Case study

From Keywords to Conversion: Decathlon’s SEO Journey with Verbolia

Join us for a conversation with Loic Helias, the Head of SEO at Decathlon France, one of the world’s biggest ecommerce player. He shares how our innovative solution, has transformed the SEO strategy of Decathlon France and enhanced the overall user experience.

Decathlon

Decathlon is a globally recognized French sporting goods giant, renowned for its effective and comprehensive omnichannel retail strategy.

Today, Decathlon proudly operates over 1,747 dynamic stores in 49 countries. It seamlessly bridges the digital and physical shopping experience, empowering customers to access its extensive product range.

This consistent, customer-centric approach has undeniably solidified Decathlon’s esteemed position as a frontrunner in the global sports retail industry

founded in 1976
+105,000 employees worldwide
€14 billion revenue in 2021
+100,000 products

About Loïc Hélias

Loïc, could you tell us about your role at Decathlon and why you chose Verbolia?

Absolutely, I’m in charge of SEO for the entirety of Decathlon France. We turned to Verbolia because we wanted to create pages that were meaningful and interesting for our users, something our current solution was falling short of.

Challenges

Could you elaborate on the challenges you faced with your previous solution?

Our initial idea was to optimize what we call “facets” by generating content for specific queries that were important to us. However, our technical solution at the time didn’t allow us to deploy these pages fast enough.

”Verbolia made it incredibly easy for us to generate all these page combinations that meet high user expectations. What surprised me the most was the simplicity and speed at which I could deploy pages from a keyword list. This allowed me to quickly focus on optimizations. The integration of new pages has been easy, and the ability to automatically suggest a list of products from our catalog allows us to focus on profitability. We saw profitability within just a few months.
Loïc HéliasHead of SEO at Decathlon France

Implementing Programmatic SEO with Verbolia

How was the integration process?

The integration of new pages has been easy. We added several hundred new queries to our catalog that match what we can generate in just a few seconds. This was really interesting for us because the generation is automated, as opposed to traditional tools where manual data entry is required.

What has been the return on investment (ROI) since integrating Verbolia into your operations?

The automated product suggestions from our catalog, provided by Verbolia, allow us to focus on profitability. Our project, even with a specific approach of not fully integrating the solution into our existing ecosystem, has already shown a positive ROI. Remarkably, we began seeing a return on our investment within just a few months.

Decathlon Expands Verbolia Across 9 Countries

Following the impressive results achieved in France, Decathlon has expanded its use of Verbolia to 9 additional countries. Learn more about this strategic expansion in the second part of the case study.