The French shoe retailer came in
to AddReal in 2008 and our strategies have been to raise the
marketing strategies and measurement efforts. Overview This company is one of the world's largest online shoe retailers in France. The company competes against other retail sites as well as vertical market-specific sites. Product pages that are indexed and found above the competition within the search results of major search properties are indispensible to the company’s success. The company came to AddReal with a goal of ensuring that their search engine marketing strategy would improve the website’s performance within the major search engines to acquire new customers and increase new account sign-ups. Objectives The lack of spider-friendly content and the large number of pages that made up the company’s website made the site’s detailing level of product pages virtually invisible to search engines. Search engine spiders attempting to index the content would stop indexing at the main level pages and were unable to follow the navigation to all of the site’s detailed product pages. The reasons the spiders could not crawl the site easily included an inefficient URL structure, the use of robot 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 categorization for products. The website was also lacking optimized metadata within the HTML code from all of its pages. Metadata is a component that many search engine spiders still use as part of the process to rank websites. Solution An aggressive search engine optimization strategy was needed to make it easier for search engine spiders to navigate to all detailed levels of product pages from the company’s website. AddReal recommended creating sub-domains to separate products into organized categories. The AddReal team also worked with the client to modify several pages within the site to create more search engine-friendly pages and a simplified navigational structure. In addition, AddReal assisted the client with the implementation of site maps throughout the site so that search engine spiders could more easily access all of the client’s content. AddReal also recommended that the client modify the robot’s file because it had been blocking far too many pages from search engines. Finally, AddReal created customized site optimization tags and implemented them across the entire site. This made it easier for spiders to find and qualify all of the site’s pages. Results - At the outset of the search engine marketing campaign, the website received 568 monthly search referrals. Two years later, the client enjoys 47,121 monthly search referrals. - The overall online visibility of the client’s website within the top ten rankings of the major search engines has increased by 119% over the past two years. - Position one rankings alone have increased by 156%, 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 search engine according to market share, have increased by 566%. In addition, the number of targeted keyword phrases ranking in Google has increased by 321%. |
