African + Eastern Case Study

E-commerce

African + Eastern is the Middle East and Arabian Gulf’s largest importer and distributor of the world’s premier alcohol brands.

5,800%

increase in top 3 keywords

5,309%

increase in monthly organic users

2,389%

increase in organic revenue

Dealing with an alcohol campaign in the Middle East is a tall mountain to climb, and we knew we had our work cut out for us when we joined forces with African + Eastern. Their primary objective was to make at least AED 60,000 per month through organic search. Our strategy focused on SEO fundamentals such as page experience, internal linking, category and product page optimization, and building backlinks. Results grew steadily, eventually seeing a 5,800% increase in top 3 ranking keywords from 15 to 295, a 5,309% increase in monthly organic users from 212 to 11,469, and a 2,389% increase in monthly revenue from AED 7,267 to AED 180,930.

HOW WE DID IT

  • Used geo-targeting to serve specific offers to specific locations
  • Optimized product and category pages with new templates
  • Used Site Search tracking to overhaul the navigation
  • Conducted organic link-building outreach

With African + Eastern, we ran into two issues - one was expected and one wasn’t. The expected one was the restrictions on alcohol advertising in the region. We knew our strategy would lead to results notwithstanding this. However, what we didn’t expect was the client launching a Progressive Web App (PWA) version of the website on an m-dot subdomain. This led to the website's mobile and desktop variants competing and search visibility dropping considerably. Our team acted quickly and resolved the issue by adding canonical tags on mobile pages pointing to the corresponding desktop ones, adding a rel=alternate tag on desktop pages indicating the same page on the m-dot version, redirecting mobile users and search bots to the alternate URL when they access a desktop URL, and redirecting desktop users and search bots to the corresponding desktop URL when they access a mobile URL.

“We're super happy with the SEO performance to date. To experience consistent month-over-month growth for over a year is rare. SEO Sherpa has greatly contributed to the business's growth during this period.”

Rahul Sainani

Performance Marketing Manager
African + Eastern

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