Case Study: Novitek Monthly Organic Traffic +1500 Visits

The leading Finnish outdoor hot tub brand Novitek invests in building data-driven content marketing processes – sees an increase of +1500 organic search visits within months.

This case study presents the cooperation and results between Novitek and Balanced Growth Boutique. If you are interested in growing your organic traffic, you can learn below how we did it for Novitek, both in terms of the process and results.

For an even deeper dive, don’t hesitate to contact us so we can discuss how we could make your website rank higher in organic search results!

Before diving in, you might be interested in:

Client Introduction: Novitek / Nordic Spa Ltd Oy

Oy Nordic SPA Ltd is a contract manufacturer of outdoor hot tubs. The outdoor hot tubs manufactured by the company are sold under the brands Novitek, Cello, and Drop.

Novitek is a sales organization selling outdoor hot tubs manufactured by Oy Nordic SPA Ltd. Catalog also includes tie-in products for outdoor hot tubs.

Over the last decade, Novitek® hot tubs have become a go-to option for many homeowners investing in outdoor bathing experiences on their yards and terraces.

Additionally, many accommodation providers select Novitek® professional series products to strengthen their customer experience through hot tubs explicitly designed for rental use.

The starting point for the cooperation

The team working on novitek.fi website approached us during the summer of 2021. They had recognized the need to start more systematic work on improving their rankings in the organic search results. Both business areas, contract manufacturing and sales of Novitek® hot tubs had developed very well during the previous year. Still, Novitek’s visibility in the digital space, especially in Google results, was not developing accordingly.

“The hard work we had done to develop the content on our website hadn’t helped us reach the rankings with some of the most business-critical keywords. We needed to implement some new tactics. Balanced Growth Boutique convinced us that conducting keyword research would be the appropriate strategic thing to do at that point.” – Teea Sinervo, Novitek

Novitek marketing team had been working hard and creating a lot of FAQ and social media content to educate potential buyers about installing and maintaining outdoor hot tubs. This work hadn’t helped them reach those rankings on the search engine result pages they hoped for.

The most concrete issue recognized by the marketing team was that they weren’t ranking with the Finnish language search query for “outdoor hot tub” (ulkoporellas), which had an average of 12.000 monthly Google queries during the time.

When we discussed this and other topics with Novitek, we decided to start the cooperation with a simple project consisting of two parts:

Keyword Research and actionable recommendations (documentation).
Auditing the existing Google Analytics setup

Solution phase 1: Keyword Research

We conducted keyword research for Novitek. But why did we decide to start with a keyword research project? After discussing with Novitek’s Teea Sinervo and Sami Kettunen, we convinced them that keyword research is an excellent way to work on their challenges in building their digital content marketing.

As Teea Sinervo from Novitek’s marketing team put it: “The hard work we had done to develop the content on our website hadn’t helped us reach the rankings with some of the most business-critical keywords. We needed to implement some new tactics. Balanced Growth Boutique convinced us that conducting keyword research would be the appropriate strategic thing to do at that point.”

The keyword research project was conducted for the following reasons:

The keyword research project was planned to increase Novitek’s understanding of all the business-relevant search queries used by consumers in the search engine (Google).
Keyword research project documentation was designed to create Novitek a structured way to approach and prioritize search engine optimization (SEO), search engine advertising (SEA), and further content marketing activities.
One of the project’s goals was also to increase the in-house team’s understanding of data-driven content planning and creation.
Detailed keyword research also would offer the marketing team something to lean on when following the development of consumer search demand regarding industry-specific terminology.

In case you want to understand the keyword research process better, we recommend reading more about it here. Here we summarize the project steps briefly:

Project kick-off with Novitek in-house team
Exploring the search query data
Categorizing keyword data
Prioritizing keyword data
Building recommendations (documentation)
Project wrap-up and next steps (a session with Novitek in-house team)

Keyword research key finding: A lot of traffic potential with one highly business-relevant phrase for Novitek

During the analysis, keywords were divided into four different categories; Brand keywords, product-related keywords, sub-contracting-related keywords, and competitor keywords.

The most concrete findings were made in the group product-related keywords consisting of various outdoor hot tub-related keywords and search phrases in the Finnish language and market.

One of the project’s key findings is presented in the picture below. The picture is taken from the project documentation. During the analysis in September 2021, novitek.fi ranked with the Finnish search phrase “ulkoporeallas” in the middle of the second search engine result page. Through this ranking, Novitek got 29 organic search website visits out of the 14800 monthly queries at the time of the analysis. During the same period, Novitek got 344 visits from the paid search (Google Ads) with that particular keyword.

Key actions implemented based on this and other findings of the keyword research project.

Even though the project didn’t focus on auditing Novitek’s Google Ads, our team looked at the Google Ads account structure. We included these insights to offer more holistic recommendations regarding Novitek’s search engine visibility.

We proposed pausing the Google Ads because they didn’t create any meaningful impact on Novitek’s business at the time. Novitek’s acting CEO Sami Kettunen quickly decided to pause their Google Ads and listen to our recommendations regarding investments in on-page optimization of their website instead.

“It was very easy to act based Balanced Growth Boutique’s advice. They combined information from different data sources in an easy-to-understand format and made concrete suggestions about where to invest our time and money. Their holistic approach to digital marketing development exceeded our expectations” – Sami Kettunen, Novitek

The next step in our cooperation was to lay out a plan for the on-page optimization project of Novitek’s website. This part of the solution is described in the following chapter.

Solution phase 2: On-page optimization through a data-driven content creation process

When discussing relevant next steps regarding digital marketing development with Teea Sinervo and Sami Kettunen, the following related topics were taken into consideration:

Novitek had gone through a rapid growth phase in Finland and was preparing for systematic internationalization – as a part of this Novitek had started restructuring its brand architecture and finetuning its brand messaging.
Due to the point above, it was clear that their website would be redesigned soon.
The in-house team wanted to boost their skills and know-how in data-driven content marketing planning.
The marketing team recently published a new article section on the website to educate their existing and potential clients further.

We decided to start an on-page optimization project focusing on on-page optimized article production. Project deliverables were the following:

Produce one on-page optimized example article
Organize a workshop and help Novitek’s internal marketing team to solve the most critical on-page optimization issues in their content management system (CMS) in hands-on workshops and follow-up sessions
Prioritize and turn keyword information into the form of a content publishing calendar for spring 2022
Start tracking selected product keywords in Ahrefs SEO tools to follow the project’s impact.

Below is one page of the project documentation (in Finnish). It visualizes the way designed the data-driven article production.

The goals of the on-page optimization project were the following:

To make an on-page optimized example article to rank on the first page of Google with the more precise “search phrase” (“ulkoporeallas terassille”)
Improve the ranking of the main product search phrase (ulkoporeallas) by publishing a range of articles including the same phrase. This also led to answering consumers’ more specific product-related questions.
Prepare an actionable SEO content plan to make it easy for the in-house team to produce on-page optimized articles.

During this on-page optimization project, we decided to get someone from Balanced Growth Boutique’s freelancer network to help Novitek to write some of the articles that were prioritized in the content publishing calendar based on the keyword data. The freelancer from our network worked alongside Novitek’s in-house team to build the article section during spring 2022.

Results of the cooperation: +1500 organic visits per month with selected product-related keywords

When the on-page optimization project (solution phase 2) was started in December 2021, we started following the rankings of 26 keywords recognized and prioritized during the keyword research project (solution phase 1) in Ahrefs SEO tools to validate the impact of the work.

Below you can see the numeric development of these 26 keywords and their effect on organic search traffic. These results come from many new articles ranking in top positions.

The latest decline in the organic traffic development seen in the picture below occurred because of a broken linkage between Google Search Console and Ahrefs during the website renewal. So it is mainly a reporting decline. Of course, the positive organic traffic development occurs usually as “steps up” (with some steps down every now and then) as seen in the picture below.

This on-page optimized article created to work as an example for further data-driven content production has held the number one position in the Finnish organic search results since March 2022 with the targeted keyword (“ulkoporellas terassille”). The article was published on 10th of January 2022. This article alone brought almost 2000 new unique visitors to Novitek’s website during H1/2022, peaking at 42 visits per day on Sunday 26th of June (see the picture from Google Analytics below).

Additional results of the cooperation

Increased know-how and capability of the in-house marketing team about successful on-page optimization through data-driven content marketing
Publishing calendar and on-page SEO template for further planning
Altogether five (5) published articles generated organic traffic with business-relevant search phrases (keywords)
Restructuring and relaunching Google Ads
Website goal tracking improvements with the help of Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics
Basic setup and planning of Google Analytics 4 implementation

Future Cooperation between Novitek and Balanced Growth Boutique

During the finalization of this case study, Novitek released a new version of its website, which was designed and created based on Novitek’s refined brand story and communications guidelines.

In the future, Novitek plans to highlight enjoyment, relaxation, and well-being in their communications. One application of this is the statement “four seasons of enjoyment.” This is something Novitek’s products have been enabling from the very beginning. These “four seasons of enjoyment” through top-quality outdoor hot tubs will be available to more and more customers as Novitek widens its international operations.

We’ll help Novitek to use the learnings from our data-driven content marketing projects in Finland to support the growth in other European countries. Novitek plans to do this by investing in creating a first-class customer experience from consideration to ownership in the space of outdoor bathing. The data-driven content marketing will play a role in convincing modern buyers around Europe.

Additionally, we plan to help Novitek to implement Google Analytics 4 to ensure and manage their digital marketing tracking capabilities also after the Google Universal Analytics properties will stop (1st of July 2023) processing new hits.

About
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Mikko Rindell

Founder & Consultant at Balanced Growth Boutique

Mikko has solid experience in marketing as he has over 10 years of experience working in the field, both in agency and in-house roles. He focuses on helping clients with marketing strategy, SEO strategy, and building scalable data-driven marketing engines.