From Underdog to SEO Champion

Über  HORNBACH

Die HORNBACH Baumarkt AG ist ein deutsches Traditionsunternehmen, dessen Wurzeln bis ins Jahr 1877 in die Südpfalz zurückreichen. Heute betreibt HORNBACH über 170 Garten- und Baumärkte in neun europäischen Ländern. Insgesamt arbeiten mehr als 25.000 Mitarbeitende bei HORNBACH. Das Unternehmen gehört zu den größten Anbietern im Baumarktsegment in Europa. Neben dem stationären Handel ist HORNBACH auch mit eigenen Online-Shops in neun europäischen Ländern präsent. Darüber hinaus ist Interconnected Retail ein wichtiger Eckpfeiler der Unternehmensstrategie.

This is the online presence of furniture retailer “FonQ” with over 2.000 product pages.

FonQ March 2023 - 2146 lounge sets (+507%)

The Success Story

The road to 192% growth

Van der Garde's peak season picks up slowly starting in January and really takes off starting in March, based on when the summer weather arrives. The high season usually continues through September, depending on how warm the late summer is. The SEO process started in May 2020 and towards the new high season, valantic achieved great results.

The team of valantic saw an increase in key search terms (lounge set, garden set, etc.) after a few months. By the end of the peak season (August/September) even entering the top 5. The enthusiasm soon turned into disappointment. Simultaneously with the 2020 December Core Update, volume began to slowly sink, and from February onwards things went into overdrive. All positions were lost and dropped even further. 

Season 2020/2021 

A comprehensive competitive analysis followed the December 2020 Core Update, and literally, every letter and kilobyte of vdgarde.nl was analyzed. The drop seemed unfair and highly illogical: valantic concluded that, while there were certainly areas for improvement on the website, the website was certainly not less optimized than competitors outside the top 5. As of August 2021, Van der Garde scaled its internal capacity, and the valantic team started implementing all the SEO points in the roadmap fast.

The hypothesis posed

In the months after August 2021, recovery occurred at lightning speed and after two months of hard work, Van der Garde was back to its old level, which of course lead to euphoria at Van der Garde. However, at valantic the team was happy but also surprised that it picked up so quickly. They critically evaluated the situation and tentatively came up with a hypothesis at the annual Roadmap Meeting with Van der Garde in November 2021. 

"As good as we are doing and as much as we want to claim credit for this rise, we foresee a possible 'doomsday scenario.' If we start losing positions again around the start of the high season (December 2021 / January 2022), we will see this as a confirmation of our hypothesis. Namely, that the increases and decreases are a seasonal trend caused by lack of brand awareness compared to the competition."

The hypothesis was also underpinned by a competitive analysis of the brand demand of 15 competitors vs. the brand demand for Van der Garde and the non-branded search market. Thus, valantic knew that Van der Garde had the second-lowest brand demand, and that compared to its competitors, there had been no percentual improvement here either.

Confirmation of the hypothesis

That valantic’s efforts paid off was also shown by how they performed on the mid- and long-tail search terms (short-tail is for example "lounge set", mid- and long-tail are more specific search terms like "Lounge set 6 persons"). This is where Van der Garde performed better and more stable than ever before.

And even though the search market in 2022 was down a lot from Corona's 2021 year, where the first half of the year was plagued by lockdowns, shopping by appointment and "click & collect," there was much more visibility on this long-tail created and a roughly equal number of clicks.

The rise toward high season 2023

Throughout 2022, they continued to rocket ahead on the SEO roadmap while also scaling up branding efforts. A higher bottom line was achieved on short-tail. 

In December 2022, there were two new major updates, fully in line with the SEO vision and expectations for 2023 that were published a month earlier.

They were the Link Spam Update (aimed against buying backlinks) and the Helpful Content Update (aimed at rewarding websites with truly quality, value-added content). From one day to the next, both long-tail and short-tail positions skyrocketed. The Link Spam update in particular made an impact. According to valantic’s view, because Van der Garde was better optimized than its competitors in all areas, Van der Garde was only lagging on domain authority and name recognition of competitors due to higher budgets. Domain authority was suddenly weighted differently by these updates.

Results: High Season 2023

While this case was recorded, the high season 2023 had just begun and by then it was clear that brand awareness once again plays a role: The correlation between the increase in impressions and the unstable average positions on the short-tail speaks volumes. However, it does become strongly apparent that for the second year in a row, the bottom line has gone up (significantly).

Average positions of the entire short-tail 

Average positions have never been higher, topping out at 2.7 in December 2022. The downward trend on highly competitive search terms in the peak season is still there but with a much higher bottom line. In June 2021, the average position was 11, in June 2022 9.7, and in June 2023 6.5. The keyword set has not changed otherwise.

+77.32% vs. 2022

+14.76% vs. 2021

+21.70% vs. 2020

How impressive these results are becomes really clear when taking the graph of the non-branded search market in the Google Ads Keyword Planner into consideration.

• -10% vs. 2022

• -35.1% vs. 2021

• -34.29% vs. 2020

This result was achieved because Van der Garde can now rank much better structurally, and also on a much larger keyword set.

Branding (January to May, compared to 2022 and 2021)

Valantic benchmarked search demand for Van der Garde against 15 competitors and the non-branded search market. All data relates exclusively to the outdoor furniture industry. Valantic used the brand name with outdoor furniture search terms (van der Garde lounge set, e.g.). In the specific case of the outdoor furniture specialists (Van der Garde, Tuinmeubelshop, Tuinmeubelselland, etc.), valantic also included brand search terms without outdoor furniture keywords in them (Van der Garde e.g.), since this brand query is 100% related to the Outdoor Furniture industry.

Over the period June 2020 to May 2021, there were only three competitors with lower brand demand than Van der Garde. Over the same period in 2022/2023, Van der Garde overtook two more competitors. The outdoor furniture industry experienced a 30.76% drop in non-branded search demand during this period, with demand for the Van der Garde brand only dropping 17.67%.

Valantic's Online Advertising team contributed to the fulfillment of Van der Garde's branding strategy during 2022 and 2023. Compared to 2022, a 127% growth in conversion value was realized between March 2023 and June 2023. For this, 57% more budget was spent, but in return, they achieved a 44% ROAS improvement.