Elite Kitchens
Elite Kitchens is one of the top kitchen design and installation companies in Cape Town, South Africa. They have build up a solid reputation for delivering custom, high-end kitchen solutions to people in the Western Cape.
Elite Kitchens Specializes in luxury, made-to-measure designs. They combine craftsmanship with personal services. They turn ordinary spaces into functional masterpieces.
Despite their great offline reputation and industry leadership, Elite Kitchens were struggling to translate this into an online presence. So they partnered with us at EcoSEO to get online. They wanted to get more high-intent visitors and convert them into paying clients.
Elite Kitchens was hitting a brick wall with their website. Though they’re a top kitchen design company in Cape Town, their site wasn’t pulling in enough organic traffic. Local SEO? It was non-existent.
Lead Time: 6 Months
Sector: Home Improvement / Kitchen Design
Target Type: B2C
Demographic: Homeowners in South Africa, particularly those seeking luxury, custom kitchen designs, aged 30–55, with a focus on urban and suburban areas.
Website Goal: Increase organic search traffic, enhance conversions (appointment and brochure requests), and improve overall brand authority in the kitchen design sector.
Services: SEO Optimization, Technical SEO, On-Page SEO, Content Strategy, Local SEO, and Link Building
96% Boost
In ‘Request an Appointment’ leads
The Challenge
Even though the company was seen as one of the best installation companies in the Cape Town area they were facing major significant challenges with their website’s search engine visibility and overall user engagement.
Here’s we found what was going wrong:
- Technical issues: We found over 300+ broken backlinks and messy internal links that were killing the websites SEO.
- On-page SEO was off: The Titles tags, the meta descriptions, the headers — none of these were optimised for the keywords their customers were searching for.
- Local SEO was missing: This was a big nono - Without local focus, the company were invisible to nearby clients in the Cape Town area, searching for kitchen design.
- Content wasn’t working: We found that the website’s content was not working for either users or searching. It was not matching what visitors were looking for. Thus engagement was low and keywords were missing the mark.
- Broken backlinks were stealing authority: A big no-no in SEO. Those dead links were losing SEO juice and hurting the site’s reputation with Google.
The Solution
EcoSEO went full-Google on them, tackling every area of their SEO: Technical SEO Fixes, On-Page Edits, Local SEO, and Fresh Content.
- First up: A complete Technical SEO Audit - We discovered and fixed over 300 broken backlinks and re-routed all of that precious lost link juice, plus made the site much easier to crawl for Google.
- Next: Schema Markup - Schema markup is a way to help search engines understand your site’s pages better. You can also use schema markup to get search engines to include rich snippets in their search results.
- On-Page SEO Edits - For on-page SEO we optimised all of their key service pages with keyword-focused copy, including kitchen design and even localised keywords. We re-wrote titles, meta descriptions, and headers for optimum impact.
- Local SEO Optimisations - We also enhanced their Google My Business listings, along with optimised location-specific showroom pages, to target local customers.
- Content Optimisation - The SEO Team also introduced an ongoing new content strategy with the regular creation of high-quality blog posts and case studies. Onsite Optimisation is about more than just optimising for keywords – it also helps to position Elite Kitchens as a trusted expert in the kitchen design industry.
Technical Seo Audit
Elite Kitchens was suffering from various underlying technical SEO issues that were silently hampering their website’s performance. Broken backlinks, poor site architecture, and hidden crawl errors were accumulating over time and affecting their search rankings. These are the dirty little secrets that can silently hinder your website’s performance and are often best discovered by deep-dive technical SEO audits.
We started by performing a comprehensive technical audit using various tools, mapping all issues and creating a prioritised step-by-step plan to address each one. Gradually we began cleaning up the house and laying the firm foundation for a rock-solid SEO strategy for the website.
Tools used:
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider: Crawling through the website to identify all the broken internal links, 404 errors and site architecture errors that were throwing search engines off their scent.
- Google Search Console: Google Search Console helped us to identify crawl errors and performance issues we hadn’t discovered during our initial audit and were used to inform our approach and monitor changes.
- Sitebulb: Mapping issues visually as well as improving internal linking to help search engines crawl the site more effectively.
- Ahrefs: Digging into the site’s backlink profile in detail, identifying and disavowing any toxic or broken links (after we removed as many of them as we could manually).
- SEMrush Site Audit: Sweeping the website for duplicate content, missing tags, and slow loading pages and prioritising areas of the site we could work on first.
Step by step, the issues that had accumulated over time began to be addressed and resolved. The result was a significant improvement in search rankings as well as a much cleaner, faster, and user-friendly website that satisfied both users and search engines.
Fixing Broken Backlinks
Elite Kitchens were silently held back by nearly 300 broken backlinks. Dead links were equivalent to votes of confidence to Google that were not being heard. As a result, each link reduced link equity, link juice, and the authority of the site without being visible to the naked eye.
We conducted a thorough audit of the backlink profile and then began systematically taking care of all the dead links that we could find. Redirecting to a relevant and active page where possible or just deleting links when that wasn’t possible. Gradually the website started to gain back some of its link equity, and the SEO results started to show.
Tools for finding broken links:
- Ahrefs – The mainstay tool. We used it to map out the complete backlink profile and to identify all of the dead links and other issues.
- Google Search Console – To monitor the redirection status and to look for any additional 404 errors that had not been discovered on our initial run-through.
- Majestic – To ensure no stone was left unturned! We don’t like to leave things to chance, so just to be certain we cross-verified everything here, too.
By the end of the process, those backlinks were back, and the website authority had a boost which was immediately noticeable in the search rankings.
Improving Schema Markup
Elite Kitchens’ website had several significant schema markups missing. When a page is missing schema markup, Google has no idea what the page is about — and all of those attention grabbing rich snippets that we all love to look at in the SERP were not appearing at all.
We addressed this by implementing schema to the most critical pages (local business markup for their showrooms, and also product markup and service markup for their kitchen design services). This small addition made a big difference. Not only could Google “read” the site much easier, but the listing appearance within the search results was much sharper and likely to receive clicks.
Tools we used:
- Schema Markup Generator: This tool allowed us to easily generate the correct structured data in an extremely short period of time.
- Google Structured Data Testing Tool: This tool helped us test out every markup and ensure it would not break or cause any confusions within Google.
On-Page SEO Overhaul
The existing on-page SEO of the website was not helping at all. Titles were bland and unoriginal, meta descriptions were boring, headers were all over the place — there was nothing on-site that was ever really targeting the proper keywords.
We focused in on the primary areas (core landing pages and services areas in particular) and reworked them to focus in on the relevant high-value keywords for kitchen design and included local keywords that related to their services and location.
This was small work but is often the difference between a site that is floating around in search results and one that is getting found.
Local SEO & Google My Business
One of the more glaring issues that Elite Kitchens had going on was that their Google My Business (GMB) profile and their showroom pages were not optimized. As a result, they were not appearing for the right local search terms and they were not appearing in Google Maps.
This is an absolute travesty because if you are not in front of a local searcher looking for bespoke kitchens in your area, then you are losing clicks, phone calls and showroom visits to your competitors that have their local SEO in place.
We optimized their local SEO by fine tuning their Google My Business profiles and their individual showroom pages so that they would appear for local search and in Google Maps. Small details, but a huge difference when someone searches “bespoke kitchen near me” and your competitor’s website is the first result that appears.
Tools we used:
- Schema Markup Generator – created structured data for local business and service pages
- Google Structured Data Testing Tool – to test each page markup to ensure there were no errors for Google to crawl
- Rank Math (WordPress) – a powerful SEO plugin that also ensured all schema was consistent across the entire website
Content Strategy
The site did not have a content strategy going in and content that existed was not really specific or relevant to the desired keywords or questions that the ideal customer was asking.
It was the digital equivalent of shouting into the abyss.
We created a content strategy to be customer-centric. Blog posts, case studies and service pages were created or optimized to answer questions, provide helpful tips and be authoritative about bespoke kitchen design.
Keyword usage was done with intent. What are people really searching for when they type in “bespoke kitchen design Cape Town”? We ensured that the content on the site provided answers to this.
Technical SEO tools we used:
- Yoast SEO – for optimizing metadata, page titles and headers to the targeted, high value keywords
- Google Keyword Planner – to get an exact list of the words and phrases being searched, for example, “bespoke kitchen design Cape Town”, so that we didn’t have to rely on keyword guessing
- Surfer SEO – to optimize the content for exact keyword density, on-page best practices while not sounding like a robot
The Results
Elite Kitchens experienced major improvements in just six months with EcoSEO. This is growth you can actually see in your bank account and numbers (not just growth on paper):
- Organic Sessions: Total organic sessions increased 60% year over year when comparing Q1 2024 to Q1 2022. This is not single-page sessions from brand new visitors alone. These are multiple-page sessions, indicating people were finding Elite Kitchens without any paid ads in their path.
- Appointment Leads: The ‘Request an Appointment’ lead box nearly doubled in six months, increasing by 96%. This means a whole lot more people coming through the door, or at least clicking on a calendar and making an appointment.
- Brochure Requests: The number of people requesting a brochure increased by 66% in the first six months. More people requesting brochures means more potential customers seriously considering a kitchen remodel.
- Non-Branded Traffic: Non-branded traffic increased 42% and 38% of the increase occurred in the first six months. In other words, people were finding Elite Kitchens without specifically searching for it. That’s exactly what you want.
- Local Market Impact: The local market numbers were even more impressive: ‘Request an Appointment’ leads increased by 93%, while ‘Request a Brochure’ leads skyrocketed 209%. Local search dominance had a major impact.
The numbers are one thing. The real story is what those numbers represent. Real people. Clicking. Engaging with the brand. Poring over kitchen design images. Taking the next step towards becoming a client. The kind of growth that not only builds authority, but revenue as well.
Technical Tools:
SEO Optimization, Technical SEO, On-Page SEO, Content Strategy, Local SEO, Link Building
SEO Services
Technical SEO, Conversion Optimisation, Press Release, Link Building, Conversation Rate Optimisation, Mobile Optimisation, Website Speed Optimisation
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