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A year in review: outstanding YoY results show nothing can keep Mitre 10 down

About the client

Mitre 10 is the Mighty Helpful hardware store, and the largest independent network of hardware operators with over 300 stores, located in metro and regional areas, across Australia. Mitre 10’s trade customers include national residential builders through to the local handyman – with the right service and products to help tradies ‘Get in, get out and get on with it’.

The hardware store market in Australia is dominated by Bunnings who currently have approximately 80% of market share. Mitre 10’s long term goal is to solidly hold the second largest share. In Marketing We Trust was engaged early in 2021 to help them get there in 2022.

Industry

Retail & Trade Hardware

Location

Australia

Website

mitre10.com.au

Challenge

Strategy, tactics, and resilience are the magic formula when it comes to achieving lofty goals

A new financial year meant new goals

When In Marketing We Trust was approached in early 2021 to pitch for Mitre 10’s SEO account, there was just enough time for us to complete technical and market audits and present some great ideas before rolling out a strong strategy ahead of the new financial year kicking off.

Mitre 10 wanted to hit some substantial targets in FY22, and needed a plan to help them get there:

Double monthly organic website traffic
Double eCommerce revenue and eCommerce CVR (conversion rate)
Support local stores to increase their page views

Mitre 10 wanted to move up from fourth position for organic share of voice (SoV) and had a goal to move into second place in name recognition and sales. Dealing with another long lockdown in NSW and VIC meant that 65% of their business was not able to trade via bricks and mortar means for some months, which added complexity to their challenges.

Solution

Focusing on strong foundations and partnering with Mitre 10 teams creates a path to success

Agreeing on a game plan that suited both aspirations and technical expertise

We started by undertaking technical and market audits to determine what the opportunities were and how to prioritise activity throughout the upcoming financial year.

Along with the team at Mitre 10, we agreed to focus on:

Providing expertise and data to support development prioritisation of new site features
Undertaking link building activities such as: directory mentions, broken link remediation, and case studies
On-page strategies to help streamline the sales process and limit barriers to purchase
Providing best practice documentation that could be shared with local stores to help grow local store page views

This has been a true collaboration between In Marketing We Trust and Mitre 10 – Paul McGuane, Product Owner – Media & Acquisition, has the technical experience to ask for what they need and to help move suggested solutions through the backlog internally.

Paul notes that he could ask for changes, such as the structure of reporting or for clarification on how to solve an SEO issue, and the team would come back with a recommendation that he, or someone on the development team, could implement.

Undertaking the right tactical approach to take advantage of these opportunities

Tactics across technical SEO, content, off-site, and local SEO were prioritised, with quarterly business reviews used to determine which elements were working and which ones needed to be tweaked for optimal results.

We also held fortnightly WIPs with the Mitre 10 team and participated in sprint meetings with their development teams (who are located internationally) which allowed us to communicate our findings and strategy directly.

While we started out focusing on four actionable areas – technical SEO, content, off-site, and local SEO – we used our quarterly business reviews with Mitre 10 to ensure our strategy was ever-evolving to suit the changing needs of the business. Lockdowns meant eCommerce and home delivery was set up quickly to service NSW and VIC markets, and the introduction of LUX gave us a new set of data to utilise.

Results

Targets were reached or exceeded with the help of expert teams and active partnerships

One of the key goals for Mitre 10 was to double organic sessions per month. Our strategy and it’s impacts meant that we helped them hit that initial target by September 2021 and never looked back. Year on year, we saw an overall increase of 59%.

Another outcome of the strategy and tactics we’d implemented was a YoY increase in share of voice of 105% to a total of 5.63%, a 93.55% increase in ranking pages, and a huge increase of 534% for first page keywords.