Monin is a global leader in the food and beverage industry, producing flavored syrups, gourmet sauces, and more. Their US team is responsible for supplying restaurants and coffee shops across North America with the flavors that make up your favorite beverages. Their innovation and creativity fuels flavor trends internationally.

In January 2021, Monin US set a goal of increasing their brand awareness, website traffic and direct to consumer sales through SEO.

The Challenge

In 2020, Monin’s organic traffic shifted from a year of pandemic-fueled DIY-at-home growth to steady decline. Users and Sessions had dropped over 20% compared to the year prior, which led them to seek out a team of SEO experts to right the ship.

The Objectives

Our content and SEO strategy’s objectives were to:

  • Regain lost SERP rankings and organic traffic
  • Resume a growth pattern in organic traffic
  • Reorganize and capitalize on hundreds of pages of existing content
  • Develop a more intentional, strategic content strategy to guide content production in the future

The SEO Strategy

We knew we didn’t need to produce a lot of brand new content – we just needed to organize and optimize what was there, and take advantage of what was already in production.

We started by gaining a thorough understanding of Monin’s current content publishing approach, existing content assets, and getting familiar with the technical limitations of the existing website. We conducted content audits, gap analysis research and analyzed a myriad of ranking factors to gain a better understanding of Monin US’s position in SERPs.

We decided to start with the lowest hanging fruit – the activities we identified to provide the highest impact with the lowest level of effort – to get their organic traffic stabilized.  Then, we would spend time optimizing and restructuring the content that already existed on the site, and finally, start producing new content backed by a solid keyword strategy.

The Tactics

Monin’s current state included suboptimal technical SEO paired with a disjointed and inconsistent content strategy. While the quantity of content was not lacking, the quality was missing the mark. Making sure the site was easily crawlable for Google standards and also accessible and usable for users was the top priority. Good SEO strategy starts with a solid foundation.

With the amount of content that exists across the site (Products, Recipes, Blogs, etc.), negative traffic trends were a major concern. Frequent content production should lead to more keyword rankings and higher organic traffic, but Monin was experiencing the opposite effect.

To start optimizing the Monin US website, we began with identifying the technical issues that could hold the site back. Utilizing technical site crawlers we established a list of high impact and high priority back-end SEO errors for the Monin US team to focus on resolving with their development agency. This led to the Monin team beginning a new website project to update the site and make critical changes in the process, one of which was their poor site speed on mobile devices.

Once we’d dealt with the back-end issues, we set our eyes on solving the content crisis. With so much content, why was the site failing to rank in the SERPs?

We spent a few months optimizing existing content on the site. We identified key value pages and page templates to analyze the content structure and keyword focus. We then developed new page templates optimized for both user-experience and SEO, and edited existing content to apply SEO best practices in those templates. We were able to identify pages that were of no value, high value, and those that could be combined into one stronger post, then eliminated or combined those posts.

Once the technical work was in place and older content starting to gain rankings, we developed a comprehensive six-month content strategy. Creative keyword research and seasonal trends guided our publication schedule of blog posts, pillar pages and recipes.  Throughout the next few months, we continued to optimize existing content and produce new content, while awaiting their shiny new website experience.

The Results

Our strategy brought with it a 68% increase in organic search traffic and a 72% increase in keywords ranked in the SERPs year over year – quite a feat for a site of this size, with such a long history of consistent content production.

The 12 Best Bubble Tea Flavors You Need to Try blog post we wrote and published went on to be one of the best successes as the 9th most visited page on their website in Q3 2021. With such massive growth in a year’s time we knew the strategy was on the right path.

Through our partnership, we’ve managed to grow Monin’s brand awareness more in the B2C market and help set them up for continued success with new content.