Olli Salumeria is a Virginia-based Salumi manufacturer, creating traditional flavors through family recipes across a full line of Salumi products. Salumi is a top-level reference to the category of cured meats, covering proscuitto, salami, salamini etc.

Olli has 2 primary brands which sell in retail and natural grocers around the US. Gusto being a brand available only through Whole Foods and Olli which is more commonly found in all other retail locations.

A new and driving force behind the digital push stems from a newly opened production facility with hopes and goals for growing significantly to their existing product line and market reach.

Organic Search Visibility

The market for Salumi and Salami products would seem competitive at first glance, but after a deeper review it seemed a bit soft. Not to say big names aren’t present or are not utilizing the space properly, just that much opportunity was there for the taking so to speak.

With 20,000 people per month searching for Salami there proved to be ample opportunities to create new loyal customers by creating more visibility in search engines organically.

In short, our goal was better ranking across organic search – in more realistic terms our goal was to create more revenue and product purchase activity leveraging organic search as the driver. That understanding was and is critical for the feeling of success for both sides – improving rankings is only desired because the thought of improve sales would be the result.

The conclusion was to identify areas of opportunity where rankings could be improved with a primary focus on opportunities that could drive new sales.

 

New Domain, Little Established History

In the world of organic search (vaguely summarizing here), you’re gauged from 2 primary areas; All of the information you provide to a search engine on your site, and all of the information the internet provides about your site. These 2 areas are often referred to as on-site and off-site – or things you can control versus things you can’t.

In the case of Olli, we needed to tackle both areas as we weren’t effectively telling the best on-site story and there wasn’t enough happening in the world online to reinforce who we are in the Salumi space.

With having little established domain history and credibility the program aimed to tackle in 2 phases knowing that our biggest obstacle was growing credibility – the process of credibility building involves creating resources so amazing that when we tell someone they have to tell someone else, then link to it, share it on social media, etc. We need a big digital fire to take place, and with the right spark we could get it there.

Foundation First

To build up to the credibility phase we needed to first solidify the foundation upon which we were to build. The process would involve a heavier front-loaded effort to tackle the majority of the on-page work and then focusing our sights toward creating resources that our customers and hopeful new customers would love.

Organic search tends to follow a similar process for us across different clients and verticals, a flow of activities took place covering the needs outlined as:

Research – It’s not just about what has all the search volume, remembering our focus of conversion we needed to review the opportunities for relevance and intentions.

On-page Optimization – Use the detailed research to inform the areas and opportunities best suited to find our target customers.

Off-site Optimization – Strategize and create meaningful and useful content which can be shared with the world… Let’s elaborate a bit on this important campaign initiative.

Content…. They say it’s king, but to be more pointed and useful, amazing/helpful/educational/inspirational content is king. Thin content is a waste, content for SEO is doomed, content for keeping your site fresh is equally as hopeless. The type of content that helps one build credibility and authority online has the it-factors listed above; helpful, educational, or inspirational.

To produce content such as this requires a process to gain understanding of the audience and customers at a deeper level. What pain does our product alleviate, does it provide a sense of joy, how does our product fit into their daily life, how could we make their life or experience better? These types of questions drive the conversations that inform this type of content.

Through our research we identified an opportunity to create pairing guides, illustrating contextually and graphically how to pair flavors of your favorite salumi products with use case items like cheese, wine and beer.

To create content with even more appeal and potential, with 1 piece of our 3 part series we partnered for our Salamini (bite-sized ready to eat) and Beer Pairing Guide with San Diego Brewery Green Flash. The production featured Green Flash’s Director of Beer Education along with former Head Brewmaster Chuck Silva, sharing expert beer knowledge alongside Olli’s Salamini varietals.

The Results

he result? Surpassing Creminelli (most known competitor – though not most relevant) as the most visible across organic search | 62% increase in organic visibility | 151% increase in online order revenue | 92% in order value | 42% increase in number of orders.

Our programs are always in a state of continued evolution and improvement, but seeing success like this not only provides a sense of accomplishment, but offers a valuable lesson that can be applied to current and future projects – begin with a strong foundation, fix your house as best you can, they offer and provide value to existing and future customers.

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