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This online catalog site is powered by our GravityMarket ecommerce platform which means it is search engine friendly out of the gate, 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 also implemented a blog.

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1. Built with SEO in mind: GravityMarket builds search optimization into the site through its technically optimized framework to achieve maximum visibility and minimize ongoing optimization investments.
2. More Product Pages Indexed: GravityMarket’s search optimized platform turns every page in your website into a traffic acquisition engine.
3. Increased “New to File� Customers and Overall Sales: Through increased targeted natural search traffic, product merchandising options and streamlined checkout process.
4. Integrated Product and Website Content: An easy content management solution to strengthen the online product catalog with additional keyword-rich site content including up-sell and cross sell opportunities.
5. Proven Merchandising Tactics: To increase conversion rates through merchandising options (featured, related, accessory and clearance products) and usability optimization of navigation, page layout and design.
6. Standard Integration With Backend Systems: To allow streamlined secure two-way communication between GravityMarket and backend fulfilment systems (CRM, Inventory and Order Management) using standard industry methods.
7. Robust and Flexible 3-Tier Architecture: To allow modular functional enhancements and specific customizations to meet unique business requirements safeguarding the client’s overall ecommerce platform investment.
8. Integrated Online Marketing Services: To develop and implement search and online marketing strategies to ensure profitable outcomes and growth of the business online.
9. Effective ROI Tracking and Reporting: To assess performance of ecommerce website and online marketing activity including sales conversion, email marketing, PPC referrals and much more.
10. Robust and Secure Infrastructure: To meet traffic demands as the business grows online and ensuring a safe environment for commercial transactions.

A few new features worth noting:

• The entire archives have been opened up. No more passwords required!
• Articles support both comments and trackbacks.
• Deep links to old articles have been maintained through 301 redirects.
• The site now offers RSS feeds. Not just one main RSS feed, but every category has an RSS feed.

Ecommerce is a large part of the company’s business says Van Dyke’s Director of Operations Susan Kalb. Their selection of Acumium was because the agency was able to meet their site and ecommerce needs better than any local supplier.

President of Acumium, Dan Costello says that of the last 38 site developments for their clients, 34 were for US-based companies. He also expected Acumium 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.”

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 GravityMarket and began a dialogue that continues to this day.

Solution:

The engagement with GravityMarket 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: “GravityMarket 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 GravityMarket 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 the GravityMarket team 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.”

The GravityMarket team 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 the GravityMarket team 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. They taught us how to turn shoppers into buyers and the key is to 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 GravityMarket.” - Steve Spangler