Case Study: Product Creation
The holy grail of eCommerce is digital product delivery where only data and money changes hands. There’s no fulfillment, no shipping, no muss or fuss. We created content for a client who wanted to sell his well-known expertise to the financial market in a series of do-it-yourself templates. Then we created a pay per click campaign to sell the templates, and optimized it over time, continually culling through keywords until we had a list that consistently produced sales. Eventually we settled on a benchmark conversion rate of over 22%. The client decides how much money he wants to make that month, invests in PPC, then realizes his return, knowing that nearly 1 in 4 people will purchase a template when they step on his site. His ROI is assured and the dollars keep rolling in, month after month.
Case Study: Outranking Your Parent
We SEO’d a distributor site for a specific term and within a few months it began ranking above its parent company, who became a little upset. Not only did our site rank organically, we also started a PPC campaign that placed the site in another position on the page, further dominating the parent. That really made them upset. They requested that we stop whatever we were doing. We pointed out that the additional presence on the page was making money for the parent, which made them a little happier – and believers in the power of SEO.
Case Study: Leads Aggregating Site
We took on a large leads aggregating site that was sitting on the second page of Google search engine results for a Top 10 Most Competitive Keyword with more than 2.1 million searches every month for that exact phrase. Current revenue was $30,000 a month. The site had not been touched for some time and needed an aggressive SEO plan to begin to move it from position #17 on page 2 for the targeted key phrase. This sole phrase provided the bulk of the site’s revenue.
We refreshed its library of articles which forced engines to revisit the site. We also made more than 60 changes to the site over the course of several months. We used “white hat” SEO best practices and also our own closely guarded tactics developed from many experiments. Within 4 months, the site moved to Google’s first page and revenue increased by $40,000 to $70,000 a month. We also achieved an indented result or second listing below our result, further pushing the competition down the page. The site’s high ranking was #6 (page 1) which placed it “above the fold” – a critical revenue point – for one of the most hotly contested keywords in cyberspace.
Case Study: Organic Ecommerce
We created and SEO’d a new Ecommerce site for an upscale organic product with a loyal fan base. The problem? The existing online distributors were entrenched, older sites. Through solid SEO we achieved very high Google rankings for a number of the site’s most desired keywords including brand name at #2 and “odor neutralizer” at #11, beating out the competition.
In addition to creating an advertising campaign (with A/B testing to see ad which was most successful), we focused on increasing natural rankings. In 2009, approximately 50% of sales now come from “free” sources, versus paid sources (advertising). Success breeds success and as a site continues to do well and show up for many keywords it becomes more difficult to dislodge. The site is focusing on increasing its natural visitors to 60% by 2010.
In 2009, the site had an average conversion rate of 34.25%. Now, that’s good optimizing.
Case Study: Local SEO
A luxury landscape company in a major city had paid top dollar in the mid 2000s for an entirely Flash web site. That’s a major no-no as Flash is still basically invisible to search engines (you can tailor it somewhat today but it’s a VERY BAD IDEA). Back then, the thinking was, but Flash is so cool! It’s going to look so beautiful! In essence, the site was a single page with a Flash embed in HTML and all the navigation took place inside this invisible window. The client appeared in no search engine results, and thus had zero referral traffic – nobody knew he was there. He needed to rank for competitive terms in his city and generate lots of rankings so he could start getting actual customers from his website rather than having it function as a very, very expensive brochure. We went to work and translated the look of the site he loved into an HTML based page structure, then did a thorough on page SEO for every major keyword surrounding his business.
The new site indexed within days and within two weeks he’d skyrocketed to Google page #2 for an abundance of his targeted keywords. That produced the traffic (if you build it, they will come….). This was done purely on best practice, white hat, on page SEO without any link development. Within 3 weeks, he was knocking on the door of Google page #1, leading to a very thrilled client who was suddenly getting phone calls and city wide exposure to people looking for precisely what he had to offer. The site will continue to gain strength over time, and as he generates more content in the blog we insisted on, he will be positioned perfectly for years to come.