Redbrain.com

Providing a MVP for Europe's #1 Online Shopping Performance Partner

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The Project

Redbrain are a online performance partner for retailers. Providing a range of feeds and products, they help drive qualified traffic to retailers. Redbrain were looking at ways to present their product feeds of over 1 billion SKUs – either as a way to build sites themselves or to allow domainers and affiliate marketers to build their own sites on their own infrastructure. Redbrain approached me to start exploring ways to use their API to integrate within WordPress.

What I Proposed

WooCommerce build that had every product within a niche present and available to be bought as an affiliate link. The idea was to focus on long-tail SEO to rank for individual products and encourage people to purchase them. It was designed to be modular and quick – both in terms of WordPress performance (I recommended using WP Rocket to do a lot of the speed improvements) and in terms of building – the hope was eventually to turn the time it takes to deploy a site from a month into days.

What I Did

• Build an easily customisable template as a child theme of Kadence.
• Implemented a system that uses Redbrain’s internal API to offer product comparison based on SKUs.
• Implement import templates for Kadence and WooCommerce using WP All Import.
• Custom JSON+LD implementation, which would allow all “offers” to be richly displayed in Google.
• Introducing SKU lookups on the API allowing you to get live pricing information and compare it to the pricing within the database.
• Custom WP Rest API script that, upon creating a site on WP Engine, would run the installation and setup of plugins and themes.
• Building custom Google Analytics reports so users will know exactly the products that were clicked on, which affiliate and from which site.
• Implementation of WP Rocket that reduced the load time to under 2 seconds.

Building this resulted in a minimal viable product of 10 sites that were expanded to over 30 with a further solution.

Challenges

Two major challenges were interpreting feeds and having products that were very similar.

One challenge was that a number of feeds had image formats which we were not always able to pull in dynamically. In the end, I worked out a lot of the images could be served from a special site on WP Engine that we treated as a media server, which was then imported into the main site via WP All Import.

The biggest challenge was certain product feeds (particularly surrounding clothing) would have very similar products with not much change. An example would be t-shirts which would be the same but different sizes. WooCommerce by default has an affiliate product type, and a varaible product type, but it doesn’t allow both on an individual product. I built a custom product type – variable affiliate products – that would be a single page with all variants listed. I also provided a solution on how to import these products en masse. This meant that instead of having a number of duplicate content issues with products being roughly the same but with small changes, one page would be created with all variants listed, reducing the time taken for Google to crawl the site.

Results

From the Client

The main focus for Rhys’ time at Redbrain was to take our vast amounts of data and present it in a way that was search engine friendly. Rhys was the best man for the job, as his unique skill set of WooCommerce, his understanding of structured data and his ability to optimise WordPress as a whole to be performant meant that his work was key in making the project a success.

Ant Robinson
SEO Strategist, Redbrain.com