Weekends Only and the Case of the Undiscovered SEO

Weekends Only has built a reputation for being a fun, quirky, and “un-stuffy” place to shop since 1997. By only opening their showrooms on the weekends, their customers are able to save money on a large selection of high quality furniture, from traditional bedroom sets to modern sectional sofas.

This unique “Weekends Only” concept quickly grew from one store to five across the Saint Louis Metro area. In 2015, the brand opened its first store in Indianapolis, Indiana and has since expanded to 7 total locations. For traditional in-person shoppers, the concept was simple: shop for your furniture by visiting the stores on the weekends and save some cash.

When we began to partner with Weekends Only, our focus was to help their ecommerce division grow at the same pace as their stores through the help of targeted SEO. After all, we believe that your website should be your hardest working employee.

Services Provided

SEO Strategy and Consulting
Marketing Analytics and Reporting
Content Strategy

Channels

Organic Search
Local SEO
Onsite Content

Industry

Furniture & Mattress Retailer

The Challenge

Making Their Website Work More Than Just Weekends

Weekends Only had good name recognition in St. Louis and Indianapolis. With the help of traditional media, great customer service, and a commitment to their communities, the brand thrived offline. Online traffic reflected this. Most of their organic users were customers searching directly for the brand. How do we get the online furniture and mattress shoppers who aren’t aware of Weekends Only to organically discover their brand?

Liz Oeltjen on Weekends Only.

The Opportunity

Two Brains (and one Brian) are better than none.

While we love to help brands by crafting and executing a marketing plan, sometimes our clients would rather keep some aspects of their marketing in house. Our marketing consulting services are a perfect fit. In the case of Weekends Only, they needed help crafting a plan that would not only guide them on what to do, but also why we wanted to make changes. In short, they wanted a crash course in SEO that would help them grow even as they added to their internal digital marketing team.

Working with a team that is well versed in some of the basics allowed Seafoam, with Brian at the helm, to take some deep dives into SEO for the brand. We knew that, if Weekends Only could capitalize on their loyal fan base and draw more eyes to their site, they’d go far. Here’s what else Weekends Only already had going for them …

Their shoppers understood the value Weekends Only had to offer.

Over 20 years of excellent service and great branding established Weekends Only as a contender in the brick and mortar marketplace. We simply had to expand this ideal to those who took to the internet when shopping for furniture and home decor.

The Internet can be the great equalizer.

While the company has a great presence in the Saint Louis market, it was still relatively new to the Indianapolis marketplace. As the brand expanded, it was also competing with furniture stores of all sizes, many of them national brands. One of the amazing things about the internet, especially for ecommerce brands, is the internet can help get your message out into the world and allow brands to compete with companies that are much, MUCH larger. We needed to help Weekends Only do just that.

THE STRATEGY

The Strategy For Weekends Only was to “teach a brand to fish.”

In this case, we did not want to simply give our “catch” to our client, we needed to teach them how to fish on their own. We wanted to let them in on our thought process and work with them to fine tune their digital marketing efforts. The first step was to really partner with the brand on a deeper level.

Liz Oeltjen on consulting Weekends Only.

Consulting

Before we could begin any of our efforts, it was important to understand what Weekends Only had done before. We analyzed what had worked, and what had not for the brand. Since Weekends Only had been in the ecommerce game since 2013 there is much we needed to discuss about their past efforts in order to understand how to move forward. This is particularly important because their digital marketing team was fairly familiar with the basics of SEO, they needed a much deeper dive to help propel their brand further.

We spent a lot of time digging into their historical data and asking a lot of questions. We very quickly understood that this consulting project was going to be an exercise in the advanced tactics of SEO. We began auditing in earnest. And as we did, we built custom reporting and analytics to help the team understand the data behind the brand in a more robust fashion. As we turned over every opportunity we built in explanations to help the team understand what to look for in the future.

Better Organic SEO

Keyword data can often be a sticky problem to parse out for a brand. Optimizing an item is largely about getting into the head of the user in order to understand how they are searching. Since every human’s search patterns can be as unique as the humans themselves, narrowing this down can be a challenge for even the most experienced of digital marketers.

Our goal was to find the best keywords, not only based on volume but also based on an aptitude for conversion. Simply getting a person to the site is not enough; we want them to buy!

In the case of Weekends Only, part of the problem was their targeted keywords. Because they offered a large range of furniture from different manufacturers, they had a vast range of keyword opportunities. They might target a popular furniture manufacturer like Fusion, for example. Unfortunately, that traffic led buyers to the manufacturer directly—not Weekends Only.

So, while they offered a fantastic lineup, their non-branded visitors weren’t turning into buying customers. We helped them target keywords that would give them a real opportunity to not only rank, but to target users that would be most likely to purchase. In some cases, this meant expanding our keywords into broader tail opportunities to appeal to the consumer who knows exactly what they want.

A big part of our efforts included regular meetings with the team to discuss the keywords that we were recommending, and why we thought they would bring value to the brand. This partnership led to many amazing conversations and ultimately has begun to pay off for the brand.

Brian Martin on Organic SEO.

An Ever Changing Inventory

Weekends Only is constantly updating their inventory to reflect the latest trends in home decor. While this is great for customers, it can be difficult for digital marketers (and for search engines) to keep up.

Our goal was to help Weekends Only put a plan in place that would help the website work with both the brand and with Google’s algorithm. We wanted to make sure that if one of their popular products needed to be pulled from the website, we redirected the old URL to a similar page. We also wanted to ensure the site minimized the number of thin content and low quality pages that harm SEO and don’t create engaging user experience. In time, we were able to help the brand clean up many of the technical errors that were hampering their efforts.

The Results

In the past year, we’ve seen remarkable growth for Weekends Only online, including:

Organic search revenue is up year-over-year by

39%

E-commerce transactions are up year-over-year by

48%

Non-branded searches are up year-over-year by

41%

Our relationship with Weekends Only has helped the Seafoam team become better marketers, by asking us deep and meaningful questions and pushing us to have an answer for EVERYTHING! This is just one reason we love working with our clients.