Case Study: One of the World's Largest Online Retailers
Situation
This company is one of the world's largest online retailers of myriad items from antiques, furniture and business items to jewelry, clothing, electronics and more. The company competes against other retail sites as well as vertical market-specific sites. So it is critical to the company’s success that all of their product pages are indexed and found above the competition within the search results of major search properties. The company came to iProspect with a goal of ensuring that their search engine marketing strategy would improve the website’s performance within the major search engines (at acquiring new customers and increasing new account sign-ups).
Challenges
The lack of spider-friendly content, coupled with the huge number of pages that made up the company’s website, made the site’s detail-level product pages virtually invisible to search engines. Search engine spiders attempting to index the content would stop indexing at the main high-level product pages and were unable to follow the navigation to all of the site’s millions of detailed product pages.
Several of the reasons the spiders could not crawl the site easily included an inefficient URL structure, the use of Robot.txt files that prohibited spiders from visiting certain pages, lack of site maps for spiders to follow to other pages within the massive site, and lack of sub-domains to categorize products. The website was also missing optimized Meta data within the HTML code from all of its millions of pages. Meta data is a component that many search engine spiders still use to rank websites.
Solution
An aggressive search engine optimization strategy was needed to make it easier for search engine spiders to navigate to all detail-level product pages of the company’s website. So iProspect recommended the client create sub-domains to separate products into organized categories.
The iProspect team also worked with the client to modify various pages within the site to create more search engine friendly pages and a simplified navigational architecture. In addition, iProspect assisted the client in implementing site maps throughout the site so that search engine spiders could more easily access all of the client’s content.
iProspect also recommended the client modify the robots.txt file because it had been blocking far too many pages from search engines.
Finally, iProspect created customized site optimization tags and implemented them across the entire site. This made it easier for spiders to find and qualify all pages of the site.
Results
At the outset of the search engine marketing campaign, the website received 17.2 million monthly search referrals. Two years later, the client enjoys 34.9 million monthly search referrals – a 103% increase.
Overall online visibility — the number of top-30 rankings (rankings on the first three pages of results) within the major search engines — for the client website has increased by 107% in the past two years. Position one rankings alone have increased by 145%, allowing the site to be found more easily by users looking for the numerous products this client offers.
Rankings in Google alone, the number one engine according to market share, have increased 543%. In Addition, the number of targeted keyword phrases ranking in Google has increased 319%.
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