E-Commerce
The Netherlands
2022-Ongoing
Customer
The customer is a major Dutch player in children's entertainment, with a dedication to the play-to-learn concept. They collaborate with numerous educational toy brands and retail their products through their Dutch website, Toverkast.nl.
They've set an ambitious objective of becoming a global leader in the educational toy industry, and their next strategic move is to enter the US market.
Challenge
The customer team uncovered a significant search volume for Montessori products in the US, which is a distinctive category within educational toys. This relatively small niche has escaped the attention of online retail giants like Amazon, offering the customer the chance to establish a competitive presence in it.
As a result, the customer has chosen to initiate a specialized e-commerce platform that offers US buyers access to the entire spectrum of Montessori products available in the market. They tasked the Cyfrania team with building this platform.
Here're essential requirements for the upcoming e-commerce platform:
- The utmost priority is the search engine optimization (SEO) of the future website to guarantee strong positions in Google search results.
- The website should strive for the best achievable scores in Google performance metrics that are also Google search ranking factors.
- Cost-efficient options are favored to accomplish project goals within the budget.
Solution
In this project, we recognized that the selection of the appropriate development technologies is fundamental to achieving its objectives.
In particular, opting for these technologies yields considerable results:
- Next.js framework - the best-suited platform for building SEO-optimized websites - has enabled us to achieve quality SEO metrics.
- Tailwind UI - a collection of pre-made user interface components - greatly expedited website interface development, allowing us to accomplish more within the budget.
- WooCommerce - a platform for maintaining a product database - saved the customer resources that would have been spent on developing their own.
Key Features of the MontiPlanet Platform
SEO-friendly URLs
- Short, easy to read, and free of numbers and special characters.
- Make it simple for users to identify their current page and the product filters they've chosen.
- Include descriptive keywords to facilitate search engines in identifying the most relevant pages for search queries.
Simple and clear website structure
Basically, there are three types of pages:
- Home page with links to the most popular product categories.
- Product catalog pages equipped with multiple filters, which also serve as landing pages.
- Product pages with detailed product descriptions.
SEO-optimized and user-friendly structure of product catalog
- The hierarchy of product categories is structured according to keyword research findings.
- Products have multiple tags that users can use to filter them, such as: product type, child's age group, learning area, manufacturer brand, size, color, material and more.
Over a billion unique landing pages for different product categories
There exists a landing page corresponding to each potential filter combination a user may select. The app auto-generates unique content for each landing page that includes:
- Breadcrumb - a navigation aid that reflects the path the user has taken through the product catalog, making it easy to return to previous steps.
- Product category name that is auto-generated based on applied filters.
- Product category descriptions, age recommendations, and its benefits for children that are auto-generated using customer database information.
- Product cards that correspond to applied filters.
SEO-optimized website content
Every website segment has meticulously integrated keywords corresponding to product names and categories, including:
- URLs, webpage meta descriptions,
- Headers, footers, homepage banners,
- Landing page titles, filter names, breadcrumbs,
- Product card fields, product descriptions, and more.
Target scores in Google's performance metrics are achieved
- Webpages loading speed is improved by optimizing product database entries and applying various technical enhancements.
- All of Google's accessibility, best practices and SEO requirements are met.
Results
The customer has given high praise to the project outcomes, which include:
- A substantial-scale website was built within just 12 weeks.
- Most web pages maintain a performance score ranging from 80% to 90%, exceeding many competitor websites.
- Four weeks after the website's launch, many pages have already been indexed and are ranking highly in Google search results.
- The website already has visitors who found it through Google searches.
Services Provided
- Project management
- Web development
- Quality Assurance
Technologies Used
- NextJS
- Prisma
- Tailwind
- Amazon S3
- WooCommerce
Read the interview with Robert den Hollander, product owner for the MontiPlanet website.