CASE STUDY: ONLINE FLOORING RETAILER

Objective: Increase online flooring sales

Strategies: Search engine optimization, paid search

Work Media was hired to promote the web site of an online retailer of hard wood flooring. There were a few things going against us from the start, the main one being the design of the retailer's web site. The site's catalog pages, which comprised the bulk of the pages on the site, were coded in such a way that there was no way to give pages keyword-rich titles. Fortunately, one of our staff members has experience with .NET programming (the platform on which the site was developed), so he was able to modify the description for the catalog pages (which mostly consisted of a single page which displayed different content depending on the values of parameters passed to it) to dynamically display information pertaining to the particular product catagory or item being displayed. This made the web page titles much more search engine friendly. We also had some ability to tweak on web page copy, so we did some copy revision to emphasize certain keywords. After doing as much on-site optimization as possible within the constraints of the web site's ecommerce framework, we turned to off-site optimization - using external links to raise the site's rankings. The primary link sources used were general directories, reciprocal link partners, and social bookmarking sites. The linking campaign was begun around the end of August. We also managed a small paid search campaign for the client, although the campaign had a limited budget and often went off-line before the end of the month.

The chart below shows net sales for our client, which are showing a strong upward trend beginning in October.

The chart below shows natural (non-paid) search engine traffic for our client. Notice the strong correlation with the above chart - as natural search traffic really starts to take off around the start of October, so do sales.

The chart below shows paid search engine traffic. It is more difficult to see the relationship here between paid search and sales because of the erratic nature of this traffic, due to our client's limited budget.

The chart below shows the number of pages crawled by Google over time. Again, here there is a definite strong correlation between the number of pages crawled, natural search traffic, and sales.

This search engine marketing campaign is showing strong momentum just a few months in. With continued work, natural search traffic should continue to increase, along with sales.