Case Study

Light Impressions SEO Case Study

SEO Case Studies 2012

Project Overview

Light Impressions Direct, a multi-million dollar supplier of archival supplies, realized early on that a strong E-Commerce site would allow them to facilitate business, but the company’s first online endeavor fell short of expectations. The majority of traffic to the web site was driven by either branded search, which is people typing their brand name in the search box, or from catalog mailings. New customer acquisition cost had been rising steadily with cost of printing and mailing expensive catalogs as well as the reduced conversion rates from direct mail advertising. Light Impressions is a premier catalog and direct marketer using all types of sales channels to drive sales. Light Impressions had an outdated looking web site that did not rank well for its target keyword terms. Light Impressions Direct realized that current online marketing efforts weren’t accomplishing the desired goals. That’s when Light Impressions Direct engaged Active Web Group (AWG) to improve their organic search engine rankings in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, to boost sales and lower new customer acquisition costs. Active Web Group was chosen because of the specialty and focus on Internet Marketing. AWG uses a 2 pronged approach: Getting your name out there is key, but more importantly converting that traffic into the eventual results, either a lead or in this case a sale, is the sweet spot? that we specialize in.

SEO Case Studies, Light Impressions SEO Case StudyChallenges

The Light Impressions web site had only a few indexed pages in Google. The search engine spider was not seeing the thousands of product pages on the site because of the way the database code and web site code were designed. The on-page SEO methods and content of the site also were very weak, and would require a complete analysis and upgrade. The site had very little inbound linking from relevant sources and multiple internal broken links. Light Impressions also had issues with duplicated content and repetitive inbound footer links from sister sites. The bottom line here is that the work needed to be done, and Light Impressions Direct felt 100% confident that their decision to use AWG was the right decision. Results speak for themselves.

Goal

The main goal of the project was to lower the cost of acquiring new customers by improving non-branded search traffic and conversions. Light Impressions was only generating ten to twenty new customers each month from the web site and customer acquisition cost exceeded $80 per new customer. Our goal was to drive new customer acquisition cost to below $30.

Solution

AWG replaced the poorly coded web site with new search engine-friendly code. A new design was provided and updated and enhancement of all the visuals and call-to-action messages gave the new pages a more inviting look and feel. After AWG’s SEO Pre-Discovery Phase analysis, a keyword list was developed that matched Light Impressions product line and had significant search volume on the web. One of the tricks of good search engine implementation is to select keywords that are being searched frequently and match up with our client’s offerings. AWG cleaned up the on-page SEO elements of proper meta data, titles, content and internal linking. AWG also began an inbound linking campaign using directories, custom links, and a robust publishing strategy with back linking. The repetitive linking that appeared to be search engine spamming along with the duplicate content was repaired or removed.

Success

Our Client, Light Impressions, is very pleased with our results! They now rank in the top ten on Google for terms such as “archival supplies”, “archival products” and their big term of “archival albums”, which currently outranks Amazon. Their Google Page Rank improved from a 3 to a 6. Non-branded search traffic has continued to increase from 500 visitors per month to over 10,000. Conversion rates increased from the new site design and layout, and the non-branded traffic is converting at over 2%. Light Impressions is now adding over 200 new customers per month online and they are acquiring new customers at a profit!