Only Oak Furniture

Only Oak Furniture, a large furniture brand from the North East, were looking for someone to help them to take their furniture emporium online. Here we take a look at how we helped Only Oak Furniture go from zero to hero with our ecommerce website design and search engine optimisation solutions.

Looking to expand their ranges of furniture throughout the UK

Living, Dining, Office, Hallway, Bedroom & Garden furniture experts.

Taking an online furniture brand to the masses

As a brand-new furniture brand, Only Oak Furniture provides the best quality oak furniture and offers a range of unique, stylish and contemporary furniture designs available to purchase online. Only Oak Furniture aims to provide high quality furniture that’s made from a variety of wood types and suits a range of budgets, as well as ensuring that they offer exceptional customer service. As a brand-new business, Steve, the director at Only Oak Furniture, needed an ecommerce website in order to take Only Oak Furniture’s brand and products online. After coming across Outrank and speaking to one of our account managers, Steve decided to enlist the help of Outrank and we agreed to take his company online by building a brand-new website.

Based in the North East, Only Oak Furniture was a new furniture supplier that aimed to provide a range of oak furniture solutions to suit a range of customers’ tastes, requirements and budgets. They offered a range of furniture collections, including pieces for the entire home such as bedroom, dining and living room, hallway and office furniture. After lots of planning and organising Steve was keen to take things to the next level and launch the brand online. As Only Oak Furniture currently has no presence on the web, we were starting from scratch which gave us the perfect opportunity to create a new website while providing a successful SEO strategy.

The web design and development process

One of the Outrank account managers worked closely with Steve, before passing the project on to the web development team. The design and development process of the new ecommerce site would involve a number of areas, this included branding, imagery, optimised category and product pages as well as ensuring that the site is responsive and provides a positive user experience.

With the opportunity to create a brilliant ecommerce website and take a large furniture retailer online, our team focused on effective branding and a responsive website design. This also involved creating Only Oak Furniture’s brand as well as including effective calls to action to increase enquiries. The branding was heavily incorporated into the website build and content, this included fonts, styling, colours, images, tone of voice and wording. As the site’s main focus is the furniture it provides online, the design incorporated lots of product images and interior photography, so it was essential that the branding and images worked together and complemented each other. Content was another essential area to consider and time was spent cleverly optimising the homepage, category and product pages, this part of the initial design and development also included a lot of input from Steve regarding information on the products that he provides.

The main parts of the site would be the category pages which included a range of different oak furniture products. Firstly, a ‘Collections’ category was created, this incorporated a large range of internal categories and products based on styles and themes such as ‘Kettlewell Oak’, ‘Urban Chic’ and ‘Mayan Walnut’. Other categories covered were ‘Living Room’, ‘Dining Room’, ‘Hallway’ and ‘Bedroom’, which then comprised of sub categories relating to the types of products, for example ‘Tables’, ‘Desks’ and ‘Chairs’. Another category that was created included ‘Budget’, this was focused around a range of furniture collections suited to different budgets.

As the main aim is to sell furniture online, it was important that the site was visual, Only Oak Furniture required lots of imagery across the site, helping to present their range of products and how they can fit into a range of interiors. The overall design of the site was extremely important as the customer required a friendly site that was easy to purchase from, as well as including call to actions to encourage enquiries and support strong Google rankings.

The new website really shows off the company’s extensive selection of oak furniture while promoting a range of quality products. The site’s modern looking branding is sophisticated and the layout makes it quick and simple to us as well as being reflective of the products that they offer. With the site’s launch running smoothly and successfully, this means that Steve can now put a focus on the business and converting its new users into customers. Having provided a professional and clean looking site that works, it was time to move on to the next part of the project, the website’s SEO. Now that Only Oak Furniture has been established online with a brand-new website, it was time to maximise their presence and start selling furniture.

The SEO project

With a fully functioning website and a distinguished focus for company growth and product sales, it was time for Only Oak Furniture to take the next step with a fully-fledged SEO campaign. The SEO plan was fairly straight forward and we set to optimise the particular product categories that Only Oak Furniture provides, this included targeting a number of keywords, phrases and related key terms focused around ‘oak furniture’. Further optimisations comprised of looking at Only Oak Furniture’s competitors’ websites and semantic keyword research. The main aim of this was to ensure that the site, its categories and its products had the best chance of achieving the highest rankings in the SERPs. We could then work on conversions and encouraging customers to click through and purchase the products. Overall the long-term goals of Only Oak Furnitures SEO strategy was to support getting the website in front of a wider audience, as well as increasing traffic, customers and sales.

The technical aspects of the SEO plan for Only Oak Furniture included a range of optimisation work to the website itself. Due to the style of Only Oak Furniture’s website, it’s very visual and includes 1000s of product images, an area which is updated frequently with new products being included in their online collections everyday. When it comes to lots of images, speed improvements are essential, this covers reducing file and photo sizes in order to improve or maintain the speed of the site. Website speed is essential in search engine optimisation as it has such a big effect on internet users who are viewing, clicking and interacting with your website. Ensuring that the website operates as quickly as possible and runs smoothly will overall have a big impact on how the site is received by potential customers, especially when it comes to ecommerce websites and buying products online.

Another essential part of technical search engine optimisation includes schema markup, there are many different types of schema that can be inputted into a site but the one that we felt was the most important for Only Oak Furniture’s site when considering its strength, positions and all-important click through was review schema. Review schema is running through Google Reviews and incorporates a business’s Google reviews into their website makeup. An important part that follows Google rankings is engagement and click through ratings; when review schema has been installed into a site, it pulls through the star rating into the meta data on the SERPs. As Only Oak Furniture’s Google reviews showed a 5-star rating, it was important that review schema was incorporated into the site, so that when the site shows up in search engine results, immediately customers can see that they are 5 star rated before they even visit the website, encouraging that all important click through. This is especially important for ecommerce website’s, customers are more likely to buy from a site online that has great ratings and reviews.

Another vital part of Only Oak Furniture’s SEO strategy involved ongoing link outreach, link outreach promotes a website’s strength and overall positively affect a site’s Google rankings. As Only Oak Furniture’s website was brand new to Google, it was important that we worked on raising their backlink profile as this would provide overall strength to the website and how it sits in the SERPs. We set out a link plan that would include NAP consistent citations, NAP consistent backlinks and premium link outreach. These links help to enhance Only Oak Furniture’s organic visibility on Google, as the link campaign goes on, visibility improves and helps to attract more qualified traffic which then increases lead and online revenue production.

Results

Local to the North East, Steve was looking for a local web design and SEO company in to help take his large furniture supplier firm online and he was delighted to come across Outrank Agency. From using innovative tools for responsive web design to incorporating new techniques into reactive SEO campaigns, our goal is to guarantee a better future for all our clients, from user-friendly websites to higher rankings in the SERPs and improved CTR, when you choose Outrank to help grow your business, you won’t be disappointed!