Interactive

SEO Strategy
08.11.22 Marks & Spencer
What’s in this document?
This document will walk you through everything needed in order to improve Marks & Spencer site’s
Organic search performance.

● We have this broken down into a 5 step process:

1 2 3 4 5
Competitive landscape Improvement
SEO Strategy Technical Analysis Keyword Opportunities
Analysis opportunities & KPIs
 SEO
Strategy
Approach
The current SEO strategy is to work on

Learning
How Marks and Spencer’s website has performed in UAE SERPs to date + Setting the foundation to track campaign
progress & ROI.

Improvement
A review of technical errors we found during our audits + Technical implementations like redirection errors, SEO optimized
URL suggestions, Hreflang, Internal Linking, Page speed Optimization, Sitemap and robots.txt file optimization.

Creating
A look into Marks and Spencer keyword universe available to attack + Defining the type of content that will have the most
impact for your brand; Landing Pages, Blog Content & on-page content Optimizations with suggestions on the UI/UX
ground like curated page creation.

Promoting
Uncovering the exact types of links to target during your campaign; we will focus on targeting the relevant & quality
referring domains which helped us to improve your overall off-page profile.

Next Steps
The execution roadmap to follow for maximum organic growth.
Technical
Analysis
Website Quality Analysis
The WQA is custom built tool that pulls in data from 6 sources,
giving us access to every piece of SEO data needed for your
website.

We use this data to do a deep analysis of your website’s

technical deficiencies, as well as the performance of your
content.
The output is a matrix with itemized actions to take to improve
SEO performance, broken down into Technical and Content
actions. CLICK TO VIEW REPORT

Priority Bucket Action Owner

High Content Content audit
High Content Update on-page
High Content Select target pages for backlinks
High Technical Core web vitals
Medium Technical Fix trailing slash duplication
The headings for all product pages need to be
High Technical
programmatically wrapped in a <h1> html tag.
Technical SEO Analysis
We ran a crawl of your site in sitebulb and OnCrawl
to see if there were any glaring technical errors
holding back performance. While we didn’t find
anything major, we did find a number of items worth
fixing.

● It’s hard for crawlers to find website pages and index

new changes; an internal links ecosystem should be
applied after Server Log file analysis. CLICK TO VIEW REPORT

Priority Bucket Action Notes

Medium Performance Eliminate render blocking resources
High Performance Reduce server response times (TTFB) 90% of URLs > 600ms
Medium Performance Use HTTP/2 for all of its resources
High Performance Remove unused JavaScript 40-60% Total wasted
Medium Performance Remove unused CSS 70-80% Total wasted
High International Missing reciprocal hreflang (no return-tag) 97% of URLs
Low On Page Fix dynamic meta description pitfalls Most categories
On-Page SEO Analysis
The scope of what falls under “on page” has grown rapidly as
SEO has progressed. It’s not enough to just change page titles
and metas, we have to analyze the overall context and targeting
of a page.

It’s our job to make sure every page delivers the proper
experience for a given keyword search.

This pushes outside the scope of SEO (slightly) into technical

and UX to make sure a page is optimized perfectly.

CLICK TO VIEW REPORT

 A look at your links, competitive landscape.
● Chart 1 maps your Domain Authority (DA) against the top results of the 2
competitors for the keywords we want to rank for. DA helps us to understand
the “ranking power” of your website by giving us a measurable metric for the
power and quality of the links pointing to your website.
● When we look at your DA compared to the industry, you are pretty close
compared to the Average DA from the top 3 results. We can better
understand your PA in UAE (52) by looking at the number of domains and
link types pointing to your website (charts 2 and 3).

1
Current status (cont).
4
● Chart 4 looks at your “link velocity”, or the
timeframe of how your website has acquired
links. This is important because it tells us
which pages we want to focus on. Since
your website has a history of acquiring links,
we can be more aggressive linking to target
pages.

● Chart 5 shows your “anchor text” profile, or

the word that other websites are using to
link to your website (i.e. the anchor text of
5
this link, is “this link”). Since your website
has a low quality anchor text ratio, we need
to start by building “branded anchors”. That
means linking more with your business
name, names and naked URLs.
Types of Links We’ll Be Targeting for Your Campaign

● When performing outreach, our success depends directly on the ability for us to incentivize the
target site to take action. Just like anything in business, that comes through the exchange of value.

● We exchange value in a number of ways:

○ Guest post. We provide high quality content in exchange for a link.

○ Sponsorships. We provide money in exchange for a link.
○ Roundups, resource pages, broken links. We offer to share their article on a client’s social
account (i.e. social equity and traffic) in exchange for a link.
○ Brand advocates. We offer free product in exchange for product reviews or blog posts with
link inclusions.

● We need explicit permission on all of the above items before outreach can begin.

CLICK TO VIEW OUR LINK QUALITY CHECKLIST

 Keyword
Opportunities
We discover keywords in 2 parts.

1. Keywords based on existing website assets. Using the category

pages & products on your website we found the optimal
keywords (based on volume and competition) that each page
should be targeting. We performed the research for top
categories and products have the quick wins potential.

2. Keywords based on competitive gaps. A competitive analysis

of your direct competitors and industry leaders, we find the
keywords driving the most traffic to their website and create a
“gap” analysis of those keywords NOT included on your site. We
will then determine the best way to rank for these keywords,
either with content & on page optimization or new landing
pages.
 Keyword identification & prioritization
We Did
1. Scraped existing keyword rankings for each page.

2. For pages with no keyword rankings (about 85% of your pages), we have to
manually assign keywords.

3. Map intent based on 5 “journey stages” that map for a keyword funnel”

4. Check the top 3 results in Google.

5. Check the number of links pointing to each of those results. This helps us
understand how competitive / many links the top results have.

Finding: We identified product category pages as the dominant content type across
the first top 3 results pages from Google. This is a clear signal to optimize for
keywords with category intent and give them more weight content & links around
these keywords to rank faster and pull more traffic to the website.

CLICK TO VIEW REPORT

Filling In Your Keyword “Gaps”

Keyword research gives us data on what your audience is

searching for. Keywords give us the starting point to identify
content ideas your customers will care about.

We scraped competitor websites to understand the keywords

they’re using to get more traffic. This data is also crosswalked
against your website, to understand the keyword “gaps” on your
website.

This data should as the foundation to on-page keyword strategy

and create new content on your website. The keywords here can
be easily grouped into topics, that should direct how / what we
create in the coming months.

CLICK TO VIEW REPORT

Competitive
Landscape
Summary
Based on our data analysis, we believe that there are two major
contributing factors for COMPETITOR NAME having more
search visibility.

1. Namshi has a total of ~26k keywords ranking somewhere

in top 100 positions for UAE vs Ounass ~15k. While
Marks and Spencer is ranking for ~3k keywords, the
aggregate search volume of Namshi’s keywords in top 10
positions (the only ones that matter) is vastly greater than
that of Marks and Spencer ~5M vs ~350k for Arabic and
English versions in UAE.

2. Another major contributing factor is the large disparity in

branded search in favor of Namshi (est. 86k vs 45k).
There are several factors that play into branded search.
 Action Items

Based on our findings we have suggested the following action items as next steps:

● Social Media Landscape Analysis + Strategy (focused on building brand awareness)

○ Facebook
○ Youtube
○ Instagram

● UAE Influencer Research / Prospecting

● UAE Domains Link Building Campaign

● International SEO tactics Deployment for UAE

● Product/Inventory Audit (identify gaps)

CLICK TO VIEW REPORT
 Improvement
opportunities & KPIs
Improvement Opportunities
The main goal here is to get high quality sales
from organic traffic [MQL]
To do so, we should target new keywords and
improve the current performance for Marks &
Spencer.

We have created a data studio report reading

Marks & Spencer current numbers and the
competition to showcase the impact of SEO on
in 4 scenarios.

CLICK TO VIEW REPORT

Target Pages

Track key pages that have quick wins for traffic

increase. This is a simple process that rolls up the data
collected to this point from Website Quality Audit and
keyword analysis (of existing pages). We use it to
prioritize the most important pages on a website based
on opportunity.

CLICK TO VIEW REPORT

Campaign Goals & KPIs
Keywords:

● Number of commercial-intent keywords at 1-3 positions.

● Number of commercial-intent keywords at 3-10 positions.
● Decreasing the gap between top competitors.

Pages:

● Number of Unique Pages that Drive Organic Traffic

● Number of new users from organic traffic.
● Click through rate.
● Overall number of backlinks.
● Revenue from organic traffic VS. all online channels.
● Dwell time - to measure the impact of new content.
● Conversion rate - to measure the impact of UX-SEO recommendations.

Technical:
● Page load speed and core web vitals.
● Crawl errors + Monthly log file monitoring.