Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI) is a leading retailer of specialty outdoor equipment and clothing, with revenues reaching close to $1 billion a year. REI is also seen as a leader in multi-channel strategies, offering a consistent sales and brand experience to their members and customers — whether through the 70+ retail stores, REI.com, or their catalog business.

Problem

While REI.com had developed a successful online store, they knew their limited search engine visibility represented a key missed opportunity to drive additional traffic and sales. REI.com didn’t rank well in search engines for many of its top products and the majority of its web pages and products weren’t getting indexed, resulting in greatly reduced visibility. UJ Cha of REI Online said: “it was a problem we wanted to address right away”.
While REI has a great range of products, its website suffered from several problems that were causing many of these products to never appear in search engine indices. The dynamic URLs that were used across REI’s online catalog were a big part of the problem, resulting in the site never being fully spidered. Their natural search visibility problem was compounded by small but significant issues with page titles, site structure, page content and link text, for example.
Understanding they had a problem, REI chose to work with Netconcepts to address its natural search challenges.

Solution

Netconcepts produced an audit report on REI’s website listing the problems and making recommendations on how to optimize the site. Realizing that this task involved a significant amount of work, REI engaged Netconcepts to help make the changes. We began by simplifying the URLs to make them more accessible to search bots and then worked on refining the REI site. As UJ Cha states, “The site in general needed optimizing for search engines” and work was undertaken to ease navigation, focus on keywords and make the site more search engine friendly.
Along the way Netconcepts took the time to help REI’s staff learn more about SEO best practices. As REI changes and updates their website, this training will help them keep REI.com search engine optimal. Netconcepts continues to work with REI to assist with seasonal keyword targeting and further SEO refinement.

Results

UJ Cha comments: “Netconcepts’ work has been very helpful, so far we have been very happy with all the work we have done together in 2004. We have been able to achieve full indexing in Google and we have had a measurable natural search traffic and sales increase.”
UJ Cha continues; “We received more than a 200% gain from overall natural search sales and more than a 250% gain in “non-branded” natural search sales since the start of the engagement with Netconcepts. Having a successful natural search strategy nicely complements our already successful paid search campaigns”.
In fact, the full indexing by Google means thousands of REI’s products are now visible to web consumers that were never visible before. REI’s site visibility has increased by 1000%, increasing overall natural search sales.
“We have decided to renew our contract with Netconcepts for 2005. Netconcepts has opened our eyes, not just on the importance of many of these elements but on specifically how to implement best practices.”

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figleaves.com, is the global leader of multi-brand intimate apparel etailers. The figleaves.com website features 250 brands and more than 30,000 items of lingerie, swimwear, sleepwear, activewear, menswear and hosiery. Brands range from designers such as La Perla and Andres Sarda to basic Playtex and Wacoal. Additionally, figleaves.com provides quality service to over 70 countries worldwide.

Challenge:

After establishing a headquarters in the United States, figleaves.com came to the realization that if they wanted to compete in the global market, they would need an expert SEO company. They had already engaged another search marketing company to help them with aspects of SEO, but figleaves.com wasn’t reaping the benefits that they expected and were starting to experience a decline in natural search traffic. figleaves.com was seeing moderate traffic for a variety of keywords but not seeing the natural search conversion they expected. They wanted to increase natural search traffic to the most relevant pages without making visitors dig through pages of results.

Solution:

Knowing the reputation of Netconcepts and the work of their president, Stephan Spencer, figleaves.com chose to consult with Netconcepts to complete a Natural Search Audit of their E-Commerce site. “Netconcepts’ audit process showed us all the areas of our site that needed attention, and helped us understand how to prioritize them to achieve a search optimized site,” stated Richard Brooks, Search Manager at figleaves.com. Netconcepts prescribed an initial focus on resolving structural barriers like URL structure, linking, and navigation before moving on to content optimization and other SEO tactics. “Netconcepts really helped us to clarify what our priorities should be,” stated Richard Brooks. “Netconcepts’ expert analysis and prioritization of our SEO issues helped us rally the support we needed in our organization to make some real SEO progress.”

Results:

Netconcepts provided the SEO methodology and program structure figleaves.com lacked internally to fully capitalize on their natural search potential. Within the first months of implementing Netconcepts’ recommendations, figleaves.com had already experienced a 40% increase in their natural search traffic. “We now rank on page one on Google for three of our most important keywords: “swimwear,” “underwear,” and “bras,” stated Richard Brooks. One of the most important influences in increasing rankings is the acquisition of back-links. Already, figleaves.com has more than doubled their number of back-links. Indexation alone has risen over 15% across Google, Yahoo, and MSN to top 300,000. Ed Bussey, Senior Vice President and Head of figleaves.com US had this to say, “We got great buy-in during our discussions and have seen great results from your recommendations. When we want to improve our SEO strategy further, we will come back to Netconcepts.”

Homestead.com is more than your typical web hosting company. They have a WYSIWYG tool for constructing the website as well. It is an all-in-one solution. The company hosts over 12 million members who use their service

Challenge:

Homestead.com had no visibility in Google or Yahoo! in the natural unpaid search results for search terms like “web hosting”, “website hosting”, or “web site hosting”. Homestead recognized that the traffic and sign-ups coming through search engines were nowhere near what they should be or could be. They approached Netconcepts after attending a session given by our President, Stephan Spencer, at Internet World in 2003.

There were several key constraints that Netconcepts and Homestead had to work within. First, the website was encapsulated within their Site Builder software platform and they wished to continue using this platform, one we were unfamiliar with. Second, they wanted their internal IT team to do all of the implementation work, so we had to do a complete ‘knowledge transfer’ (think: Vulcan mind meld) to a team of very competent technologists who, although very savvy with web technologies, were not up to speed with the latest search engine optimization best practices. Third, no significant changes to the look of the home page were allowed, at least not at this early stage. This was a tough constraint for us to work within, as their home page had very little room for content. Home pages with much more content have a distinct advantage in the search engines. So, not being allowed to add much content to the home page nearly hamstrung us.

Homestead recognized that web hosting was one of the most competitive markets as far as search engine marketing was concerned. It was going to be hard work to get on to page 1 when there were 12 million other pages in the search results to compete with.

There were already competitors to Homestead who were old pros when it came to search engine optimisation and to pay-per-click. Trumping them would be no small matter. Indeed some of the bigger players in the hosting business were willing to pay unsustainable sums of money to attain top rankings (for example, as much as $10-12 per click for visibility in the paid search results).

Homestead’s site was in frames, which posed a real problem considering the degree to which search engines have problems with framed websites. Indeed Google cautions against the use of frames on their Information for Webmasters page, stating “Google supports frames to the extent that it can.”

Solution:

The engagement with Netconcepts involved an in-depth search engine findability audit that included strengths, weaknesses, missed opportunities and recommendations in areas covering URL structure, content, HTML, internal linking structure, and analysis of keyword markets.

We prepared a 50-page audit document that also took into account: usability, design, style, accessibility, and other core issues that contribute to a website’s commercial success.

We then presented our audit findings, conducted a training intensive with their IT and marketing teams, and then returned for a second training intensive later that month.

This was followed by six months of ongoing support, where we guided them through the process of implementation.

The Stage 1 mild re-design of their site still used frames, and shortly after the six-month engagement, they launched a larger scale re-design of their site that was, thankfully, frame-free.

Before

After

Results:

Within eight weeks of the launch of their mild re-design they were on page 1 for “website hosting” in Google.

With our audit as a blueprint, later that year Homestead launched an internally built complete site re-design which landed them the #1 Google position for “website hosting,” which they have since sustained almost continuously over the course of the past 12 months. Not bad, considering very little additional SEO work has been rolled out on the site since early 2004.

Ken Chen, Marketing Director of Homestead states: “We are an internet company and there was considerable resistance in hiring Netconcepts. Some here felt that they knew everything there was to know about Search Engines. But, the fact is that the Search Engine industry is changing so quickly and is growing so quickly that a company like ours cannot possibly stay on top of it all. Netconcepts did an excellent job of training us on what is really critical in the world of search engine optimization. They have a great framework and philosophy about what works that is very much in line with how Google and the others are thinking. We paid for their expertise in an area where we didn’t realize we needed help. And, they delivered great recommendations and we saw immediate results. From my point of view, it’s been a great investment.”

Netconcepts developed and maintains this site as a free service to the writing community. Essentially a searchable directory of writers, editors, agents and publishers, an active discussion forum has made this site a popular point of contact for the literary community. It contains entries for literally thousands of well-published writers with a well patroned (and very entertaining) discussion forum.

Challenge

Founded in 1994 by Stephan Spencer, also Netconcepts’ Founder and President, WritersNet was started as a labor of love because he and his wife were both writers. However, in order to devote resources to maintaining and expanding the WritersNet site, it needed to be a viable business model.

Of the 30,000 writers who have profiled themselves on the site, how many of them would pay an annual subscription to post their listing to use the discussion forums? Probably not very many. Therefore we needed a creative solution to keep the site free for visitors but generate revenue for Netconcepts.

Solution

The solution lies in Google’s AdSense program. By placing Google ads throughout the site we were able to monetize a loss-making site and turn it into a profit center. Through some automated SEO techniques, we were also able to enhance the tens of thousands of pages of user-generated content to make it more search engine optimal which really ramped up the traffic levels. Furthermore, Netconcepts optimized the Google ad placement, sizes, fonts and so forth to maximize the clickthrough rate.

Results

The site now regularly generates over $5000 per month in Google AdSense revenue, and that is with just a handful of hours spent each month maintaining the site. The community of users continues to build content. Every day new search engine friendly forum posts are posted and make it into the search engines along with new writers’ directory listings.

The site boasts over 80,000 pages in Google and traffic levels are in the hundreds of thousands of visitors per month.

“My staff at Netconcepts have really risen to the occasion on this site, taking my pet project that I started when I was still a graduate student and turning it into one of the most visible and most respected online communities of published writers on the Internet. One staff member in particular, Hamish Gilbertson, really rose to the occasion and nurtured the community and took the site to new heights, even spearheading the development of a printed anthology of WritersNet authors. On top of it all, the site makes a healthy profit each month. Who needs clients when you could be your own client and have a site as successful as this? We still love our clients by the way!”

InnSite is one of the leading bed and breakfast directories on the Net. Founded in 1994, it is also one of the longest standing ones. The directory covers 68 countries, all 50 US states, all 12 Canadian provinces/territories and detailed directory listings number over 12,000. Selected by Yahoo! Internet Life magazine as “Best Inn Directory” and reported on in the Wall Street Journal.

Challenge

Since its inception, InnSite has been a free service to both innkeepers and travellers. The site is actually owned by Netconcepts which gives us a lot of lattitude. As a free service the challenge for us has been to make InnSite a profitable venture for us, one that warrants our continued focus. The site was well search engine optimized and had a significant amount of traffic, in fact it is one of the highest trafficked websites of all the sites that we host. However all that is of no consequence if the site is actually a loss-making venture. So we were looking for a way to make money without adding significant overhead or drastically changing the business model. That is not to say that in the future we won’t decide to charge innkeepers a subscription fee, but at this point in time we have opted not to.

Solution

Thanks to Google’s AdSense program we had a path forward. Using a number of techniques to optimize the Google ad clickthrough rates, including such things as placement, colors, sizes, and keyword foci, we were able to turn InnSite into an ongoing revenue stream. Further search engine optimization of the site pages gave us a further lift.

Results

InnSite went from being a loss-making venture to one of our most profitable web projects. Our Google AdSense revenue regularly exceeds $10,000 per month and, considering the handful of hours that we put into maintaining the site each month, it offers quite a lucrative profit margin.

Stephan Spencer, founder of InnSite and of Netconcepts has this to say:

“My staff’s superb understanding of SEO and AdSense optimization saved this little pet project of mine and turned it into a viable part of Netconcepts’ business and for that I am grateful. The bed and breakfast industry is one that is close to my heart.”

For the future, we intend to continue developing InnSite, using it as a test bed for Web 2.0 search engine optimization approaches. Stay tuned, and hopefully in the not-too-distant future you are going to see such things as tagging and blogs incorporated into InnSite!

Problem:

Although Steve Spangler has this great persona in the offline world, it wasn’t translating very well to the online world.

“Our ecommerce site was terrible. No, it was worse than that. The website was abysmal,” says Steve. “I was getting one million viewers a week on TV but I was ashamed to send people to our site. After a first re-design (by another company) there will still problems. They knew nothing about SEO or how to translate the Wow Factor into sales. They could make a site that was aesthetically pleasing but they didn’t know how to wrestle the credit cards out of people’s wallets.”

After researching the problem Steve discovered Netconcepts and began a dialogue that continues to this day.

Solution:

The engagement with Netconcepts began with a website audit. We evaluated their existing site and made a whole raft of recommendations on how to improve it or do it better, as far as usability, functionality, search engine visibility, and making the site stickier. All of this had the goal of changing the site so that people will want to return to it again and again.

Steve Spangler Science liked the audit so much they asked us to implement our recommendations through a site re-design which we did, vastly improving the functionality of their ecommerce shopping cart site, and getting every page into Google. The whole site was re-built from the ground up to be search engine optimal.

Steve comments: “Netconcepts taught us to do things differently, to think differently about our web content and to write differently. I realized I was searching for the wrong thing. I had to learn to see the invisible stuff behind the web pages that make them rank well in the search engines. I had to stop thinking like a cataloger and instead draw upon my TV skills from the Four O’Clock News, I had to grab someone’s attention and keep them from clicking off to another site and Netconcepts helped me realize this”.

We also wanted to convey how entertaining Steve was. We did that through installing fun product demonstration video clips on the site and then later through suggesting Steve start a blog. We helped Steve through the whole blogging process: evaluating blogging software, designing the look-and-feel, and training Steve on how to write for blogs.

“The blog came about when I came to Netconcepts with an idea for a site re-design and they replied with the blog concept. What’s more, their concept was going to cost one-third less and be more effective than my original idea. I thought this honest, collaborative approach was great and in retrospect the blog was the right next thing to do. It gave our site more punch. Now it will become the cornerstone of my new speaker website.”

Netconcepts also assisted with email marketing: email strategy, with template creation, delivery and tracking, ensuring the goals of increasing visibility and usability were adhered to at each step.

Results:

Steve Spangler’s ecommerce site has grown in the past 18 months with revenue increasing three figures to mid five-figures a month..

Steve’s blog, although relatively new as of this year has already achieved a PageRank score on a par with his ecommerce site.

“A detailed analysis of our print catalog marketing plan revealed a direct correlation between catalog distribution and increased web traffic. However, a survey of our top customers revealed that they turned to our website to get MORE information on a product that interested them. Our high-content website not only answered their questions but prompted them to buy additional products that “grabbed” their attention.”

“Together we worked to make a very successful arm of my business. I am a tough client and I don’t have a six-figure annual web budget. Why did I agree to publish information in this case study? Am I concerned about our competitors getting a hold of it? Sure. But I have trust in Netconcepts to protect our innovative ideas and creative marketing strategies. Anyone can hire a web design company to “open up shop” on the internet. But just because a store is open doesn’t mean that anyone is shopping or buying. Netconcepts taught us how to turn shoppers into buyers and the key is have creative ideas, to think differently and to be innovative. It’s easy for our competitors to imitate (and we see it every day), but the real secret to internet marketing is to innovate. That’s why our competitors will always be 8 month behind. Thanks Netconcepts.” - Steve Spangler

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