For the 14th issue of our Fast Five interview series, we had the great pleasure of talking to Koen Van Lysebetten, Head of Growth at Gimber. Founded in 2018, Gimber is an innovative company that provides healthy and non-alcoholic beverages made with a blend of the finest organic ginger, spices and herbs. During the interview, Koen told us how he first became involved in SEO, shared with us his favorite SEO tools and discussed the future challenges of the SEO industry.
- Hi Koen, can you tell us about your previous SEO projects and how they went?
I have grown several sites by +100K in monthly traffic…including my personal projects like FillGap.news which I launched as a test pool for SEO. At the moment I’m rolling out as we speak at GIMBER, an aggressive content strategy where we will publish 38 articles per month.
A recent example: I turned Kazidomi‘s (online health retailer) into a +150k organic visits per month site by making SEO the primary acquisition channel, followed by influencers and ads.
To achieve these results, there are rules to follow:
- Quality over everything,
- Content over technical SEO,
- Quality over quantity,
- Quality over on-page optimizations and
- Post publishing optimizations.
Kazidomi’s blog was before my arrival already generating lots of traffic, but it wasn’t converting as well as it should. To give you an idea, they already had more than 1000 pages that were basically just written without any SEO or content strategy behind it.
So how did I generate +200K organic visits to Kazidomi’s blog? 😉
In my first days as the Head of Growth at Kazidomi, I did a content audit, together with my team, and aggressively cut content that wasn’t working. What was really great is that even the co-founder helped me a lot during this initial setup.
It’s really important that you clean the content house regularly. This means cutting pages that were sending unqualified traffic and also cut pages that weren’t generating enough traffic ✂
Next we focus 80% of revamping old evergreen content and we wrote 10 new articles and some of which were repurposed to video etc.
At the end of the day, it’s all about focusing entirely on writing the best content possible, as regularly as possible. With a great team of external writers, we were able to revamp 30 articles per month and 10 new articles, supported by a monthly plan and content calendar to make sure we stuck to those numbers.
And the results were just amazing ! 🚀
In that year, during the roll out of this new strategy we increased organic traffic to 259% and MoM (month-over-month) to 9.5%, making it one of our key channels in terms of revenue. One thing to mention is that organic traffic gets a huge boost from our influencer marketing.
- What will be the main challenges of SEO in 2022 ?
Number one and also confirmed by my buddy Neil Patel is building unique content. It will be harder to write more/better unique content. This is because most things have already been written on, so you’ll have to come up with serious good ideas.
Furthermore, Google will launch his new algorithm MUM which seems to be 1000x faster then BERT.
MUM will enable users to find relevant answers to their complex queries easily and faster.
Further challenges to consider are:
- Mobile-Friendliness is Critical for Google Rankings,
- Content Should Fulfill Google’s EAT Principle,
- Effective SEO Needs to Include Video,
- More longform content,
- AI will be more integrated in SEO.
- What is your favourite SEO software ?
I have more than one …Google Analytics, Semrush, Ahrefs, Clickflow and of course the best Saas tool for automated landing pages Verbolia.
As additional tools to Ahrefs, Semrush and Google Search Console (GSC), we use at the moment LSIGraph for keyword research and content optimizations. This tool really helps find quicker related keywords to the main seed work we want to rank.For us, we noticed that having about 75 keywords around your main seed keyword works best.
Recently, we also added Clickflow to our SEO stack in order to reduce the time we were spending on GSC for spotting hanging fruits like title & meta descriptions test to increase CTR’s on the SERP. Clickflow also has the copywriting feature but it doesn’t work 100% yet on Google.fr – It will be available with their next product update.
Freebie: I’m sharing a comprehensive curated list of SEO tools.
All tools are neatly categorised to help you find your next favourite.
👉 Just check Seotoolbet.
- What is the most common SEO mistake you see people making?
For me, the number one is: Not setting clear goals. Because the endgame of SEO is to grow your business online and this won’t happen without clear goals.
- What is a typical low-hanging fruit optimization to make in SEO for e-commerce?
That’s the great thing about SEO. There’s so much low-fruit hanging there. Just shake the tree and you’ll be amazed at what’s lying in front of you.
- Site Structure,
- Focus on long tail keywords – that’s why Verbolia is a powerhouse for SEO,
- Internal linking,
- Product descriptions matter: Don’t write like a robot but use your best copywriters so they can use the power of the words to tell stories around the brands you’re selling,
- Run experiments with your meta descriptions – This doesn’t impact your ranking but it increases your CTR and therefore also your conversions,
- Improve page speed.
