CI&T bets on smart and automated SEO
The marketing manual says that well-done SEO - Search Engine Optimization - is key to achieving brand awareness. And CI&T, a Brazilian multinational digital specialist for major brands such as AB InBev, Bradesco, Coca-Cola, Google, Itaú, Johnson & Johnson, and Nestlé, has chosen to do this with state-of-the-art tools. Three years ago, it hired Simplex, a Brazilian martech company specializing in increasing website traffic and conversion by adopting resources such as artificial intelligence and process automation. The experience was so promising that CI&T adopted the same solution used in Brazil - Sir Cache, a tool that works to optimize websites and SEO traffic - on its global website. In the process, it witnessed an increase in organic traffic on the company's various global sites of 198%.
"At that time, we decided to unify the company's website in all countries as part of our movement to think globally and act locally, unifying the perception of the CI&T brand as a global brand," explains João Vitor Ferreira, Marketing Manager at CI&T. "In this context, an SEO project using process automation and artificial intelligence was fundamental," he says. He chose Simplex for the project because "we had already signed a partnership previously with promising results, and we were confident in scaling the project globally in partnership with Simplex."
The SEO improvement obtained by CI&T in the period is measurable. According to SEMRush data, the growth curve from June 2019, when the project started, to January 2022 went from 6,534 organic accesses to 19,509. This expansion goes hand in hand with the growth of CI&T, which in recent years has won the world, made acquisitions (including Dextra), and successfully debuted on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: CINT).
Team integration—CI&T's IT team in the various countries where the company has a presence closely monitored the entire SEO project.
"The integration of the teams and the transfer of knowledge from the Simplex team to the CI&T professionals in various countries was one of the determining factors in strengthening the partnership between the companies," believes Marcos Arantes, founding partner of Simplex.
According to Arantes, the project, which has already reached a global level, took into account various aspects of SEO, such as a site with many language options. We also applied SEO concepts to sites in China, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia. "Asian countries don't have such a predominance of Google in market share as we do here. In Japan, Yahoo and Bing's share is not so insignificant. In China, there is a unique system, Baidu." We had to adapt the SEO criteria so that it could work with the other search engines in those markets," he explains. In this context, Sir Cache was a determining factor for a good SEO response. "In the case of Baidu, there is a much higher requirement than Google, for example, for pages to load faster, and Sir Cache was a determining factor in the project."
According to the Simplex executive, the Sir Cache implementation project took about 15 hours. "We implemented it first on the Brazilian website, and then we did the rollout, which was a straightforward process," he concludes.