Hepper: Pur-fect Fur-niture
Optimized content improves sales. Ask modern pet furniture company, Hepper. They increased revenue by 2,964% with Semrush.
Table of сontents
Cute animal content rules the web. This modern pet furniture company figured out how to turn competitor best practices and keyword insights into a money-making strategy.
Challenge: Catch a cat's attention
In February 2021, media and eCommerce company Pangolia acquired Hepper which designs modern cat furniture.
Hepper was only receiving around 150 daily pageviews when Pangolia acquired it:
With a modest portfolio of successful websites, the experienced content team at Pangolia knew that a strong content strategy could result in millions of readers every month from organic searches. While learning about their pets, the visitors would also learn about Hepper’s products, and be encouraged to purchase them.
As Simon, the CEO of Hepper puts it: “Hepper was convinced that if a reader was reading a post about ‘how to brush your cat’, then that would also be a great place to introduce them to Hepper’s cat brush product, and thereby increase Hepper’s sales.”
The goal was clear: to publish 5,000 posts within 2 years and grow the organic traffic to 1 million pageviews per month.
Hepper achieved their goal in 9 months. Here’s how they did it:
Step 1: Do keyword research
First, Hepper needed to figure out what articles cat owners were actively searching for. That’s when the team started using Semrush’s keyword research tools.
“I could type in a keyword and get an estimated overview of how many people were searching for it,” Simon said, “and whether a keyword would be difficult or easy for our website to rank. This was the key to our strategy.”
Step 2: Find keyword variations & "how to" queries
You can rely on your expert knowledge on a topic to come up with some content ideas, but most of the hidden keyword gems - the ones that are immensely popular and fairly easy to rank for - will require much digging.
Luckily, the team at Hepper came up with an easy way to discover low-hanging fruit using Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool.
They enter a keyword like ‘why do cats [?] in the search bar’, and the tool shows them thousands of variations for that keyword:
Remarkably, Hepper’s team was able to come up with more than 100 article ideas just based on that one keyword variation search for ‘why do cats’.
The team also likes to do more advanced Keyword Magic Tool searches to get valuable insights.
For example, they wanted to learn what keywords people search for that contain the words ‘how to’ and the word ‘cat’. To do this, the Hepper team would search for ‘how to’, and ‘cat’ in the ‘Include keywords’ filter.
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This method also resulted in lots of great keyword ideas for new posts for Hepper to write.
Step 3: Start a keyword cat fight with competitors
A second method that the Hepper team uses for keyword research is to see what keywords their competitors rank for.
To do this, they click on the Organic Research tool in Semrush, and then enter the domain name of one of their competitors. Then they are presented with an overview of keywords that their competitor is ranking for:
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Step 4: Focus on long-tail keywords at first
When Hepper started their content strategy, they knew they didn’t have a lot of authority in the cat world yet. Their chance of ranking for medium and high competition keywords was very low because the sites ranking for those keywords had usually been in the cat industry for decades, and thus, built up a lot of authority.
“We realized that there was a lot of opportunity for us to focus on long-tail keywords, which are keywords with low competition, and usually low search volume,” Simon says. “This would allow for Hepper to slowly start ranking for those terms, build up authority, and then once we had built a bigger name for ourselves, we could transition to more competitive keywords”.
Results: Increased revenue by 2964%
Between March 2021 and March 2023, Hepper was able to:
- Grow organic traffic from around 150 daily pageviews to around 90,000 daily pageviews
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- Increase Hepper product sales revenue by 2964%
The rapid organic traffic growth gave Hepper much more cash flow which allowed them to:
- Grow their team to more than 110 team members consisting of pet lovers, marketers, content experts, veterinarians, and many more roles.
- Invest more money into their other sites such as Pet Keen and Excited Cats, which have followed a similar growth trajectory.
- Spend more money on product development, inventory, and marketing.
Key Takeaways
A content strategy can produce fantastic results if done right.
- Make sure your keyword research is based on data rather than gut feeling and speculation. Use tools like Semrush Keyword Magic Tool to quickly find lots of keyword variations.
- Reverse-engineer your competitor’s success. Find their top-ranking keywords using a tool like Semrush’s Organic Research and create better content.
- Keep your domain’s Authority Score in mind. Start with long-tail keywords and challenge competitors with a lower domain authority at first. You can check domain Authority Score for any website using the Semrush Domain Overview.
Ultimately, a disciplined focus on producing the most helpful and optimized content can give you the potential to double or triple your organic traffic in a very short time. And with more readers seeing your brand comes the opportunity to show them your products, which can ultimately lead to tremendous revenue growth.