Portfolio: BlossomHill.com

Portfolio: BlossomHill.com

Since early 2009, I have been working on BlossomHill.com (one of the UK’s most popular wines) at Pulse Group – which been an absolute hoot!  Mainly because they trust my geek skills to “work it out” while the team in the studio always come up with some of the best looking creative work around, which is always a bonus when you need to “get your geek on.”

On the most recent/current version of the site, which launched in summer 2014, I was able to take the strategic lead in developing the SEO strategy and build team lead for the brands requirements to achieve more site traffic and user conversion via organic (free) search engines and social campaigns, whilst training creative/copy/design/build teams on the latest trends in responsive site design.

On the current site, my role included:

  • Project lead agency strategist and line manger of the site build
  • Targeting new and existing customers differently via SEO and crunching the numbers to estimate future traffic ratios between those two groups
  • Internal team training on what a responsive site is, it’s pros/cons/limits/benefits when compared to older traditional site builds
  • Search market keyword research – identifying over 1 million search monthly opportunities
  • Selling in the strategy to the client’s brand and tech teams
  • Strategy implementation – training SEO copy writing teams, keyword density analysis, writing targeted title tags and much more
  • Acting as team leader for this responsive site build, guiding creative teams on what’s possible and what isn’t when building a responsive site for mobile/tablet/desktop
  • Line management of internal teams and departments to keep the project delivery on schedule and on budget utilisting a combination of PRINCE2 methods, concurrent workflows, and Agile PM methods during ‘sprint’ work periods
  • Support in client meetings, strategy documentation and presentations to senior level and board level Diageo brand teams and technology teams to sell the strategy and increase client confidence
  • Rapid HTML/JS/CSS/Photoshop prototyping demo pages to help illustrate and sell in the concepts at key stages of the project
  • Coordinating many client suppliers and integrating, testing and customising their code and functionality onto the brand site. Including: Foodity (ecommerce shopping widgets), Age-Gateway templates from Diageo, Tagify for enhanced Google Analytics event tracking for better user insights and much more
  • Reviewing the results and changes to site traffic, SEO and other key traffic drivers to determine the outcomes of our work and build on the successes in upcoming seasonal updates.
  • Quality assurance, security/browser/devise testing, managing the debugging and deployment processes
  • Ensuring the site went live on a challenging but fixed deadline, in sync with a national television ad campaign

The results, since summer 2014 have been impressive.

  • The traffic referred organically (at no cost) from Google & Bing is up by over 100 times previous traffic averages
  • Targets achieved and surpassed for the summer season and it’s SEO aims
  • Traffic is now roughly 49% desktop users, 18% tablet users and 33% mobile users
  • First page ranking on Google search result pages for targeted keyword searches (“fruity wine“, “summer red wine” and more taste related terms) and second page results for new customers looking for new wine brands (“best sauvignon blanc“, “best pinot grigio“, etc) and many more long-tail keywords.

I could go on… but I think the Google Analytic snapshot graphic below kinda says it all (click the small image below to view a larger version).

BlossomHill.com-SEO-stats-summary-2014

 

Visit the site at: BlossomHill.com

About the author

Terence Chisholm A proud geek, digital strategist, designer and programmer based in London (UK), Terence Chisholm makes great digital projects happen and has been "getting his geek on" since 1996 and in graphic design for print before that. Terry also likes travel, music, the arts and photography.