Van Dyke’s Restorers, a business-to-business furniture restoration supplies cataloger sends out over three million catalogs per year. Van Dyke’s is a leading supplier to professional furniture restorers nationwide.
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.”
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