Client Profile
“A key element for us has been Lumar’s customer-centric approach, and the opportunity to work collaboratively to help us meet our needs, from complex crawl segmentations to report and custom metric developments. It allows us to deliver a first-class service to our clients.”
Lucia Navarro, Organic Technical Director, Brave Bison.
In Brief
- Client Type: Digital Marketing Agency
- Lumar Services: Lumar Analyze, Monitor and Protect
- Challenges: Manual processes and the complexity of multinational, complex e-commerce sites.
- Outcomes: Streamlined processes, greater efficiency, and improved traffic.
Brave Bison is an award-winning media, marketing, and technology company, purpose-built for the digital era. Working with some of the boldest brands in the world to capitalize on the complexity that defines the modern marketing landscape, it works with international e-commerce brands, including global footwear icons and leading technology retailers.
The Challenges
As part of its wide remit, Brave Bison oversees SEO strategy and activation for their clients’ websites across Europe and North America. Initially, this could be time-consuming due to the large scope of markets, but as the success of the business and their clients led to growth, Brave Bison needed to find a platform that would allow them to continue to deliver a first-class service to their clients.
“We focus on unique optimizations and offering our bespoke SEO and e-commerce experience,” says Lucia Navarro, Organic Technical Director at Brave Bison. “We identify insights and capitalize on traffic opportunities, while developing effective content strategies despite brand limitations and approval layers. For big, complex e-commerce sites, we needed to improve the efficiency of our processes.”
One of Brave Bison’s customers, a global footwear brand, has intense competition in more than 10 markets. Each market has different strengths, opportunities, competition, and customer behavior, so the team needs to create a customized approach for each market.
“Delivering these bespoke insights across multiple markets with manual crawling and technical analysis, and Excel dashboards was taking up significant time and resources,” says Navarro. “We needed a platform that would help us get the insights our clients need at scale, and simplify prioritization to deliver the bespoke analysis for each market they need and expect.”
Streamlining Processes
Brave Bison decided that Lumar’s website optimization platform was best suited for their needs, based on not only the capabilities of the platform but also its ease of use.
“The Lumar platform’s detailed SEO audits deliver the level of expertise our clients expect”, says Navarro. “And while there’s a lot of data, it’s laid out in a logical way so we can quickly make sense of it and prioritize accordingly, as well as giving us extensive trend data so we can spot issues before they become a problem. This saves us a huge amount of time, and focuses our attention on the right issues.”
“With Lumar, we can segment our crawls in an extremely deep and customized way, so we can analyze the site by page template, business unit, and URL level. Now we can quickly identify issues and determine if they’re site-wide or specific to a category or template, which has significantly enhanced our efficiency in isolating problems and providing targeted solutions to our clients.”
Lumar has also helped Brave Bison improve the communication of opportunities and progress to stakeholders.
“We use the Lumar health scores to make it more quantifiable and measurable,” says Navarro. “It’s a simple, easy-to-understand way of communicating where we are and where we want to be on our objectives and key results.”
Enabling a Proactive Approach
When looking for a platform, the team at Brave Bison wanted something that would enable them to be proactive rather than reactive, with customizable dashboards and the ability to deliver the level of technical SEO expertise their clients require.
“Before Lumar, we were sometimes playing catch-up after big technical releases, rather than being able to proactively identify all the issues and make recommendations for fixes. Lumar’s breadth of technical SEO coverage, combined with integrations to tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, means we’re now always ahead of any issue.”
The Lumar platform also allows Brave Bison to proactively monitor both live sites and development environments, to quickly identify and notify clients of issues that need urgent attention.
“With Lumar, we crawl the development environment daily so we can notify the client of issues before code is published, and limit the number of times they need to revert to a previous release. We also crawl samples of priority pages on the live site daily, so we can quickly spot issues and get them fixed. So Lumar helps us not just improve our clients’ traffic and revenue, but also protect it.”
Built-in Flexibility
Navarro was also impressed with the flexibility of the Lumar platform and the level of customization they would be able to achieve.
“Our clients’ sites have a lot of bespoke requirements, and with Lumar we were able to build custom metrics that would go beyond the usual technical SEO issues, to help our clients stand out from the crowd.”
One example of this came with monitoring changes in on-site elements and copy within footer components on Product Listing Pages (PLPs). The reports and alerts in Lumar were able to highlight changes in the total number of certain on-site elements, such as tags, from previous crawls, but the team needed something more detailed.
“With Lumar, we get a clear picture of the previous and latest crawl data, and we built a metric to tell us if anything has changed,” explains Navarro. “We can now quickly identify changes on metadata at a URL level, if the automated page meta tag rules were accidentally updated by site or dev teams, or if the PLP copy was suddenly lost. Linking this directly to our keyword reporting shows if this impacted performance, and for which URLs, so we can give specific recommendations on where issues occurred and need to be prioritized to recover.”
Lumar has also helped Brave Bison overcome language barrier challenges with the development of another custom metric to identify core primary and secondary brand and generic terms, mapped against each page crawled on the site.
“Essentially, the Lumar team built us an automated solution for keyword mapping at scale. All the keywords offer translations, so market leaders can easily identify and take action based on the data. This informs their regular on-site recommendations and strategies, and ensures language differences don’t hinder our SEO efforts.”
These custom metrics have been incorporated into regular auditing and analysis, streamlining the team’s approach and enabling them to diagnose performance changes more efficiently.
The Results
For Navarro, the Lumar platform’s advanced custom metrics, deep segmentation capabilities, and automation, coupled with the service from the Lumar team, have significantly improved their SEO processes and efficiency, which allows them to provide a great service.
“A key element for us has been Lumar’s customer-centric approach, and the opportunity to work collaboratively to help us meet our needs, from complex crawl segmentations to report and custom metric developments. It allows us to deliver a first-class service to our clients.”
“For our global footwear client, we’re forecasting +10% increase in traffic by the end of the year from our regular technical health improvements, and a further +6% from our on-site optimization projects. The insights we get from Lumar, coupled with enhanced processes and efficiency gains, are critical to us delivering these results.”
