 Overview Our customer is a leading global sun care products company owned by the Schering-Plough Corporation. To promote these products in the digital world, the company developed a website. Shortly after, the company’s marketers discovered that building a robust brand presence, increasing consumer awareness and attracting qualified traffic are daunting tasks for any website. They wanted to increase the number of downloaded rebates from their website and dominate the competition regarding the visibility of non-branded keywords. To achieve these goals, they realized the need for a comprehensive digital strategy with search engine marketing. Therefore, they turned to AddReal. Objectives At the beginning of the campaign, the company's website had just been released, and thus had very little visibility within the major search engines. Furthermore, many competitors’ websites within the skin care segment had already established a strong ranking in the top search engines. As a result, without a targeted search marketing strategy for the new site, the marketers risked losing potential sales leads to competing websites that had well-established search engine presence in the online health care products marketplace. Additionally, the website had very few listings in major search directories such as Yahoo! This not only resulted in low visibility in Yahoo!, it was also missing the opportunity to enhance its visibility in other major search properties as links within the Yahoo! directory are considered within the ranking algorithms of other search properties such as Google. When the campaign began, there were just nine incoming links to the site. Another challenge for the website was that it lacked rich keyword content on several important pages. Because of this, the site was not taking full advantage of search engine optimization strategies that would improve its ranking performance. Search engine spiders “feed” on content. The length of copy on each web page, the number and density of targeted keyword phrases, and the number and format of anchor text links within the content are all critical to the way search engines crawl, index and rank web pages. Solution AddReal initially concentrated on researching and analyzing the company’s target audience and their search behavior and linguistic patterns. This included consumers as well as health care providers within the skin care field. After gaining a clear understanding of the client’s business model, competitive landscape and search environment, AddReal was able to develop a robust universe of relevant, targeted keyword phrases. AddReal subsequently implemented an aggressive search directory strategy as it was seriously lacking visibility in this area. The directory research process included a thorough analysis of related sun and skin care categories and the development of detailed, rich keyword titles and page descriptions for each listing that met search directory guidelines. The AddReal team then made manual submissions for review by search directory editors. To overcome the website’s lack of visibility within search engines and to begin the competitive fight, the AddReal team recommended the addition of strategically placed, rich keyword copy for several pages of the website. The team then developed customized meta tags for various pages as well. Then, manual submissions were made to the major search engines. Finally, the AddReal team devised a relevant content endorsement strategy to drive additional traffic to the site via links from other relevant websites. Results - Since the campaign launch back in 2001, the number of monthly unique visitors to the website has grown by 6,498% in the first year. Year after year, traffic numbers continue to climb. - The number of monthly search referrals has increased 2,543% since the beginning of the campaign. - The number of keywords generating rankings for the website has increased by 36%. - The number of position-one rankings has increased 456%. - The website has far surpassed its top competitors in terms of overall visibility on non-branded keyword phrases in all top five search properties according to market share. It currently outranks its closest competitor by 385%.  |
