Big Oak Client: Danforth Diamond
The jewelry business is a tough market to penetrate when you are the new kid on the block. And when diamonds enter the picture, the stakes get even higher.The founders of DanforthDiamond.com knew that with giants such as Blue Nile, Mondera, De Beers and Helzberg dominating the industry in cyberspace and beyond, they would need an aggressive Internet marketing strategy to give them a competitive edge. Realizing that search engine optimization was a step in the right direction, a referral from an employee led Danforth to team up with Big Oak to help bring the traffic needed to make their online jewelry store a success. Danforth Diamond’s GoalsTheir main goal in implementing an SEO campaign was to achieve high search rankings for targeted search terms such as diamond engagement rings, engagement rings and diamond jewelry. While many other terms were sought after, a strategic focus was made for engagement rings as this is the jewelry category they specialize in and their primary sales objective. Our ChallengesWe faced some major challenges when starting with the Danforth: they were a new company with a new website and a limited budget. Because the website would be new, and age is a major factor in how quickly and how highly a site gets ranked, we knew we would have to develop an unconventional search engine marketing strategy to get the company ranked in such a competitive market. Our StrategyDanforth wanted to rank for competitive terms such as “engagement rings” and “diamond rings” right away – and typically more competition means longer timeframes for high rankings – so we suggested another idea to bring traffic to the site sooner. We decided to focus SEO efforts on getting ranked for less competitive search terms related to topics their target audience would search for as they planned for an engagement ring purchase, such as “engagement ideas,” “romantic ways to propose,” and “how to get a man to propose.” This way Danforth would receive site visitors interested in an engagement ring while they were waiting to be ranked for the more competitive terms. Reaching for the lower hanging fruit from the outset gave Danforth the traffic they needed to start selling and provided a solid base for our link strategy in the future. ResearchPreliminary research was conducted on more than 100 search terms and www.danforthdiamond.com was analyzed to see which pages would be optimized. Twenty pages were selected initially (with many more to come in the future) to be rewritten with the search terms incorporated into the page content, and each page was given a specific focus. Changes were made to replace data-driven url addresses (e.g. www.example.com/page.php?var1=23) with search engine-friendly static urls (e.g. www.example.com/product.html). This simple change dramatically increased the number of pages the search engines were able to find and index on Danforth’s expansive site. Professional SEO CopywritingOnce the site was optimized we began an intensive search engine marketing campaign and while hard work and research are the basis for a successful campaign, the devil is always in the details. Some of those details included writing professional press releases, articles and blog posts that focus on critical search terms, providing links to their site and much needed visitor traffic. BloggingBlogs are powerful tools and we proved this with Danforth by creating an informative jewelry blog to bring thousands of visitors to Danforthdiamond.com. A blog was used because it ranks quickly and more frequently than many websites. Danforth’s blog posts on palladium jewelry were especially helpful in driving traffic to their palladium jewelry page. The palladium blog posts established Danforth as an expert with helpful advice, pointing visitors to Danforth if they were interested in purchasing. Impressive ResultsThe optimization strategy and search engine marketing campaign helped the site get quickly indexed by the search engines. In only a few months Danforth’s new site was ranked by Yahoo and MSN, and a soon after Google began listing the site. Today, www.danforthdiamond.com is listed within the first pages of the major search engines for many of their search terms including “diamond engagement rings” and “engagement rings” and their rankings continue to improve steadily each month. Increasing Visitor Traffic“We’re getting higher traffic each month – it has grown significantly since we first started to work with Big Oak,” said Jill Renee, president of Danforth Diamond. In Danforth’s first full month on the web they received 1,000 visitors who viewed 12,000 pages. One year later they averaged 25,000 visitors per month who viewed 181,000 pages. Those are staggering increases of 25 times the traffic and 15 times the page views.
“Working with Big Oak has been very beneficial,” Renee said. “I feel that they really care about their clients and they try to make your business as good as it can be – they treat your business as if it were their own.” Why Big Oak is differentWe couldn’t have said it better ourselves. We truly believe each engagement is a partnership and that means treating each client’s business as if it were our own. We care about your success because that translates into our success. It is extremely gratifying helping Danforth turn their site rankings from a lump of coal into a sparkling diamond. Contact Big Oak to see how we can help your company rise in the search engine rankings. Our next successful case study could be your site! Search Engine Rankings*
*Search engine ranks change often. Results are from February 6, 2007. |
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Does every site need optimizing?Every site can benefit from optimization. It targets your sites, helps searchers find you and encourages both sales and interaction. |
