Mini SEO case study: HelloFresh.de (Berlin)

HelloFresh (Founded: 2011) is the largest meal-kit provider in the United States and also has operations in Canada, Western Europe (including Germany and the UK), New Zealand and Australia.

Executive Summary

HelloFresh's backlink profile is very strongly build around images which in fact appear to be paid advertising. Its blog which contains a lot of very relevant content is separated from the main top level domain. If it were part of the root domain, it would be attribute a traffic increase of 25% to the main domain. It could actually benefit from the main root domain authority and rank its keyword higher.

40% of its organic traffic comes from brand related Keywords; such a brand dependance shows a lot of potential for non-brand organic traffic growth.

Google Trends

Backlink Profile Overview

• 40k backlinks from 1.4k domains.
• 81% of backlinks are from pages with little Page Authority.
• 50% of the backlinks are from German websites.
• 50% of the Backlinks are images (often with also text).
• Only 3% of backlinks are nofollow.

Backlinks with Page Authority of 30 and above (according to ahrefs)

• Make Munich
• Cross Engage
• Strange domain name
• International HelloFresh Blog
• UK HelloFresh Blog
• Raidenger

Backlinks for advertisement

HelloFresh with 50% of its backlinks being images actually uses its own system of affiliation using banners as backlinks.

Organic Traffic Analysis

HelloFresh ranks for over 70k Keywords (including blog) for 200k monthly organic visits + 50k for blog (subdomain)

Main Keywords generating traffic:

Brand / search terms with brand

• Around 80k (40%)

Broad terms

• rezepte (3k)
• gesunde rezepte(1k)
• kochbox (900)

Dishes

• couscous (3k)
• hackbraten (2.5k)
• schweinefilet (1.3k)
• thai curry (1k)
• köttbullar (1k)
• falscher hase (1k)
• risotto (1k)
• tortilla (900)
• süßkartoffelsuppe (750)

Food

• pak choi (2.4k)
• rote beete (1.3k)

Blog as subdomain

• Porridge rezept (7.7k)
• grünkohl zubereiten (5.5k)
• gemüsebrühe selber machen (4.7k)
• eierlikör selber machen (3k)
• brötchen backen (2.5k)
• müsliriegel selber machen (1.7k)
• ingwer shot (1.5k)
• nudeln selber machen (1.4k)
• chai latte (1.3k)

also:
kohlrabi, brot ohne mehl, tzatziki, all 1.1k

Indexation efficiency: 10%

From around 7k pages indexed, over 650 pages each get at least 10 visits per month.