Big Oak Client: H.A.L. Woodworking

Established brick and mortar business moves onto the Web and gains national customer base

H.A.L. Woodworking is a small business that specializes in solid wood products such as trophy bases, cremation and pet urns, wine bottle supports and wine racks, award plaques and specialty keepsake boxes.

Big Oak designed and developed the H.A.L. site with their industry and brand in mind. We also continue to work with H.A.L. on search engine optimization of their site. Below are the rankings for some of their selected keyword phrases.*

Challenges

H.A.L. was looking to sell their products online but had not done so before. This meant organizing their products into categories, assigning the correct pricing and photographing all of them. Once both teams had a handle on the entire product catalog the site was built. A simple clean design with user-friendly navigation was needed to make browsing and buying a easy task.

Determining keywords and phrases for their products was also a challenge since they appeal to a niche market. We made sure that the keywords we chose would be intuitive to their customers.

End Results

The website, which launched September 2002, has increased sales for the company. H.A.L. has indicated that they receive orders nationwide on a regular basis giving them a much broader customer base than they could have achieved in their store.

The site's search engine rankings have steadily improved for their selected keywords. The link building campaign continues to add links to their site which improves their popularity in Google. Additional keywords have been targeted to help broaden their reach within search engine results.

Client Praise

“Big Oak was great to work with. It takes a while before Google will list and rank your site. You will have to be patient. Big Oak did a great job. Results were up to #1 on Google out of 180,000 for the search terms we selected. We liked Big Oak so much we hired them for our other site (Henderson's Furniture). We can't endorse them any better than that.”

Search Engine Rankings

Keywords Google Yahoo MSN
Trophy Bases 1 1 1
Wine Bottle Supports 1 1 1
VMI alumni gift 1 2 1
UVA graduation gift 2 3 1
Pet Cremation Urns 6 9 n/a

*Search engine ranks change often. Results from March 27, 2007.

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