Case study: Roombeez

From a blog to a successful home and lifestyle magazine

In Germany, home, lifestyle and interior design are major topics. Germans enjoy decorating and putting their own personal touch on where they live. This is also reflected in the large number of lifestyle blogs and interior-design magazines. In this case study, we’ll look at how Kolibri Online helped OTTO’s home and lifestyle blog Roombeez to reposition itself as an interior-design magazine by creating inspirational content and achieving high organic reach.

Services provided by Kolibri for home and lifestyle magazine Roombeez

  • Concept and strategy
  • Developing user-focused, creative content formats
  • Editorial work, incl. copy and images
  • Content SEO
  • Graphics and illustrations
  • Video and image production
  • Portal management and entering content into the CMS
  • Strategic topic planning
  • Monitoring and testing content

The client: OTTO and its home and lifestyle blog Roombeez

OTTO is one of the most successful ecommerce companies in Europe and Germany’s largest online retailer for furniture and lifestyle products. With more than three million products and 6,800 brands in the fields of fashion, living and multimedia, OTTO is a favourite port of call for seven million customers. It is also by far and away the German market leader in the online furnishing and interior-design segment, where it offers more than 100,000 products. OTTO strives to establish a direct dialogue with its customers by means such as video and blogs on a wide range of topics from technology and domestic devices to fashion and sustainability.

Roombeez is OTTO’s home and lifestyle blog. Users can find content on all the latest lifestyle trends along with interior-design tips, DIY guides and decoration ideas.

The challenge: Repositioning and achieving visibility in search engines

Roombeez was set up in 2014 as a blog. Our idea was to find six design-savvy bloggers passionate about different aspects of home interiors to produce posts about trends, offer tips and create home stories providing insights into their own apartments.

After initially revising its blog content with a focus on search engine optimisation, in early 2018, Roombeez was on the search for a partner agency to evolve its blog in visual, strategic and editorial terms. OTTO’s goal was to reposition Roombeez as a source of interior-design expertise while also achieving high visibility in search engines. It was therefore looking for a content agency capable of identifying relevant topics and trends in the interior-design market, creating suitable content in response and conducting search engine optimisation to ensure that this content generates a consistently strong flow of organic traffic.

Challenges in a nutshell

  • Boosting organic reach in the interior-design market
  • Establishing crossovers with the OTTO online shop
  • High publication frequency and scalability requirements
  • Flawless 360° content: text, images, graphics, videos, collaborations with bloggers
  • Maintaining consistently high quality and proactively optimising content formats

The solution: High-quality posts, optimised for search engines

With the support of specialist agency Dope Digital, Kolibri Online developed a new strategic orientation for Roombeez. This included web design, logo development and information architecture for the home and lifestyle blog, along with work to develop new content formats. Our in-house Content SEO team and reliable project management take care of ongoing copywriting projects and ensure the blog operates smoothly.

In-house SEO editing and image SEO

Given the high publication frequency, Kolibri Online set up a fixed in-house editorial team headed by a senior editor. The team holds regular coordination meetings to plan areas of focus and topics for articles in the months ahead. Our content editors conduct trend and keyword research on a regular basis and analyse users’ search intents. Building on this research and drawing on their interior-design expertise, Kolibri’s editorial team then produces high-quality SEO copy, always observing the four-eye principle. These wide-ranging curations, which focus on products and are tailored to our various content formats, guide users to the OTTO shop and the OTTO app.

Interior-design magazines depend on stylish, authentic imagery. Our editorial team therefore searches for suitable images and creates captions and alt texts for SEO purposes. In addition, we coordinate closely with our client to integrate images produced for otto.de into the Roombeez articles and to tailor posts to specific photo galleries. Working in collaboration with bloggers and in-house image and video production specialists, we also create unique, topic-specific content and produce in-house illustrations. Our editorial team archives and documents images to ensure that they are always used appropriately.

Dependable project management as a connecting link

Extensive projects usually involve a large team – and the Roombeez project is no exception. We appointed a fixed Kolibri project manager to ensure that processes flow smoothly and facilitate efficient knowledge management. As a point of contact and a key connecting link between all stakeholders involved in the project, our PM establishes and maintains workflows and processes, selects suitable tools, oversees day-to-day work activities and ensures seamless communication within the Roombeez team. Our content planning tool Scompler supports our planning and coordination activities. We customised the tool extensively to support our project, tailoring it to meet Roombeez’s requirements perfectly.

Portal management and maintenance

Creating and supplying high-quality content is not enough in and of itself to achieve high visibility in search engine results. Kolibri therefore takes care of portal management and day-to-day operation for Roombeez. In addition to updating the page and conducting daily checks, this also includes subjecting new features to comprehensive functional checks and regular bug reporting.

High-quality video content, tailored to user intent

Users searching for inspiration on interior design, home furnishings and decoration appreciate visual input and practical tips. With this in mind, Kolibri Online develops and produces target-group-specific video content – so-called room stories – precisely tailored to the identified user intent on each topic. We oversee the search for candidates to appear in these stories, take care of all aspects of project management and supervise production and editing.

The result: Enhanced visibility and organic reach

Thanks to in-depth, tool-based research and a well-oiled team, we regularly publish new posts on Roombeez focused on the latest trends and current topics. Interior-design fans consider these posts both relevant and trustworthy. Overhauling the existing content has also created a uniform look and feel in line with consistent quality standards. Not only is this high-quality content relevant from an SEO perspective, it also generates conversions on various distribution channels. Roombeez also provides exposure for new brands and product lines in the OTTO online shop. Once a blog, Roombeez is now a home and lifestyle magazine – and a successful one at that. All of the measures put in place by Kolibri Online combined to increase its visibility and organic reach.
Are you looking for a content agency for your next project? Maybe you have questions about developing long-term content marketing strategies or how to implement high-quality, SEO-compliant online content in practice. We’d be happy to talk it over with you. Call us on +49 40 5247774-0 or email us at info@kolibri.online.
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About the author

Our team: Portrait of Kerstin Uhing
Kerstin Uhing
Senior Content Marketing Editor
+49 40 5247774-19
k.uhing@kolibri.online

Kolibri Online GmbH
Bernstorffstrasse 128
D-22767 Hamburg

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