F. Curtis Barry Company SEO Case Study

F. Curtis Barry & Company provides warehouse, operations and fulfillment consulting to retail, catalog & eCommerce businesses – and multichannel businesses that operate in all three of these markets. With expertise in warehouse and distribution operations, inventory management, business systems, and contact centers they have no shortage of business know-how but were experiencing a shortage of inquiries.

Client Goals

F. Curtis Barry & Company knew they could do better.  Generating zero leads from the 20-to-30 daily visitors to their website, all while spending hundreds of dollars on pay per click campaigns, was proving to be a fruitless endeavor.  Realizing that a change was needed, F. Curtis Barry & Company partnered with Big Oak to turn their website into a success.

"The bottom line is that
F. Curtis Barry & Company can attribute Big Oak's great SEO work to us having the strongest year we have had in the 23 years we have been in business"
- Jeff Barry

Known in the industry for their published articles in Multichannel Merchant and innovative Benchmarking ShareGroups, F. Curtis Barry & Company wanted to expand their audience to reach other retail, catalog & eCommerce businesses struggling with warehouse, inventory and fulfillment issues. We explained how SEO can increase their visibility in the search engines and drive traffic to their website – qualified traffic that is more likely to convert.
As a forward-thinking consulting firm aware of their customers' needs, F. Curtis Barry & Company is constantly innovating and rolling out new services. Being found in the search engines for each of their services helps them get in front of prospective clients as well as communicate to current clients searching for solutions using a search engine.

Our Challenges

When Big Oak began talking with F. Curtis Barry & Company, they were planning to redesign their website. This was actually a good time to bring us in as we routinely partner with website design firms to champion SEO best practices during the site mapping, designing and development of the new site. We worked lock-step with their design firm and provided navigation and copywriting guidance to the F. Curtis Barry & Company team. We also optimized the site while it was still in development so everything was complete when the site launched. 

SEO for B2B companies is just as effective. Though the sales cycle tends to be longer, you can still attribute conversions to the website if you make sure to ask phone inquiries how they found you and set up your website analytics to track visitors who fill out a contact form through to the thank you page.

Our Strategy

For this project a few of our strategies were particularly important:

Blogging

With so many talented folks on staff and constant changes in the retail industry, F. Curtis Barry & Company was able to establish a company blog with multiple contributors writing on various topics. A company blog can be a powerful tool for:

• Building links – A successful SEO campaign depends on building links to your site. A blog can help you create a buzz and get links naturally, just by having creative and thoughtful content. Blog posts naturally act as link bait and, often, your company's blog can gain high rankings for terms you are also targeting on your company website.

• Being found for long-tail terms – Marketing copy is business communication with a formal tone where as blog posts are more conversational and relaxed. Not everyone searching for your products or services will use industry terminology. A blog can help you capture searches for terms you wouldn't normally include on your company website.

• Communicating thought leadership on a subject - Corporate website copy tends to talk about your company and your solutions where as blog posts do more to provide useful information to your audiences and communicate a point of view on various topics. The more you have to say about your industry, the more you know the challenges faced by your clients. Blogging helps to build trust and showcases you as a resource for information and solutions.

• Getting feedback from your customers/readers – Enabling comments on a blog allows your readers to share their thoughts on your blog posts and ask questions.

F. Curtis Barry & Company's company blog quickly developed a healthy readership and became the #1 source of referring traffic to their company website. Their commitment to blogging about the state of the industry and their experiences gives them no shortage of topics.

The blog is only seven months old at the time of this writing and in its seventh month it has attracted over 2,000 visitors and we expect this trend to continue.

Keyword Research

With such a specialized focus, F. Curtis Barry & Company wasn't looking for a spike in traffic volumes; rather they wanted better-qualified traffic from business stakeholders searching for solutions to help their multichannel businesses. The key question ultimately became: how do prospective clients search for these types of services? This is where the flexibility of search engine optimization and the know-how of a good SEO firm are important.
Big Oak is not an "optimize once" firm.  Instead, after terms have been selected based on keyword research, competitor and industry research, and the client's own sales process, we monitor the rankings and traffic levels to see what terms are driving traffic and if conversions are increasing.  This information helps us determine if there are better terms we should target or if new pages should be created to specifically address certain topics. This is also what is great about doing a company blog. The natural language used in the blog posts creates opportunities to be found for long-tail terms no one anticipated. Those terms, and others related to them, can be applied to the company website to also draw traffic there.

Professional SEO Copywriting

Once the site was optimized, Big Oak began working with F. Curtis Barry to produce a steady stream of relevant press releases and articles that established F. Curtis Barry & Company as an industry leader while at the same time building quality links that pointed to the company website.  In addition to press releases and articles written by both Big Oak and F. Curtis Barry & Company, Big Oak began a blog marketing campaign that focused on critical terms while allowing for a shift in focus depending on industry trends and the roll out of new services.

Results

Working with Big Oak, F. Curtis Barry has increased visitors to their website, created a large readership for their company blog, and increased their rankings in the major search engines.  Jeff Barry, Marketing Manager at F. Curtis Barry & Company, said, "The bottom line is that F. Curtis Barry & Company can attribute Big Oak's great SEO work to us having the strongest year we have had in the 23 years we have been in business."

Site traffic on their main site increased from 1,136 visitors in January, 2007 to 3,255 visitors in April, 2008. This amounts to a 186% increase in traffic.

Search Engine Rankings*

*Search engine ranks change often. Results from May, 2008.

Why Big Oak is Different

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. We truly believe each SEO campaign is a partnership - we treat each client’s business as if it were our own. We care about your success because that translates into our success.

F. Curtis Barry has benefited from our hard work and personalized consultation. Contact Big Oak to see how we can help your company website achieve better search engine rankings. Our next successful case study could be your site!

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