The New AI Fuel for Halfords' SEO Engine

Client: Halfords

The festive trading period is critical for Halfords' business as motorists prepare themselves and their vehicles for the changing season and weather conditions.

As part of an extensive digital transformation agenda, Halfords targeted the sales headroom available within organic search channels – seeking improved rankings across their digital estate – a challenge compounded by an extensive product portfolio (and corresponding product pages) spanning thousands of SKUs.

Our solution combined SEO best practices with the latest innovations in Generative AI technology, ensuring that Halfords could quickly and effectively improve their website assets at scale, driving significant increases in traffic, rankings, and sales.

We built a custom AI agent for Halfords, trained using MG OMD’s Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models in Omni – proprietary, trusted, performance datasets that are used to enhance the response capabilities of the Generative AI model. These RAG models delivered SEO-optimised content built upon Halfords’ brand platform and tone of voice, SEO best practices, product page optimisation, and consumer feedback/queries.

The content was tested across two product categories on Halfords.com in the run-up to Black Friday, with product category pages optimised with bespoke content assets tailored to each category's individual SEO opportunity and landscape.

Over such an important and competitive trading period, we saw a significant improvement in SEO performance. Traffic across optimised pages improved 24% YoY, with new-to-brand audiences up 98% YoY. Crucially, we captured high-intent, high-value consumers, delivering significant YoY improvements in site engagement and SEO-driven sales.