We created a £1bn Growth Strategy for Herbalife Nutrition’s EMEA website ecosystem
As a global leader in nutrition, Herbalife EMEA was not being recognised as an authority in the Health & Wellbeing search market due to low performing existing website content and therefore won’t be attaining the brand salience needed to fuel its key business growth objective of 4.9% in 5 years.
Challenge
Herbalife Nutrition needed a comprehensive organic growth strategy and clear execution plan in place to maximise the opportunity of their huge website redesign project that will impact 12 country market websites across two continents.
As Herbalife Nutrition and the human tech agency were already working in partnership on the website redesign project, with in-depth UX research gathered throughout, it was natural for GC to take ownership of creating the EMEA organic growth strategy to empower the Herbalife Nutrition country teams to work in harmony to reach their ambitious commercial revenue goals.
What we did
Herbalife Nutrition manages twelve official country market websites across the EMEA region plus a whole digital ecosystem. We took five of those public facing websites in key markets (UK, Spain, Italy, France, South Africa) and conducted Web Performance Audits so that we could gauge a representative view of the landscape with regards to the following metrics:
Authority
Shows how a website is being valued by search engines in terms of trustworthiness and is a numerical figure scored out of 100.Technical
Analyses the behind-the-scenes factors that improve the crawlability and usability of a website, closely linked to visibility, in search engines.Content
Reviews the content marketing performance for a website and for three competitors in order to identify critical differences and opportunities.Targeting
Surveys the secret sauce of all high converting, highly ranked websites – how well their topic targeting performs by understanding keyword analysis.Analytics
Deep diving into the existing analytics tracking setup to make it easier for you to identify issues quicker and report on performance easier.
Not only did the audit feature those key sections, with a mixture of insights delivered via cited sources and visual reports, but it also had Observations and Recommendations at the end of each section to help the Herbalife Nutrition team understand the importance of the findings. Rated by Impact v Effort.
Audit Tools
Adobe Analytics
Ahrefs
BrightEdge
Google Analytics
Google PageSpeed Insights
Google Search Console
Google Search Operator
Keywords Everywhere
Screaming Frog
Siteliner
We included three competitors for each country's audit and made sure that they were a mix of direct commercial competitors and aspirational high performing content players in the industry. It was important to understand the benchmark and see how Herbalife Nutrition compared in key markets.
With a popular global brand like Herbalife Nutrition, they naturally received a significant amount of organic traffic that included branded terms (that had “herbalife” or product names) within the searches – but this isn’t reflective of organic growth. We focused the content marketing audit on non-branded performance to show the unprompted marketing landscape and to identify opportunities for targeting improvement.
The audits highlighted some critical areas for improvement that would need to be worked on at a foundational level to really see the impact of a Content Marketing Strategy being executed by the whole team. Some of the findings are being addressed in the website rebuild, but here are a few for example:
We found that most of the sites audited had an unnecessarily large amount of low value backlinks being sent from known sources within the Herbalife Nutrition digital ecosystem but from some unknown sources too.
External links profile
Mobile pagespeed
We found that most of the sites audited struggled with mobile page speed, and seeing as it was accountable for ~60% of all traffic, would be causing usability issues (and that’s not to mention that it’s been confirmed by Google to be a ranking factor).
Content targeting
We found that most of the sites audited were producing content that wasn’t optimised for search with keyword topic research not being conducted beforehand. This led to the content not being of enough depth on a subject therefore low ranking results.
Result
The final part of the project was to produce an organic growth strategy to achieve their ambitious business objectives over the coming years; one that could align all country markets so they can all grow collectively.
Due to the need to grow non-branded organic traffic and with resource constraints within already busy teams, we focused on SEO optimised Content Marketing initiatives for this growth strategy. A content strategy ultimately helps to guide the creation, execution and management of useful content to attract targeted audiences in order to achieve business objectives.
We identified 2 x 5 clusters of content topics to focus that were split by user intent focused on buying products or on educating themselves. With those topic clusters were able to build out a comprehensive Content Execution Plan that was handed over to each country marketing team to produce.
There was a mixture of content types recognised as important for the tactical execution and those were new website category pages, a blog restructure, recipe methods with explainer videos and research statistic infographics.
Execution is key here, so how do we ensure all teams are singing from the same hymn sheet? We create the hymn sheet for them! Those documents were a Content Checklist and a Content Creation Guide that enabled anyone to pick up the plan and go through the process of creating the content step-by-step so there’s no room for error.
We’re excited to see the results of this large scale organic growth strategy once the country market websites go live, the content is being produced in the background.