UK Yarn Specialists Cotton On To CRO And SEO Success

As one of the leading yarn specialists in the country, Yarn Worx are on a mission to bring their community of trusted followers the finest quality hand-dyed yarns from across the Globe. They pride themselves on stocking ethically sourced wool from the best independent suppliers and pairing their customers with the ideal yarn for their next knitting or crocheting project.

Weaving their way to the top of an extremely competitive market

Millions of people cite crocheting and knitting as their primary pastimes, and Yarn Worx’s competition reflects the size of the marketplace accordingly. For example, household names such as Etsy and Hobbycraft, and their hugely authoritative and well-established websites, are key players in the sector, so breaking into this market was going to prove challenging. 

As an ecommerce SEO agency, Yarn Worx came to us in July 2020 wanting to do just that.

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Striking a balance between brand awareness and paying the bills

“When we launched the website at the end of 2019, our strategy was to build brand awareness through social media and paid ads. 

The problem was that whilst our website visits from social media were strong, the vast majority did not translate into sales and revenue. As it was really just hobbyists viewing our latest blog posts, there was no real commercial intent when visiting the site. 

Sales and revenue from our Google Paid Ads was good, but the advertising costs with Google cut vastly into our bottom line.”

Teresa Alexander, Co-Founder & Director, Yarn Worx

Yarn Worx found themselves with two digital channels that were performing well, but not in a way that was moving the needle for their business. While a great social presence is vital in this sector in terms of content amplification, collaboration, and inspiration, it was not going to beat a well-rounded strategy that leverages multiple channels. 

Search intent of visitors to the site also needed to be analysed and reverse engineered in order to get in front of potential customers at different stages of their buying journey. Yarn Worx needed a fresh approach.

Increase in referring domains
£££

How Edge45® knitted together with Yarn Worx

Members of the Yarn Worx team had help with an extremely successful campaign for a previous business venture from one of our colleagues in the past, so they were already aware of us and what we can do. 

Their fledgling forays into digital marketing had helped lay some pretty solid foundations, but they knew SEO had the potential to push their business further forward and that it was vital to long-term growth. 

Edge45® were on their radar not only because of the aforementioned previous working relationship, but also because they were impressed by our ecommerce seo experience, culture and the wider team we’d put together. In short, they felt Edge45® had the staff, knowledge, and drive required to help them hit their ambitious online growth targets. 

In short, we were seen as a safe pair of hands.

Capturing customers early with threads of inspiration and information

Our initial research confirmed there was a strong opportunity to compete and gain traction in organic search, despite the competitive nature of the market Yarn Worx were in. Our keyword research revealed a huge amount of ‘top of funnel’ queries, many with incredibly high search volumes such as ‘what is worsted weight yarn?’ (3600 searches).

Targeting keywords such as this would allow us to capture prospective purchasers at the awareness phase of the buying cycle. This, in turn, would give Yarn Worx a fighting chance of progressing those prospects through the sales funnel to the decision stage where there would be a solid intent to buy.

Answering customer search queries would position Yarn Worx as the friendly expert they could rely on, not just yet another business looking to make a sale.

Stitching it all together

Based on a deep dive technical SEO audit, Edge45® restructured the Yarn Worx website to improve technical SEO performance, whilst keyword research allowed us to re-map and optimise content based on user needs and interest.

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Stitching it all together

For example, Edge45® helped Yarn Worx roll out a comprehensive content strategy that focused not just on awareness stage ‘blog style’ content, but also the category and product pages, too. This included things such as specific brands, colours, and styles of yarn people were searching for.

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Wool, would you look at that!
increase in Organic Revenue 12 Months to Dec 21 Vs 12 Months to Dec 20
Featured Snippet Increase
in page one rankings (July 20 vs April 2022)
increase in page one search colume (1700 now 30350)
increase in organic new users (March 20 to March 2022)
keywords in positions 1 - 3, was zero

“We worked with Jo for many years at a previous digital agency in Leeds and we have formed a great friendship. 

We initially started on a modest budget that grew substantially in line with my previous business growth, so we knew Jo’s style of management would propel us to where we needed to be rather than just keeping our account ticking over. Importantly, at a rate that is comfortable for our business. 

When we came to Edge45®, Jo assured us the quality would exceed anything we have seen before, as they have taken learnings from other agencies and strived to be the best. She wasn’t wrong, and we couldn’t be happier.

Here’s to the next chapter!”

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