A note on the numbers: these are the baseline figures measured before implementation began, not results we're claiming. This is a live project at roadmap stage. We've published it because the strategic thinking is the interesting part, and because pretending every engagement is a finished success story would be dishonest.
Winning at home is not the same as winning abroad
NS 4×4 — trading as North South 4×4 — is a specialist Toyota 4×4 parts supplier based in County Monaghan. Over fifteen years it has grown from a spare-parts exporter into Ireland's leading supplier and manufacturer of Toyota 4×4 parts and accessories: a catalogue of more than 23,000 parts, its own manufactured performance components for the Land Cruiser, Hilux and Amazon, and the ability to source over half a million parts globally. It has been named Leading 4×4 Auto Parts Retailer of the Year by the Irish Enterprise Awards more than once.
Having established itself in Ireland, the business identified an opportunity to expand into the UK through a dedicated storefront, NS UK Spares. That's a bigger market, but a considerably more competitive one — populated by established parts factors, marketplace sellers and OEM dealer networks, all bidding on the same terms.
Expanding across a border is not simply a matter of switching the currency symbol. Search demand differs, competitor sets differ, and a site that ranks well in one country will not automatically do so in another.
Two markets, two storefronts
The same catalogue, aimed at two different audiences. Separate storefronts avoid the classic cross-border mistake — one site trying to rank in two countries and doing neither well.
- ns4x4.ie — North South 4×4, Ireland. The established business, with strong existing organic visibility in its home market.
- nsukspares.com — NS UK Spares, United Kingdom. The expansion target, and the focus of the SEO and PPC roadmap.
What we delivered
A full SEO review to identify opportunities across the website and build a roadmap for UK growth — starting with the question of what UK buyers actually search for, which is not identical to what Irish buyers search for even when they want the same part.
Phase one — research and roadmap
- Keyword research focused on UK Toyota 4×4 part searches
- Category and product page optimisation recommendations
- Website structure and internal linking improvements
- Content opportunities to capture additional search demand
- Competitor analysis of the UK automotive parts landscape
- Technical foundations to support organic growth
The starting position
Before implementation, we measured what the business was already achieving organically over a 90-day period. This matters: it establishes the baseline that future work will be judged against, and it tells us where the existing demand sits.
Organic search was comfortably the strongest channel, generating 26,925 sessions from 15,146 users, with 17,141 engaged sessions and an average engagement time of 1 minute 57 seconds. Organic Shopping added a further 3,046 sessions and Organic Social 866.
A 63.7% organic engagement rate is a genuinely strong figure for ecommerce. It says the people arriving from search are the right people — they're looking for a specific part and this is a site that stocks it. That's a much better problem to start from than high traffic that bounces.
Dwell times above three minutes on category pages — the homepage at 3m 06s, the Land Cruiser category at 3m 22s — indicate genuine buying research, not casual browsing.
What happens next
The next phase is implementation of the SEO recommendations, followed by a PPC programme to accelerate UK growth while organic visibility builds. Paid search does the immediate work of putting NS UK Spares in front of people ready to buy; SEO does the slower, cheaper, more durable work underneath it. Running them together means the paid budget isn't propping up the whole operation indefinitely.
Phase two — implementation and paid search
- Rolling out the SEO recommendations across category and product pages
- Targeting high-intent Toyota 4×4 part searches through PPC
- Capturing customers actively looking to purchase
- Supporting SEO growth while organic visibility increases
- Building a scalable acquisition channel for the UK market
This project is delivered by dijitul, Maxxd's parent agency. Read the original case study on dijitul.uk.
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