Kalpa SEO Case Study

This article is an SEO case study about Kalpa. In this article, I’ll discuss how SEOZ360 has been handling the SEO process for the Kalpa website and show you the results.

I kindly thank Remy, the owner of Kalpa, for letting us use Kalpa’s data and show examples in this SEO case study.

Who is Kalpa?

Kalpa is a Dutch brand that produces agenda organizers, agenda refills and notebooks. Kalpa was founded in 1993 as a wholesale organization, and since 2005, their products can be purchased directly through their website. Kalpa is the market leader for the agenda organizer segment in the Netherlands, and its products can be found in all West European countries.

Initial SEO Presence

When we first met Remy, he told me Kalpa has a tremendous wholesale organization, and he is looking for ways to improve Kalpa’s digital presence and online sales. We have discovered that Kalpa had a little online presence. There was not much traffic through search engines. As a social media channel, there was only an Instagram account, which was not very active. After a little chat, we agreed that the best investment would be on Search Engine Optimization, and we have started to work.

SEO Goals and Objectives

The first step was to determine the goals. As an online store owner, Remy was naturally expecting an increase in sales. However, through our meetings, he understood SEO is a digital marketing strategy and a branding activity that helps companies improve their visibility, grow their online presence and increase the value of their brand. I am also delighted to tell you that SEOZ360 has increased Kalpa’s sales and made Remy happy.

Expectations

• Increase organic traffic and visibility.
• Improve click-through rate and average position.
• Increase the sales.
• Implement a successful multilingual setup for English and German versions.

Problems

• There had been no SEO effort on the webpage. The Google Search Console wasn’t even installed.
• The products are very similar, and this type of catalogue of products means a painful keyword optimization process.
• One of the main tasks was to go international and create English and German versions of the website. The primary language would be English instead of Dutch, and Dutch and German versions would be added.
• I had no idea about Shopify and how it works. Thanks to Kalpa, I am now a capable Shopify Liquid developer.
• Nobody in the Kalpa team could execute the SEO strategy, so we had to take control of the process. Due to time limitations set by Kalpa, every SEO step has yet to be executed.
• There have been no active Google Ads campaigns until now. Google Ads has a positive effect on SEO despite their denial.
• The agenda organizer and agenda refill business is seasonal, and we had to be patient to see the results.

The SEO Strategy

There were a few steps to follow for a successful SEO campaign, and we had to act step by step to avoid creating a mess. In addition to paying attention to technical details, our second vital point was using Semantic SEO basics and creating a meaningful internal linking between the pages. We also did have no backlink strategy and effort.

1.      Multilingual SEO

Our first task was to convert the first language of the website to English from Dutch and create Dutch and German versions. With the help of the Matrixify app, the backup process was easy. We have decided to use the Langshop app as the translation app. The primary issue on the process was the structure of Shopify for using hreflangs. Shopify automatically creates hreflangs language and country codes (such as en-us), which is a complication if you don’t have multiregional content for each language and location. We asked Shopify to remove their hreflang code and added our manual code to the theme.

2.      Technical SEO

Shopify is the top e-commerce platform on the web at the moment. It is fast, secure and reliable, but still, it has some challenges to overcome. Things we had to do:

• Add the robots.txt file and edit it.
• Remove duplicate URLs for products.
• Remove spammy links created in Shopify.
• Deindex spammy and unnecessary pages from Google
• Let pages be indexed with matching correct language and content

3.      Keyword Optimization

Keyword Optimization has been one of the most challenging tasks. There are over 100 organizers that have 3 sizes and vary in colours. There are almost 200 refills that vary in size, year and language. This catalogue of products means a painful keyword optimization process.

We had to work hard to overcome the situation and spent a great effort to find the perfect keywords for Kalpa’s products. The keyword research process also included finding the right keywords for Dutch and German pages.

4.      On-Page SEO

Our team has greatly optimized the content on product and collection pages. ChatGPT has played a crucial part in creating content and metadata. Still, we have used ChatGPT under strict prompting and manual editing. With our special prompts, we created unique content for each product with on-page optimization.

We have optimized all product descriptions, titles, meta descriptions, bullet lists, and image alternate texts. Internal linking has been a crucial point in our on-page SEO efforts.

5.      Image SEO

There were images over 2000px ( or even 3000px), and we reduced all image sizes to reasonable sizes. We have updated each image’s alternate text, which brought Kalpa serious organic traffic..

6.      Optimizing Landing Pages

At the initial stage of the SEO campaign, there were only products on the collection pages, and there were no descriptions or other sources. We have worked on the most critical landing pages to direct traffic for specific queries to related collection pages. The organic traffic received by the front page was successfully redirected to the collection pages.

7.      Link Building

There has been no effort for link building. We are proud to announce that all our results are from the on-site SEO efforts.

There were 2 main reasons why we didn’t do link building. Firstly, we were sure to get results with a Semantic SEO strategy. Secondly, there was limited time and budget, and we preferred not to use them for link building..

8.      Content Strategy

There have been no blog posts published. We had found some opportunities to publish blog posts, but it was a push to release tens of blog posts in the agenda niche. Instead, we have been using informational data on our collection pages.

9.      Conversion Rate Optimization

Altough, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is not a field of SEO, yet, we had to help Kalpa improve its sales. We did a couple of things to improve CTR, such as adding charts for comparison or creating new templates for certain types of products, etc. Thankfully, our effort on CRO has paid off since Kalpa has increased its sales significantly.

The SEO Success

After a well-defined and executed Search Engine Optimization strategy, our SEO campaign is a great success. Let’s dive into data, and let me show you some visuals. I will use Shopify data as well as Google Search Console data since it is possible to access data from earlier times from Shopify. The oldest data accessible through GSC is 04/10/2022, while the data from Shopify is accessible from April 2022. Also, I need to note the sales on Shopify started on late May 22nd, so I’ve used the Shopify data from June 22nd for a fair comparison.

The graph above shows the increase in impressions and clicks that started at the start of July 2023, when our SEO effort for the new calendar product pages and landing pages was finished. As you may well see, there is a sharp increase at the beginning of November, when the peak season for Kalpa’s products has started and the shopping season has opened. Still, you may also notice this November effect was not there for the previous year.

Increase in Visibility and Traffic

When we compare data of non-branded queries to the previous year, total impressions have risen by 365%, and there is 10 times more traffic from Google.

I have to use the Shopify data to compare the longest available time interval. I must add that there is always an inconsistency between Google Search Console and Shopify. Still, since I talk with %’s, this inconsistency will likely be ignored. Also, it is impossible to exclude branded queries in Shopify.

According to the Shopify data for between June 1st and November 9th, compared to the previous year, there is an increase of 251% in sessions by search engine traffic, meaning 3.5 times more visitors have visited Kalpa’s website. This data includes branded queries, and I assume we would see that there have been more than 5 times visitors have come through Google and other search engines compared to the previous year if we were able to exclude branded queries in Shopify.

Image SEO Traffic

There has also been a significant traffic via Google Image search. Almost 1/3 of the Google Search traffic is from the image search. Our effort in optimizing images has paid.

Improvement in CTR and Average Positions

Thanks to my colleagues’ hard work, we increased the click-through rate (CTR) from 0.6% to 2.9% and raised Kalpa’s average from 24.5 to 14.5. Kalpa receives impressions of over 1.800 keywords; we are in the top 10 for over 1.000 keywords.

Increase in Sales

We had a success in increasing the sales. Due to the increase in prices, it would be fair to compare the number of orders Kalpa has received. Between May 1st and November 9th, compared to the previous year, there has been a 51% increase in the number of orders received by the customers visited via search engines.

One thing I have to add is that we have more opportunities to increase sales for the US and the UK since we receive a serious amount of organic traffic from those two English-speaking countries, but unfortunately, Kalpa does not ship to the UK and the US.

What We Could Have Done Better in The Kalpa SEO Campaign

As a data-driven and result-oriented Shopify SEO Agency, we constantly analyze data, criticize ourselves crucially for better results and look for ways to improve. For example, we don’t like the results of the Google Image Search, and we think we may have helped Kalpa with better positioning in displaying product images and could receive more traffic. Also, we should have spent more effort to convince Kalpa to make more time available to execute our SEO strategy.

Side Benefits of Our SEO Campaign

We have helped Kalpa get better rankings in their Bol.com and Amazon marketplace stores. While optimizing there wasn’t our primary goal, our in-depth keyword research and understanding of the products helped Kalpa to improve its rankings.

Future Steps for the Kalpa SEO Campaign

SEO is an ongoing process, and new opportunities and fields exist to maintain our success and improve. Here are a few things on our agenda:

• Optimizing the notebooks and creating a few new notebook collection pages.
• Use more structured data to get along better with search engines.
• Run a baclink and an outreach campaign.
• Helping Kalpa to improve its digital presence on YouTube and social media channels.

Testimonial from Remy van Nieuwenhoven

Big thanks to Remy, the owner of Kalpa, for his kind words:

“I wholeheartedly endorse Serhat Özaydın and SEOZ360. They have a deep understanding in what drives sales in a listing. They are professional, and they are committed.
Partnering with SEOZ360 didn’t just change our game; it put us in a higher league. If you’re looking to elevate your digital presence, Serhat and his SEOZ360 team are the partners you need.”

Conclusion

It has been a pleasure to work for Kalpa, and our successful SEO campaign increases our willingness to get better results. We are happy to reach our goals and ready to beat our million-dollar (or billion-dollar) competitors.

Thank you reading my SEO Case Study for Kalpa. Please feel free to get in touch with me via Linkedin.