Situation
Sharp Electronics manufactures consumer and business electronics, including TVs, appliances, copiers, laptops, and solar products. The primary purpose of the Sharp Website is to support and promote the company brand. The site also provides detailed product information as well as customer support.
Sharp’s late emergence to the Web resulted in missing out on obtaining their brand's Web domain name, www.sharp.com.
Consequently, the company recognized that protection and fortification of their brand name on the Web was going to be an additional challenge to maintaining their status as a renowned leader in their industry. Prior to contracting with iProspect, the organization had done little to position itself in the major search properties.
Challenges
The Sharp Website was not visible within the major search engines on the branded keyword phrase, “sharp.” In addition, the domain, www.sharp.com, was taken by a health care provider. This meant that Internet users searching on the brand name “sharp,” or users who direct-navigated to www.sharp.com expecting to find Sharp Electronics product information found a website about healthcare instead. As a result, potential customers were left frustrated, and the Sharp Electronics Website at www.sharp-usa.com received very little traffic.
Marketers at Sharp realized that to increase the visibility of sharp-usa.com the site would have to be redeveloped with a focus on search engine marketing tactics. For example, the site did not have meta data, keyword-rich content or
categorized product sections. As a result, the marketing team at Sharp was not capitalizing on the website’s full potential.
Sharp’s international corporate offices streamlined the U.S. domain name from the original www.sharp-usa.com to www.sharpusa.com, posing another challenge in the search engine marketing campaign. Not only was iProspect tasked with improving visibility and traffic for a site that did not own its brand domain name, but the team also had to transition the site to another URL. iProspect was challenged to increase the number of new pages indexed by Google and other search engines, revise all directory listings and external links, and create meta tags for the new website.
Solution
At the outset of the Sharp campaign, iProspect recommended the client create sub-domains to separate products into categorized sections. Keyword-centric sub-domains, containing a significant amount of related content, would help increase visibility because search engines in many cases will index sub-domains separately. Furthermore, unique sub-domains may be submitted to search directories for additional listings and create further opportunities for internal linking.
After working with the client to isolate a number of key traffic-driving search terms, iProspect made recommendations to enhance content on specific Web pages around these targeted keywords. For directory submissions, iProspect subsequently recommended relevant, keyword-centric categories that directed users to specific pages within the Sharp Website. The team then developed keyword-rich titles and page descriptions for each listing, and manually submitted each section for directory editor review.
During Sharp’s re-design process, the iProspect team created new meta tags for a significant number of Web pages. In addition, iProspect recommended the implementation of a paid inclusion program for the new site. The team researched and selected key Web pages under the sharpusa.com umbrella that offered the greatest potential for increasing visibility and driving qualified visitors to the website.
These pages were then submitted to the major search engines via a paid inclusion program (pages are submitted in an automated fashion through an XML feed). The iProspect team then monitored and reported on the results of the Sharp paid inclusion program.
iProspect also initiated a relevant content endorsement™ strategy on behalf of Sharp. The team not only worked to build linking internally (within the Sharp Website), they also worked to locate external websites containing subject matter that relates to Sharp’s content and establish relevant content endorsement™ via links from those sites to help drive additional traffic.
To provide further assistance with Sharp’s domain name change, iProspect recommended the client implement "H1" tags on key pages within the website, and every main sub-domain page. This coding helped to identify content on each page to search engine spiders. Additionally, the iProspect team suggested that duplicate content be removed and Sharp establish 301 permanent redirects. This helped search engines to seamlessly follow the path from the old site to the new site.
Results
The total number of search referrals to the sharpusa.com website has increased 276%, jumping from 82,500 at baseline to almost 310,459 monthly search referrals.
Despite the fact that Sharp does not own its brand domain name at www.sharp.com and the challenge of changing domain names, visibility for the sharpusa.com website has increased over 138%.
The sharpusa.com website outranks its competitors on average by 121%.
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