About Simon Delafoy

Could you tell us about your role at Würth and provide some insights into your background?

Hello, I’m Simon Delafoy, responsible for SEO and SEA at Würth France for the past 6 years. Prior to this, I worked as a traffic manager in various web agencies.

Würth is a renowned global leader, specialized in the distribution of assembly and fastening materials, catering to a diverse range of industries. With a legacy dating back to 1967 in France, Würth has established itself as a trusted partner for professionals in automotive, construction, electronics, and engineering sectors worldwide.

Team Structure

Würth France relies mainly on its sales force of 2,500 sales representatives, on more than 200 sales outlets and finally on its online store.

For this online store, we now have a specialist for each source of traffic: SEO, SEA, Display, Social Media and Emailing. In this case, I am the SEO/SEA specialist for Würth France. We also work with an SEO agency that helps us with content production and netlinking.

Getting to know Verbolia

How did you actually first hear about Verbolia ?

I received a call from a salesperson from the Verbolia team. You know how it is when you’re approached by phone, thinking “you don’t need anything”… but I was immediately intrigued by the concept because I had already been admiring the process used by major e-commerce players.

Pierre-Olivier, the co-founder (of Verbolia), then provided us with a more detailed demonstration of the solution, and I immediately grasped that it was the exact solution we needed to enhance our 100,000 product listings in the SERPs.

Would you say that it was primarily product-related that you picked us? Or were there other triggers that convinced you to implement Verbolia? 

Yes, the product has directly captured our interest because it responds to our shortcomings and unleashes our SEO potential at a time when we were in a kind of impasse in terms of major developments.

Ease of integration is very important and we hear that a lot from our customers. How did the integration of Verbolia go for Würth?

The integration took a little longer than expected but this is our doing. We had legal and IT constraints that slowed down the project launch.

For its part, Verbolia was very responsive in the progress of the project and defined clear steps, which was very reassuring. Above all, they were able to adapt their solution to our technical constraints, which was very valuable!

In the end, it took us 4 months to launch the indexing of the first 1500 Verbolia pages. Which, in retrospect, is already quite an achievement.

General SEO approach

How did your SEO approach look before implementing Verbolia?

Our SEO approach was significantly limited due to our restrictive IT environment. Our websites’ development was centralized in Germany, which posed certain challenges. Moreover, creating and maintaining landing pages, crucial for driving traffic and conversions, was a complex task for us.

Developing our search engine marketing (SEM) around detailed search queries, known as long-tail queries, was also a difficult undertaking. These queries, based on specific attributes of our products, are incredibly important in the professional tools sector.

Due to these constraints, our SEO strategy mainly revolved around three key components: netlinking, the addition of SEO-friendly texts to category pages, and corrections to title tags.

Could you describe in a few words what the process of creating pages was like before Verbolia? What were the steps you had to take to get these pages live without the technology ? 

To create a landing page, we had to manually list the products to appear on a page and send this information to a web designer. Once the page was online, we still had to request updates to add or remove products later. Very tedious. We didn’t have more than 50 such landing pages. For some of our SEA ads, we had to use internal search results.

And how did your SEO approach changed after implementing Verbolia?

Since implementing Verbolia, we are now able to tailor our product offering to the searches of Internet users and no longer focus solely on generic terms.

Verbolia’s solution has brought out an unsuspected potential of SEO traffic thanks to the use of our numerous product attributes such as product lengths, diameters and materials, but also much more specific attributes like the standards.

Could you tell us about the implementation process of Verbolia? The collaboration with the team, how long it took, what the experience was, etc..?

It took four months from signing the agreement to launching the project, slightly longer than anticipated due to some internal legal and technical hurdles. However, once these issues were addressed, the project development accelerated. For several weeks, I devoted a substantial amount of time to creating the landing pages, a task that felt like an engaging game.

This process also enriched my understanding of our product offerings, an experience that will undoubtedly be beneficial in the future. Throughout this phase, Evelien, from the Customer Success team at Verbolia, was exceptionally responsive and provided solutions to all our challenges.

The platform

What would you say are your favourite features of the Verbolia platform ? 

What I appreciate above all is the fact of having a CMS initially designed for SEO with directly integrated data such as search volumes, SEO position and information on the crawl of robots.

It is really an added value which facilitates the analysis of the results.

There are also features that allow us to directly personalize the data of our product feeds at each import. What is done, is no longer to be done.

The technology

If you were to go to the Würth management and present Verbolia, how would you describe our platform, in one sentence, in terms of trends and technology?

It is a solution that exploits the unsuspected potential of the technical data of our product offer in order to develop our visibility on Google and Bing.

Can you give an estimate of what it would cost Würth to build a platform like Verbolia themselves?

I wondered about the feasibility of creating this type of solution in-house. But we couldn’t afford to monopolize several developers for a long time for this type of project and then maintain it. Finally, we would not have been able to go as far in the functionalities related to SEO and product feed optimization.

For example, for SEO position tracking, we would have had to increase our contract with SEMRush to track 3,000 new keywords (but outside the solution). With Verbolia, this is included in the solution. 

So when you add up all the benefits of the solution, there is no doubt about it. It is more advantageous for us to choose Verbolia.

The results

For now, we are just in the beginning phase of our collaboration. What do you expect to see in 12 months knowing that SEO growth is slow in general? Where do you think you’ll see the biggest impact? Are there any other KPIs worth mentioning?

After launching the indexation of the first 1500 Verbolia pages, we could observe relatively fast results in terms of SEO. Some pages were quickly positioned on page 1 and we started to generate more than 100 visits per day after just a couple of days.

After that, as you say, SEO takes time, so we see a continuous but progressive growth of our SEO traffic. 5 months after the launch, we are getting more than 500 visits per day. That was the first goal I set. The ultimate goal was to get 2000 SEO visits per day. I am hopeful that we can achieve this result by the end of the year.

But in the meantime, our Verbolia pages are heavily used in SEA with more than 2000 SEA visits per day. These pages have allowed us to reach new queries, more qualified users and to propose more coherent landing pages. This can be seen in the average shopping cart generated by the Verbolia pages in SEA: it is 20% higher than our pages on our original site.

Advice for other customers

Based on your experience, what would be your number one piece of advice to new customers to get the most value from the Verbolia platform?

First, focus on finding page ideas. Utilize tools like the Google Ads keyword suggestion tool or SEM Rush to generate a wide range of ideas. Additionally, examine the search term history in Google Search Console and Google Ads, filtering by character count to uncover valuable long-tail keyword ideas. Within Google Ads, you’ll also discover synonyms commonly used in searches related to your products.

Consult with your company’s product managers as they can offer unique ideas that may not be found through traditional keyword research methods.

In the context of selling tools, you can refine your approach by taking one of your important product lines and segmenting it based on attributes, such as:

At the end, you will cover a good part of the main semantic field of a product type and Google will appreciate that.

Then give value to these Verbolia pages:

Verbolia in five years

Where do you see Verbolia and Würth in five years from now?

We have now reached the 3000 pages foreseen in our contract. The results are very encouraging so inevitably we will ask ourselves the question of potentially creating more pages.

Our e-commerce site will also experience major changes in the coming years which will potentially offer new opportunities to develop SEO traffic with Verbolia.