Monday, July 21, 2008

Case Study: Small Business Website Optimization


As a small-business owner, I thought I would focus today's case study on a common challenge for small businesses. How does a small business boost website traffic, hence boosting overall visibility?

Your company website is the best way for prospective customers to get to know you. Plus, an informative and well-designed website can be a great equalizer. A small business is lucky in that if they are clever enough, and if they spend their time and money wisely, they can build their web presence to make them compete very effectively against huge corporations.

Today's case study is brought to us from Marketing Science, a marketing consulting firm that focuses on helping small businesses realize success. This case study and others can be found on their website. I like this story because it provides practical advice about how a small business can boost organic search results.

Client: Paage Et Cie Ltd.

Industry: Personal Management & Organization Services

Business Problems: Although a highly successful small business for 15 years, the 3 year old company website was receiving near ZERO natural (organic) search traffic.

The company's Internet presence was invisible to prospective clients. The website infrastructure (Meta tags, headings, keywords, etc.) was poorly designed from an Online marketing standpoint and was not optimized at all for search engine traffic or search engine marketing effectiveness.

Problem Summary:
  • Site was designed to be visually appealing , but unknowingly at the expense of marketing performance
  • No Meta Tags
  • Used One Title tag for all 25 pages of website - a major "no no"
  • Traffic was poor, only receiving referral visits by word-of mouth from a few friends and associates
  • Very low keyword density
Goals: Management wanted to maximize growth potential Online by adding PPC (pay per click) search marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Client also wanted increase sales of a booklet Online from the website.

Marketing Solution: Marketing Science implemented a full service Search Engine Optimization and Search Marketing Campaign. Setup and optimized Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing accounts for pay per click advertising, including:
  • Create and implement a website marketing plan (SEO, article marketing, content development strategy, etc.)
  • Create website content that uniquely positions client
  • Keyword research, keyword selection, keyword optimization
  • Search engine optimization & search engine marketing techniques
  • Integrated ecommerce shopping cart in client website to sell booklets from website
Results to Date: The results since the late summer of 2007 have been impressive. Website went from receiving roughly 50 unique visitors per week to an average of 42 unique visitors per day! Booklet sales have also increased by 330%.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is a really useful and interesting site. Have lots of bookmarks for sites on marketing, account planning, creative and so on but not for DM.

Regarding this post, would be interesting to know how they went about selecting keywords and how they implemented these keywords into the content.
So:

- did they go for single keywords or groups of keywords?
- what type of keywords did they use?

And so on.

Suzanne Ortiz said...

Eamon,
Thanks for the kind words. I have reached out to the firm who is responsible for this case study and asked them to visit and comment here. Hopefully, they'll see your post and respond. You can also reach the company directly at their website: www.mktg-science.com.

Suzanne

Anonymous said...

Hi,

First off, sorry for the late reply. I am getting back from a few weeks of vacation and catching up.

To answer the question about keywords:

I use a combination of mostly low, medium and some high competition keyword phrases.

These days it doesn't really pay to focus on single and two word keywords due to the stiff competition from companies that have the financial resources to make them work. Most of my keyword selections are longtail phrases of at least 3 words or more. In less popular niches, you can still derive traffic from using 2 word keywords.

For paageetcie.com, I used phrases like "personal assistant ny" and "personal assistant ct" to grab traffic from people searching with those longtail phrases.

Integrating the keywords into the content was fairly simple. Always create a title that closely or exactly matches your keyword phrase. I then try to use the phrase several times in the designated page. Sometimes this is easy and sometimes not. Some clients don't like their content messed with and you have to spend more time editing the content to sound natural and not keyword spammy. This is the balance that must be struck.

Suzanne Ortiz said...

Thanks, Bob, for your explanation. I know that I found it very helpful and I'm sure Eamon will, too.
Thanks again,
Suzanne