Built by Design – a Kansas-based remodeling company – contacted EAG in June of 2012. They were frustrated; they had hired a local search engine marketing company and believed that they had put their website and online marketing in capably and knowledgeable hands. However, they quickly realized they didn’t have a clear concept of what they were paying for or if they were getting results – what was the ROI? With very little in terms of defining the action items of their agreement, and even less with regard to regular reporting, the Built by Design website was not showing much traction after several months and the client was feeling swindled. They knew that there was something wrong, so they contacted EAG Advertising for help.
After our first discovery meeting we noticed several items that were hurting Built by Design in their internet marketing efforts. A few including the following:
- Website was developed in Flash, which is not search engine friendly.
- Website was not functioning properly causing a bad user experience.
- Website contained several broken links causing search engines to lower the website’s quality score.
- Website had minimal content, not giving the search engines enough to spider to increase search engine rankings.
- Search engine company was purchasing low quality links causing Google to flag and penalize the website, and remove it from search engine rankings.
We consulted Built by Design and explained the need to reformat the website using search engine friendly practices and removing the Flash components. We would keep the same look and feel, but put the site on a content management system that we could continually add search engine-friendly content to, and continue to optimize for the targeted keywords that were agreed upon. Built by Design decided to move forward with the new plan.
On July 1 we launched the newly formatted website and ensured that the site was optimized for the keywords that were identified. We also set Built by Design up on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Houzz. We created a content strategy to help in adding new content to the website on a monthly basis, which would consist of articles and images.
It was an upward climb and there was some frustration involved due to the penalty that Google placed on the client’s domain. Facebook would not allow us to use their domain in any of our postings because they had marked it as a URL that had been recognized for spam. We decided to use content curators such as StumbleUpon and Reddit in hopes of getting quality inbound links coming into the website. We spent a lot of time contacting Google for reconsideration and finding other ethical workarounds that would help us salvage the company’s brand URL and gain the blessing of Google. Within eight weeks we started to see the rebound in traffic and rankings as you can see from the following statistics:
| Website Visitor Growth | 60.65% Increase |
| Pageview Growth | 58.29% Increase |
| Bounce Rate | 11.45% Decrease |
New visitor volume had increased and those visits were lasting longer. Search engine rankings started to increase and Facebook would now allow us to post their URL to their own Facebook page.
Since starting our relationship with Built by Design on their interactive marketing, we’ve also had the opportunity to help them with integration using email and traditional marketing. We continue to work with them on a monthly basis managing their social media accounts, writing content, and managing search marketing efforts. We run bi-monthly reports to monitor progress and share the findings with the client so that they are continually aware of monthly tasks that we complete on their behalf. Experience has shown that with this consistency and ongoing effort, their internet traffic will continue to grow and consumers will continue to find them when looking for their services. We will continually update this case study to show our progress.
Even in the direst of circumstances, working with the right company can help you to not only recover, but grow your business and thrive. While we cannot guarantee results, what we can guarantee is that we are with each of our clients every step of the way using our knowledge and ethical search engine marketing practices to help them in every online marketing effort. We have yet to see a client that we can’t get results for.