Driving 70% of Web Traffic with Organic Search

Key Takeaways

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Organic Search Traffic Tactic — Create (Relevant) Keyword-Rich Pages: All of Oatly’s product pages are rich with relevant keywords; not only do they contain popular and obvious keywords such as “oat milk”, Oatly also makes sure they use keywords that are aligned with what customers are searching for:

• Product-related Searches: Customers are often searching for products, be it branded or unbranded (from “oatly barista edition” to “oat ice cream”). Oatly leverages this and makes sure their product pages not only repeat their product titles several times, but includes recommendations to other product lineups.
• Information-related Searches: Many customers are curious about the nutritional information of milk alternative products, including their ingredient origins and sustainability factors. Oatly’s product pages touch on that by listing out the full ingredient list, mentioning nutrient information (“enriched with vitamins”, “calcium”), and calling out keywords like “plant-based” and “GMOs”.‍

‍Paid Search Tactic — Leverage Competitor Brand Keywords: While Oatly’s strong brand recognition allowed them to drive majority of their search traffic from branded keywords (88% of their search traffic came from keywords that included their brand name “oatly” in the search), they also leverage their competitors’ brands to boost their search ads. For Oatly’s product ads, they target their ads to competitor keywords such as “califia farms”, “califia farms unsweetened almond milk”, “oat yeah” (a Silk product), and “silk soy milk”. This allows them to capture the attention of audiences who may not have heard of the Oatly brand but are already a target audience based on their product-preferences (plant-based “milks”).

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According to Nielsen, oat milk sales in the United States increased by +347% during the first week of March, coinciding with Oatly’s +41% increase in web traffic in March-April.

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Oatly experienced another spike in web traffic after news that the company sold a $200 million stake to Blackstone private-equity group.

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In terms of marketing channels, almost 70% of Oatly’s web traffic came from organic search.

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Their organic search traffic has also seen significant growth since the latter half of 2020, increasing at +19% (vs. first half of 2020).

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Website traffic that is driven from search channels also has the lowest bounce rates (organic at 35% and paid at 32%) compared to the site average of 57%.

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Oatly’s strong brand contributes to its sizeable search traffic, with 88% of their search traffic coming from branded search terms.

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Diving deeper into branded search terms, over 1/4th of all organic search traffic comes from product-related searches: “oatly + [product name].

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Information enquiries account for roughly 12% of the inbound traffic, yet they are more diverse and highlight white space content opportunities.

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Oatly’s inbound search traffic is equally split between homepage and product pages, with each area taking up roughly 40% of traffic share.

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Each of Oatly’s product pages are packed with keywords, especially ones that fit under both “product-related” and “information-related” searches.

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When it comes to paid search, Oatly leverages both search text and product ads. For text ads, Oatly focuses on 3 main categories: “product-related”, “about us”, and their “subscription” model.

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For product ads, Oatly ran 54 ads in total for 2020 and all of them are focused on their oatmilk collection. Each product ad leads to its own individual product page.

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