Ever since being established in 1926 HEMA has taken a core place within households across the Netherlands and abroad. The Dutch department store offers all sorts of products varying from clothing and food to household goods. In the latter, HEMA wanted to gain more online visibility using SEO. But search behaviour is changing. More and more consumers use video platforms like YouTube and TikTok to find new hotspots, tips and DIYs. Traditional text-driven search results have made place for video SEO. This offers huge opportunities for brands to influence masses of orienting consumers with optimised video content. But the question that remains to many marketers is: How do I know which video topics I have to create on which platforms, to gain top rankings? What does my audience on TikTok, Instagram or YouTube really want to see? With this challenge, HEMA came to us.

Their goal? To skyrocket online visibility and increase organic traffic, impressions and SEO rankings on Google, YouTube and TikTok. With data-backed long-form and short-form video, the department store wanted to help consumers that are orienting online for a product or information around using one.

Born from the need to know for sure, TopicTree continuously tracks and analyses view and search behaviour data from Google, YouTube, TikTok, Amazon, Pinterest and Bing. It is a tech solution – a first in the market – that unites every single data touchpoint about a brand’s consumer in one place. Its predictive power allowed HEMA to get a list of most potential video topics and trends. Based on this data, we mapped out the most potential domains to rank high in; on Google, YouTube and TikTok. On top of that, we did a competitor analysis – taking a deep-dive into the different video styles, ranking positions and upload frequencies of HEMA’s biggest opponents. What are they doing online and what are missed opportunities? An important insight was that mainly creators were leading the field of ‘bathroom’ and ‘window decoration’ content on YouTube as well as TikTok. This offered huge opportunities for HEMA in claiming authority as a brand – the classic early mover advantage!

Our in-house production studio created the ‘HEMA Helps’ series. Help content, focused on making life at home easier with nifty tips and tricks for the household. Both long-form how-to content, as well as short-form, vertical life hacks, step-by-steps and DIYs were produced – all tailored to the intent of the different video platforms. For instance, on YouTube we published long-form help videos on different ways to hang your curtains, whilst TikTok content focussed on sharing curtain-related life hacks. This way, we’ve set a whole web of ‘HEMA Helps’ videos in motion that tapped right into the needs of online orienting consumers.

With this new SEO-driven content strategy, the brand took on the challenge of broadening their viral content palette with informative help content. Being one of the first brands to put data-driven TikTok creation to the test, HEMA has definitely veered off the beaten path with this ‘HEMA Helps’ series. And with success. The first video gained #1 organic TikTok rankings within the ‘bathroom’ domain, just 5 hours after publishing!

On top of that, SEO-optimised landing pages were created on which the long-form YouTube videos were embedded. In monthly newsletters, extra traffic was guided to these SEO-optimised pages.

This new way of video SEO led to crazy results! Almost all videos on TikTok rank #1 on relevant keywords. Same counts for Google and YouTube, almost all videos rank in the top 3. We embedded relevant short-form content (TikTok and YouTube Shorts) on SEO-optimised landing pages, with which HEMA now even ranks in Google. These landing pages took on the algorithm by storm – with an average non-branded organic CTR of +389%. A total of watch time of 2.859,5 hours from which 1.828 hours came from short-form content – not longer than a minute.