Problem

PoolDawg, an online billiards store, was in need of taking their internet marketing presence to the next level. They determined that SEO was the means to get them there.

“As a newer company in an established market, it was extremely important to get a jump start on our search engine listings,” says Mike Feiman, Director of Marketing for PoolDawg.com.

Their original website suffered from several structural/functional limitations and relatively low conversion rates.

Solution

An initial SEO analysis document was completed and presented for PoolDawg. The analysis covered the primary aspects for best practices in search engine optimization and provided PoolDawg a blue print for optimal execution into the organic search channel.

The analysis also provided insights that a new site structure, with optimized design and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), would benefit PoolDawg.com’s exposure in the search engines.

In order to capitalize on the SEO, structural and functional opportunities, PoolDawg decided to utilize Netconcepts’ GravityMarket Search Optimized Ecommerce Solution. GravityMarket provided PoolDawg.com an optimal site design and on a robust, scalable, software infrastructure.

“After delivering our analysis to PoolDawg, Netconcepts realized that a new site structure would do good things for their business online. We are pleased to see that our recommendation to get a new infrastructure was correct and PoolDawg is realizing the return,” stated Jody Hartwig, Netconcepts’ Vice President of Ecommerce.

New ecommerce features for PoolDawg include:

• Best practices in design and navigation, including optimal CSS files
• A stream lined, 3 step checkout process
• Estimated shipping calculated in shopping cart page
• Featured Products RSS Feed
• Enhanced Content Management System

Results

Implementation of the recommendations from the SEO Analysis yielded a 300% increase in search engine traffic.

Now that the redesign has taken effect, PoolDawg currently receives page one rankings for the targeted search term, “pool cues.”

Attention to best practices in website design, and merchandising, has paid dividends as well. Since the redesign, PoolDawg has enjoyed a conversion rate increase of 27%.

The new site design, and capabilities work to maximize the consumers’ entire shopping experience and drive them through to complete an order.

Feiman commented, “We saw an overall increase of over 300% in our search engine traffic within the first 60 days of implementation. We are extremely pleased with our initial results and look forward to expanding our relationship with Netconcepts.”

(Be sure to check out PoolDawg’s Podcast with PRWeb and Netconcepts’ VP of Client Services, Jody Hartwig)

(Also be sure to check out PoolDawg’s testimonial for Netconcepts)

This online catalog site is powered by our GravityMarket ecommerce platform which means it is search engine friendly out of the gates, with an intuitive feature rich website for customers and a powerful administrative interface for our client. Among other things, the site supports “EZ Ordering” by SKU or item number. They are also embracing the concept that “markets are conversations,” having just started a blog.

[ database | client admin cms | SEO ]

Visit the site: Emergency Medical Products

This ecommerce site, powered by our GravityMarket solution, makes it easy for Polycase’s customers to do business with them. In addition to searching by keyword, customers can search by size — length and width — and by series. They can also browse by product type, size range and application. In addition to ample product information and specifications, including engineering drawings, the site also offers a helpful PDF library.

[ database | client admin cms | SEO ]

Visit The Site: Polycase

This site boasts extensive functionality on the back-end, including some quite sophisticated integration with their own back-end systems. The site has tens of thousands of pages in Google. The revamp that we completed included a total site redesign, new user interface and a completely new website back-end and database.

[ database | client admin cms | SEO ]

Visit The Site: Full Compass

The company came to Netconcepts to establish a complete ebusiness presence. The site we created for them offers more than great nursing supplies and equipment. It offers the latest school kids news and a separate nursing blog, authored by a local school nurse.

[ database | client admin cms | SEO ]

Visit the site: School Kids Healthcare

Among the additional out-of-the-ordinary features offered to customers is a Wish List capability which is integrated throughout the site and is as simple to use as the shopping cart itself.

The site is built search engine friendly, of course, with static looking URLs, unique keyword rich title tags, and more.

[ database | client admin cms | SEO ]

Visit The Site: Tools For Less

[ database | client admin cms | SEO ]

Visit The Site: Antique Hardware

Ensure your site has intuitive navigation and usable site architecture, not just an appealing look and feel. Visitors should be able to accurately guess what a button or link does before clicking on it.

The search function (you do of course have one!) should appear in the navigation bar, preferably at the top right, where users expect to see it — and not as a button but as a type-in field, which saves the visitor from having to go to a search page to do their search.

Upon a keyword search, automatically check spelling and, when appropriate, suggest corrections. If their search is too generic, suggest alternatives (for example,”You just searched for ‘cameras.’ If you’d like, you could try a more specific search like: ‘ canon eos cameras” ‘nikon digital cameras,’ … “).

2. LEAVE A TRAIL

Incorporate “breadcrumb navigation” into your online catalogue pages. This will show where in the site hierarchy the currently viewed web page is located and it will give the visitor shortcuts to instantly jump higher up the hierarchy (for example, “Online Catalogue > Home Furnishings > Lighting > Table Lamps”). It’s good practice for usability and for search engine optimisation.

3. CUT TO THE CHASE

Make maximum use of screen real estate to minimise scrolling. Put the most important stuff (like your 0800 number) “above the fold.”

Minimise the number of steps required to locate products and make purchases. Amazon.com’s 1-Click ordering is the epitome of efficiency.

4. BE A LIGHTWEIGHT

Optimise images for small file sizes and fast downloads, strip out extraneous HTML and remove unnecessary graphics. Ideally, a page should load in less than 10 seconds.

5. BE OPEN TO ‘OPEN SOURCE’

Don’t waste budget on unnecessarily expensive software licences when an open-source solution exists. Open source offers a highly customisable, stable and low- or no-cost alternative to proprietary software.

6. STUDY YOUR CUSTOMER’S EVERY MOVE

Watch how your customers use your website and learn what frustrates them. Analyse your visitor’s traffic patterns (for example, what are the top exit pages, what are the most popular searches that return results), invite customers to complete a survey after they purchase and have informal brainstorming sessions with your most valuable customers.

7. DELIGHT YOUR CUSTOMERS

Service your customers like your survival depends on it, because it probably does. Reply to email within hours. Keep your commitments to your customers; make “under-promise and over-deliver” your mantra. If your site promises delivery in three days, that doesn’t mean five or 10.

You’ll also need 24-hour server support to effectively manage traffic surges.

8. SING TO THE SEARCH ENGINES

Each product or category page has its own unique “song” and should be made to “sing” for its own set of keywords. Your home page can’t be everything to everybody; it can’t be ranked in the top 10 for every product your online shop carries. The numerous pages that make up your online catalogue can serve as a virtual sales force.

To illustrate, the home page of Netconcept client SmokeCDs.com ranks in the top 10 in Google for “buy CDs” but it’s their category pages that rank well for genres like “drum and bass music,” and product pages that rank well for artists like “Trick Daddy” and albums like “The Matrix Soundtrack.”

However, there’s no point in making your pages sing if they aren’t being picked up by the search engine spiders. Some of America’s largest online cataloguers have problems getting their full catalogues fully indexed by the major search engines, as detailed in our analyst report The State of Search Engine Cataloguing 1.0 (published by Catalog Age).

SmokeCDs.com has tens of thousands of product pages in Google, whereas major US music retailer SamGoody.com only has a few hundred. Check how many pages your site has in the major search engines with the free tool at http://web.archive.org/web/20040708075116/.

The best results are achieved when spider-friendliness and search engine optimisation are built into the site from the ground up rather than added as an afterthought.

9. FLOG YOUR PRODUCTS

Merchandising on the web means making clever use of your virtual shelf space. Choose some products to feature on your home page and rotate through them.

Consider having a “Top 10 List” of products (as in the top 10 products you most want to sell). People are like lemmings when it comes to top 10 lists.

Also offer related product recommendations and user-contributed reviews on each of your product pages. Consider promoting limited-time, limited-use special offer codes as a way to stimulate sales.

10. BE FULLY FUNCTIONAL

For starters, visitors should be able to add items to a “shopping cart.” Furthermore, they should be able to abandon their carts and and return days later and still have the cart intact.

They should also be able to create user accounts for ease of repeat ordering and checking order status.

If it’s a consumer site, they should be able to buy and redeem gift certificates.

Online ordering should of course be secure, with a 128-bit secure server certificate installed.

Finally, hopefully you have an admin interface that allows you to add, remove and update website content yourself.

Also, regarding the up-and-coming trend for e-commerce sites to offer online forums and the question of how they can add to the site’s value proposition and also serve as search engine fodder, here’s an example of one Netconcepts did.

Ecommerce is a large part of the company’s business says Van Dyke’s Director of Operations Susan Kalb. Their selection of Netconcepts, whose development staff were based in New Zealand, was because the agency was able to meet their site and ecommerce needs better than any local supplier.

President of Netconcepts, Stephan Spencer says that of the last 38 site developments for their clients, 34 were for US-based companies. He also expected Netconcepts to double its revenue in the next 12-18 months.

Problem:

Van Dyke’s online catalog was very search engine unfriendly, and as such, was invisible to Google and Yahoo. Their site supported secure ecommerce transactions, but sales on the site were minimal. The site just wasn’t converting well. Visitors found the site difficult to use and were not compelled to purchase. Van Dyke’s asked friends and employees for suggestions of who to engage to turn things around; they were soon referred to Netconcepts as optimization and usability experts.

Solution:

Netconcepts redesigned the Vandykes.com site with search engine optimization built in from the ground up.

Our primary focus was on Google, as it is the most popular search engine. We made sure the entire online catalog would get indexed by building the site with search engine friendly URLs. We also made each page “sing” to the search engines with search optimal title tags, heading tags, body copy, image alt tags, hyperlink text, meta descriptions, etc. Design and layout was thought through so that the keyword-rich body copy would be high up in the HTML, thus maximizing keyword prominence. We developed a search engine optimal site structure so that PageRank transference from the home page to the sub pages of the online catalog was done in a strategic rather than haphazard fashion.

Van Dykes after SEO and redesign

We also assisted Van Dyke’s with their email marketing, designing HTML templates, executing the campaigns, and tracking total opens, unique opens, clickthrough rates, clickthrough by recipient, total clickers, return clickers, unsubscribe rate, and bounce rate, and most importantly, number of orders and order volume attributable to each campaign and each link.

Using Netconcepts’ traffic and sales reporting technology, Van Dyke’s began tracking which keywords, search engines, and email campaigns delivered the most sales.

Results:

Van Dyke’s Restorers has achieved phenomenal website results within just a few short months of launch. The resulting e-commerce site makes its predominantly dynamic pages visible to search engines. Susan Kalb, Ecommerce Manager for Van Dyke’s was enthusiastic about the results:

“Orders attributed to the website have increased over 500% within just the first two months of our re-launch. Traffic in that same time period has increased by over 350%, much of that due to search engine marketing. Every one of our over 9,000 product pages is in Google, most of them with great rankings.”

VanDykes.com sales, 2001-2004

Van Dyke’s is reaping the benefits of prominent search engine placement. People looking for furniture restoration products in the search engines are finding Van Dyke’s.

“It was well worth the investment to have Netconcepts rebuild our site. They have done a fantastic job, improving its usability, optimizing it for the search engines, and providing Internet marketing strategy advice. Netconcepts has far and above exceeded our expectations.”