Decathlon, the popular French sporting goods retailer, offers a wide range of products for all kinds of sports and outdoor activities. Known for its focus on innovation and customer satisfaction, Decathlon has something for everyone—from beginners to seasoned athletes—all with an easy and enjoyable shopping experience.

For several years, we have partnered with Decathlon to create a comprehensive, easily implementable SEO strategy focused on maximizing organic traffic and driving website revenue. By providing tailored, data-driven content across diverse category pages and offering technical support during website migrations, we have consistently improved rankings while delivering the impactful results every e-commerce client seeks.

Objectives:

• Improve the organic positioning of selected categories to appear at the top of the first page (positions 1-3), measured by the average position of focus keywords.
• Enhancing strong organic rankings through multiple technical website changes.
• Implementing data-driven, relevant content on category pages to address key search terms.

Creating unique, high-quality content for each category page is a significant challenge for most e-commerce websites. It requires not only volume but precision: clear, data-driven descriptions that help both users and search engines understand the products and their value.

Think about it—when you land on a page with dozens or even hundreds of unfamiliar products, good images are helpful, but it's the well-written, informative content that really makes an impact. It not only guides you through your options but also helps you make more informed decisions about what to buy.

And it's not just us reading these pages—Google is doing it, too. If for example, Google can’t figure out that a page is all about selling "exercise bikes," it won’t show that page to people searching for related terms. This is why data-driven content is so important for boosting visibility and improving the user experience.

For Decathlon, our primary objective was to align the website more closely with these content requirements, making it easier for customers to effortlessly find the products that best meet their needs.

To achieve this, we focused on elevating Decathlon’s key product categories to top positions (1-3) on the first page of search results, using the average position of target keywords as a critical metric of success. This strategy also involved maintaining strong organic visibility through various technical updates to the website, ensuring consistent SEO performance. Our strategy is built around creating carefully tailored content that aligns with Decathlon’s priority search terms, delivering both relevance for customers and value for search engines.A well-structured tactic to efficiently enhance organic traffic

A well-structured tactic to efficiently enhance organic traffic

Boosting organic traffic is often a complex task, as it requires aligning multiple factors to achieve optimal results. In our case, we primarily focused on identifying traffic opportunities for specific category pages, with an emphasis on maximizing business impact across various sports. 

One key element that needed to be added to the site was data-driven descriptions, which are essential for both search engine visibility and user engagement. Recognizing this gap, we conducted a detailed analysis of potential traffic opportunities, allowing us to craft a tailored strategy that aligned both with our business goals and the objectives of our partner. 

To further support this initiative, we provided educational sessions for Decathlon on data-driven content creation. These sessions were designed to enhance their SEO maturity, ensuring they could independently implement best practices, and foster sustainable, long-term results.

Once the education and the strategy were in place, our next step was conducting in-depth keyword research. This process involved identifying high-impact, relevant search terms that would not only drive traffic, but also resonate with potential customers and their intent of search. After that, with this foundation, we moved forward with the content creation phase, ensuring that each piece of content was not only optimized for search engines but also designed to enhance user experience and possibly increase conversion rates as well.

Reaching #1 positions and more!

We developed 70 high-quality, data-driven content pieces across multiple categories, which helped increase the average rankings despite the migration and URL updates. The project involved two stages of URL restructuring at the site level, impacting category URLs. While migrations typically pose the risk of a decline in organic traffic, we successfully mitigated this challenge and preserved stable performance.

In our analysis, we focused on the pre-selected priority categories, which included a diverse range of products from various sports, such as cycling, fishing or fitness. These categories were further differentiated based on whether the category descriptions had been uploaded to the respective pages. 

Through the strategic implementation of data-driven descriptions across the pages, we successfully avoided any decline in keyword rankings throughout the migration, even amid growing market competition. First, we retained top positions across several core product categories, solidifying Decathlon’s leading role in key areas such as fitness, water sports, and cycling. Additionally, our focus keywords not only held their ground on content-optimized pages but also made impressive strides in rankings for related search terms.

For keywords ranking in lower positions previously, significant gains were achieved. For instance, "treadmill" improved dramatically from an average position of 6.7 to 1.9, while "exercise bike" rose by five positions, moving from 5.4 to the top spot. Additionally, “treadmill” saw an average improvement of four positions, advancing from 4.4 to 1.4. Moderate but meaningful gains were also observed, such as “men’s tracksuit,” which climbed from the second position in 2022 to first by 2024, along with “camping gas cylinder” following a similar path. 

Beyond existing rankings, numerous relevant secondary keywords also began to rank, with several achieving #1 position, especially in popular sports categories such as diving, cycling, and fitness. This marked a significant improvement, as we not only stabilized and enhanced rankings for existing search terms but also gained top-ranking positions for new keywords where Decathlon had no visibility in Google searches previously.

These improvements reflect how our content strategy can boost visibility across a wide range of categories. All these achievements are particularly noteworthy because they have happened in a constantly shifting technical environment.