How General Tools, a B2C company whose base was an older clientele and was new to selling online, increased their web traffic substantially, attracted a broader customer base and, most importantly, increased sales.
Challenge
General Tools has been in business since 1922, selling its precision specialty tools and instruments to a middle age and older customer base. When they started selling products online, they discovered quickly that their main online competition was their own independent re-distributors. While they wanted to increase their online sales they did not want to appear to be taking away sales from these re-distributors. Furthermore, they wanted to attract a younger clientele, one that is more apt to shop online than their core customers.
They had attended many of WebMarketing123’s webinars about SEO, and realized that organic search was a way for them to attract people to their website, without appearing to compete. If they did a PPC campaign, their re-distributors might complain.
The main problem with this approach was that their website was fairly new, since it’s more difficult getting higher rankings with newer sites. Another problem was that their e-commerce tracking needed to be set up so they could attribute revenue to individual keywords.
Campaign
General Tools and WebMarketing123 set as goals 30% increase in web traffic and a 25% increase in online revenue.
The first step was identifying keywords for their products and services.
“We used a mixture of broad and long tail keyword searches,” says Michael Turner, account manager. “What we quickly found was that, while the site generated a lot of traffic from keywords like ‘hand tools’, these general words did not generate revenue. We found that optimizing for the products themselves – long tail keywords like ‘pocket hole jigs’ – had much better conversion rates to sales. Even though they aren’t searched as often as the broader terms, when you add up all of the long tails, their cumulative numbers bring in a lot of visitors.”
What made this organic search campaign unique was that General Tools built out the content on its product pages, incorporating the key search terms. E-commerce tracking was put in place, so it would be possible to analyze online sales in relation to key words, thus identifying the high ROI-keywords.
Results
It took WebMarketing123 45 days to set the organic search for GeneralTools.com.
After 6 months, the goals were exceeded. Instead of a 30% increase in non-branded traffic, the site enjoyed a 50% increase.
Increased traffic is great, but sales are what really count, and those goals were exceeded as well. Online revenue was up 35%, and in one month, General Tools experienced a 134% increase year over year.
An added bonus is that their organic search terms rank higher and higher each ensuing month. That’s only going to result in more traffic and sales.
