| The brief | The risk |
|---|---|
| Four audiences on one site: job candidates, press and analysts, retail and distribution partners, investors. | Content built for one audience would work against the others, unless the architecture kept them apart. |
| A name shared with PepsiCo’s Lipton Iced Tea and with the former parent company, Unilever. | Ranking for “Lipton” means drowning in consumers looking for iced tea. |
| Product brands with their own websites and SEO strategies (Pukka, T2, Tazo, PG Tips). | A corporate site that cannibalises them, and confuses search engines about which brand owns which audience. |
Case study · Lipton Teas & Infusions
A US corporate site, planned so four audiences wouldn’t compete.
Architecture and content for the new corporate site of Lipton Teas & Infusions, decided before launch. 7,900 organic visits a month five months in, and first on Google US for every primary employer brand query, with no paid traffic.
7,900
monthly visits worldwide, reached within five months of launch through organic search alone
#1
on Google US for every primary employer brand query
5 months
from zero to visibility, with no paid traffic and no existing domain authority
The situation
Four audiences, one new domain.
When the Ekaterra group rebranded its tea portfolio as Lipton Teas & Infusions, it launched liptonteas.com as the public face of the group in the United States, built from scratch, before a single URL went live.
What we decided, and in what order.
What the work covered
Decisions before pages.
Step 1
Employer brand competitive analysis
Which FMCG groups compete for the same US talent pool, and how they position their benefits and values.
Step 2
US keyword research, audience by audience
Built from scratch for the US, one layer per audience, with a defined list of queries to exclude.
Step 3
SEO strategy and content architecture
URL structure, content pillars, internal linking and page-by-page intent mapping, finalised before launch.
The site launched in July 2023. By January 2024 it had reached 7,900 monthly organic visits worldwide, and no cannibalisation with the product brand websites was observed across the group’s search footprint. The traffic the site attracted was the traffic it was built for.
Three principles
What transfers to other launches.
Architecture decisions made before launch determine the results.
Retrofitting SEO to a live site is harder, slower and more expensive than designing the structure correctly from the start.
US keyword research is not a translation of a European strategy.
Search behaviour for employer brand queries differs between markets, in the topics that matter, the values that influence candidates, and the vocabulary they use.
Knowing which queries to exclude is as important as knowing which to target.
For a brand in a complex ecosystem, deciding what you will not rank for protects the content budget. Every exclusion was a budget call, not just an SEO one.
In the agency partner’s words.
“Alizée is a pleasure to work with. She’s a good listener, responsive, organised, and above all, very expert in her subjects. We’ve been able to work together on both international SEO for Lipton and local SEO for smaller businesses. The deliverables are very detailed and clear, and Alizée is always super available. I highly recommend her.”
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The complete document covers the strategic approach, keyword rankings, traffic data, and three transferable principles for any multi-audience corporate SEO project.
If you’re planning a launch in a new market, the best time to decide is before.
Plan the launch before the pages.
The cheapest moment to decide what a site should rank for, and for whom, is before it goes live.