Winning Non-Branded Search Opportunities with Kroger & Conductor

About Kroger

Headquarters

Cincinnati, OH

Company Size

100,000+

Industry

Retail

With 18 different companies operating under the brand, Kroger is the largest grocery chain in the U.S., but until recently, their focus had been mostly brick and mortar.

As customer needs continue to evolve, the SEO and digital content team at Kroger saw the importance of having a strong digital presence and solid organic marketing strategy. The team set out to create an omni-channel experience, removing the barriers between the customer and their next meal. Their customer-first strategy involves relevant content, local SEO, user-generated content, reviews, public relations and partnerships.

The Challenge

Inherently just being a big brand, a lot of your organic traffic is branded traffic. It’s hard to get away from that. People love what they love and go out and look for it.

Despite being one of the largest retailers in the country, Kroger struggled with ranking and generating traffic from non-branded search terms. Head of SEO and Digital Content, Troy Eaves, had seen this problem before when working for another well-known brand.

Additionally, as a grocery store entering into the eCommerce market, Kroger wasn’t just entering a new space, they were entering a highly competitive one. The food and recipe market includes both Kroger’s more-traditional offline competitors as well as formidable new competitors like bloggers, recipe sites and media outlets.

How Conductor Helped

Conductor has helped us predict the future.

Conductor’s easy-to-use platform provided Kroger with the insights and data they needed to start competing for non-branded terms.

Conductor’s Explorer tool presented insights, including trend data from both search and social media, allowing the team to discover and prioritize topics to best drive their digital content strategy. Conductor’s index of 20B+ keywords offered a competitive advantage in uncovering new opportunities in niche areas such as seasonal trends, holiday trends and events that fit with Kroger’s product offerings.

The Results

SEO and content need to be forward-looking. Conductor has helped us look at trends in previous years and months and helped us predict what might be worth going after.

Increased organic traffic YoY by 7%

Conductor has allowed Kroger to accelerate their digital strategy with tools to tackle quick-fix technical issues and forward-thinking insights to unlock more topics of interest. This has resulted in a steady increase in organic traffic by 7% YoY. For a brand as big as Kroger, this translates into millions of visitors each month.

Identified non-branded search opportunities

With Conductor’s ability to track trends over long periods of time and in-depth competitive insights, the team at Kroger was able to expand their content strategy into new topics and categories. They’ve been able to use this data to validate keywords and prioritize relevant content creation. This has been especially helpful in planning and creating both seasonal and evergreen content.

Informed overall content strategy and implementation

The ability to plan content ahead of time has also helped Kroger improve workflows that span across multiple teams. Now, they can coordinate with graphic designers, paid search efforts and other promotional campaigns to maximize their content efforts across the board.

It’s helped us plan better and be tighter in our content strategy.

To sum it up, Conductor has significantly helped Kroger advance their digital marketing strategy by providing the insights they need to gain ground in a competitive search space, as well as the data needed to validate their efforts.