if users do not engage with the content that is ranking. This is why paying close attention to user intent is so important – something that was at the forefront of our strategy for the Pasta Evangelists website.

It was identified at the start of the campaign that there was a significant amount of search volume for different types of pasta like “tagliatelle”. The website did rank for this term (a collections page compiling all tagliatelle dishes that had at one stage been available to buy), but rank position had plateaued on the third page of results.

The reason this page had not performed better was clear to Go Up – searching for “tagliatelle” is understood by Google as having the same search intent as “tagliatelle recipes”. Thus, in order to rank on the first page for this term, a resourceful “tagliatelle” page that served a range of internally linked recipes to users would be required.

This approach would tick the user intent box. It would also help Pasta Evangelists in its goal of becoming the online authority on pasta. What it would not do, however, is provide much transactional value to the company.

To tackle this, the second phase of the project planning focused on user journey, designing a wireframe that not only ensured good user experience but also created clear pathways from informational content to conversion.

Go Up incorporated the company’s weekly menu into the page, giving the user a choice: follow one of the provided recipes to make a meal from scratch or take the pressure off and buy one of Pasta Evangelist’s easy-to-prepare meal kits (with the option of signing up for a subscription in the process). The recipes and the weekly menu were joined on the page by video tutorials, FAQs, links to related blog posts and links to similar pages on different pasta types, culminating in one comprehensive hub of tagliatelle-related resources.

Go Up repeated this process for several other pasta types and the results have been outstanding. Traffic has surged, keyword rankings have improved, and engagement metrics including bounce rate and average session duration have improved – a sure-fire sign that users are engaging with the content and their queries are being satisfied.

Go Up has since delivered a number of other authority-building projects that have yielded similar results, alongside continuous copy optimisation, site structure recommendations, user journey mapping, strategic link acquisition and technical improvements.

Results

The website’s organic performance has gone from strength to strength, with huge increases in both branded and non-branded organic search traffic.

It should be noted that this project was delivered at various stages throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, with the launch of the tagliatelle hub coinciding with the start of the first national lockdown in the UK.

Despite the chaos and change of consumer behaviour brought about by the pandemic, the website’s organic traffic increased by 444% in the space of a year.

This was influenced by the significant improvement in visibility across a number of relevant topic areas (“tagliatelle” being one example of many). At the time of writing, the website is ranking for more keywords than it ever has before:

• The total number of keywords ranking on the first page has increased by 831% year-on-year.
• The total number of keywords ranking within the top 3 positions has increased by 387% year-on-year.

The campaign continues with the creation of an interactive asset that aims to continue these impressive results.