Situation
This company is one of the world's leading wireless phone manufacturers. Their website offers a variety of mobile phones and accessories, as well as information and news about the company and their upcoming products.
Prior to engaging with iProspect, the majority of traffic to the website had been a result of relationships with the Global Corporate Website (which has a separate URL).Traffic was also coming from companies that provide wireless phone services. Although there was a steady flow of visitors from these sources, the company was looking to increase the visibility of its website within the major search properties so that they could attract a portion of the millions of searchers looking for wireless phones and accessories.
Challenges
Marketing mobile phones online is a daunting task. Competition in this particular online marketplace is fierce. The company competes with hundreds of wireless service providers, small resellers, and other mobile phone manufacturers. In addition, the company has an ever-evolving product line that their online marketers must continuously launch, replace and refresh.
The website contained a significant number of images. Although search engine spiders are quite sophisticated, they cannot read text embedded in graphics the way they appeared on the company’s site, so their graphic-intensive pages were nearly invisible to search engines.
Other challenges included the lack of non-branded keywords on the site. As it was, the site was only generating traffic on branded search terms. As a result, the client was missing out on a significant amount of traffic — users that were not using the company name in their search and simply looking for information on wireless phones and accessories. Furthermore, the client was not considering the way search terms differed depending on the stage in the buying cycle a searcher had reached. The site failed to include keywords that spoke to users of all stages of the buying cycle.
Solution
iProspect worked with the client to develop a comprehensive search engine marketing strategy that included optimization and content recommendations for the client’s existing Web pages, as well as a strategy for introducing new pages to the website. After thorough research into the mobile phone industry and the behavior of search engine users looking for mobile phones and accessories, iProspect recommended the client target additional highly relevant non-branded keyword phrases on the new pages. The goal was to more effectively target prospective and existing customers searching on general terms that did not have the company name as part of the query.
The iProspect team also prepared a best practices document to support the client’s evolving product line. This document detailed guidelines for adding new pages for each phone offered, and outlined the layout of pages, content and an internal linking strategy for the new pages. A linking strategy was also developed for existing pages within the site, which involved making enhancements to textual content and meta data as well.
iProspect also recommended that the client change the majority of images to plain HTML text on any old pages. This would help the search engine spiders find and index keyword-rich content.
iProspect’s directory submission process included a thorough analysis of competing phone manufacturer and sales sites, as well as of all the applicable directory category options. Additionally, the team worked specifically to create new directory listings for each phone and targeted accessories as new products were released. The iProspect SEM team developed keyword-rich titles and page descriptions for each listing, and made manual submissions for review by the search directory editors.
Results
After three years, the number of search referrals to the website increased by 27,474 per month.
Overall search engine visibility for the website increased by 30%.
Position one rankings alone increased by 30%.
67% of the clients’ rankings are visible on the first page of search results.
del.icio.us
