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Nike Golf Leveraged SEO And Got 169% Total Increase In Organic Search Traffic

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Nike-golf-59-logo1About Nike Golf

‘Nike, Inc.’, one of the famous American multinational company, established in the year 1964, manufacturing sports shoes, apparel and accessories and marketing them world-wide. It was founded by ‘Bill Bowerman’ and ‘Phil Knight’ named as ‘Blue Ribbon Sports’. Later in the year 1971, company’s existing name ‘Blue Ribbon Sports’ was replaced by ‘Nike, Inc.’ officially. Nike, Inc. faced some financial crisis due to declined profits during the years 1983 to 1986. Company faced tough competition and sales declined due to change in customer preferences. It has decided to add new product line to raise the profits and entered the golf industry in the year 1986, by manufacturing golf shoes as one of their new outcome. ‘Nike Golf’ is a branch of Nike specific for manufacturing golf products and accessories. At initial stage, Nike did not gain any prominence for its manufactured golf shoes. Later, in 1996, after the endorsement of golf player Tiger Woods with Nike has shined the company, increasing the company sales world-wide. Thereafter, in the year 1998, after looking into multiple profits, Nike Golf has been established as a separate business division of Nike Inc. In 2001, Nike Golf decided to launch its first golf club design. With in one year in 2002, Nike Golf has launched its first golf club of Pro Combo set of forged irons. Thereafter, company has raised its profits to heights along with multiple endorsements of different golf players.

Challenge Faced By Nike Golf

The main goal of Nike Golf is to increase its website visibility on different search engines to attract more number of visitors towards its website during golf season. To attain this goal, Nike Golf has decided to adopt a strategy increasing the search engine accessibility of website along with regular optimization of content published on it. At initial stage, the main challenge faced by Nike Golf was lack of focused keywords pointing towards the website. Another challenge was its low-level crawlability caused due to improper design of complete website and its internal options. Lack of right keyword strategy and low-level crawlability of website have shown their effect on some important elements of SEO like page title, meta descriptions, blog posts and internal links which supports the website and its online presence. These two problems should be resolved completely. Otherwise the company may droop out completely from its roots. In order to overcome these two issues, the technical team of company, along with the support of Swell Path has adopted a proper SEO strategy to improve keyword strategy and accessibility issues.Ng

Strategy Adopted By Nike Golf

Things should be studied before reacting. Initially, the technical team studied the terminology used in content of Nike Golf website. The team prepared clear analysis regarding keyword data and search trends. After clear analysis, they came to a conclusion of concentrating on particular keyword ‘golf apparel’, through which multiple visitors are searching for the website in US. From this conclusion, the technical team has developed a perfect keyword strategy which helped the website to rank high on different search engines.

In order to solve the accessibility issues, SEO team has decided to re-build the website completely along with addition of relevant and informative content on the surface. Introduction of no script tag and advanced technology which works supporting the old site without raising any issues. The advancement was introduction of open-source java script library known as SWFObject2. This allows the website to store an HTML version of website behind the site and will come into play whenever a visitor visits the website. It was very helpful for mobile users and involved in providing content for search engine spiders. This was the right solution which can be adopted without any doubt. But the team felt to test the solution once before recommending to Nike Golf. For this, the team has tested on two websites to check whether the alternate content is pointing towards Google’s index and rank on search or not. Without any surprise, it worked on both sites leading to recommendation of this solution to Nike Golf without any confusion in mind.Ng1

Results Obtained By Nike Golf

As expected, after implementation of this SEO strategy just before the golf season in 2012, the response noticed was hilarious. There was a huge hike in rankings lasting for few months with small gains recorded once in a while. From statistical analysis of previous years, you can notice the improvement in organic traffic of Nike Golf.

  • Compared to 2010, 169% of growth in organic search traffic is seen in 2011 golf season, which includes both branded and non-branded search traffic.
  • Along with 169% additional 67% growth is seen in between 2011 and 2012 golf seasons.
  • In 2012 golf season, it is found 348% growth in organic traffic compared to 2010 golf season.

Effectiveness of SEO strategy adopted can be well judged by analysing the growth result in organic search traffic obtained from non branded keywords.

  • Initially, between 2010 and 2011 golf seasons, growth rate of organic search traffic through non-branded keywords was decreases by 17%. But after relevant optimization, significant growth was observed.
  • Later, in between 2011 and 2012 golf seasons, a maximum of 250% was noticed in organic search traffic gained through non-branded keywords.

With the achievement of above results, Nike Golf has succeeded in attaining its goal. Moreover, by looking into the SEO strategy adopted, company has noticed the importance of content optimization and search engine accessibility in achieving their goals. Later, while launching Nike Golf 360, they have applied highly accessible HTML-5 based platform keeping the growth results obtained by Nike Golf using SEO in mind.

Learnings

From the above case study, it is clear that, if you ignore your organic search then your business will be laid down completely. The main things that never be ignored in promotion of your business online were proper keyword strategy with content optimization and ease of accessibility to both visitors and search engines. If you ignore these two things then forget your website’s online presence completely, as these are the main things on which website’s online presence will depend upon. Regular optimization of content and maintenance of ease of accessibility of website are the main tools of SEO to raise your website’s organic search traffic.

Image Credit: The club at hidden creek, Swellpath.

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Sindhu Aitha

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