Case Study: Online Retailer

Laura Thieme
BizResearch

Customer

Board Games Express.

SEO Challenges

• Improve Google indexing of dynamic database driven web site.
• Convince small business retailer CPC advertising and shopping search was a worthwhile expenditure, when "free" organic listings had attracted most of his customer base.
• Improve traffic flow and conversion rates from shopping search engines, to justify new CPC expenses.
• Determine why we were blacklisted from MSN/Inktomi.
• Improve customer referral tracking to better understand ROI from advertising expenditures.

SEO Strategy

• Optimized site so search engine crawlers would index and improve organic rankings without creating doorways, cloaking or link schemes.
• Ensured search engine friendly dynamic URLs, without use of 3rd party URL rewrites.
• Global site optimization for all 800 plus products.
• Installed two types of referral codes to better understand where new customers were coming from, and the monetary value associated with each referral.
• Conducted extensive industry analysis and implemented numerous changes.
• Identified prior SEO company's link farm, and located link farm sites referencing Client, and requested removal. Currently advocating for reinstatement with prior SEO company, Inktomi, Positiontech and Yahoo.
• Worked directly with Shopping.com to improve conversion rates.

Results

• Google has indexed and ranked every page on the site, including all of its products.
• Top ten Google rankings for over 85% of their products.
• Increased 2003 sales by 59 percent over 2002.
• Increased customer base by 740% in a two-year period, reaching 22,000 customers in 2003.
• As of December 2003, shopping search engines sending nearly 20% of monthly sales.
• Shopping.com monthly sales referrals increased by 72% from April of 2003 to December of 2003.

Contact Information

Laura Thieme, 614-846-7560 or, www.bizresearch.com