Here’s a quick client success story in-the-making that I think is worth sharing with you: the Pacific Life Holiday Bowl is a client of ours. For you non-sports fans out there, the Holiday Bowl is one of the post-season bowl games held annually in college football (aside: it’s one of the best bowls year in and year out). We’ve had the pleasure of working with them for the last few years.
After last year’s game, the Holiday Bowl said they wanted more organic traffic for the 2009 game (being held at the end of December). Although the site gets decent traffic all year long, it gets an overwhelming majority of its annual visitors in December (when the game is played). So December is very important. It’s their entire year. The vent is once-a-year, so the better the webiste performs in that month, the higher they can charge for ad deals, partnerships, etc.
We did a few basic things to help improve their overall search profile. And so far, those things have paid huge dividends. Traffic for December of this year is way up when compared to last year (stats listed below) and the year before (which is as far back as we have traffic stats for the site).
Here’s what we did:
1. We looked at the last 18 months of data about how the site was performing organically. As you might guess, the site dominated searches for “holiday bowl”. But we noticed for searches like “holiday bowl tickets” (a really popular search), the site was getting beat by ticket dealers and brokers. We saw a huge opportunity to gain substantial traffic just by improving on 10 searches similar to “holiday bowl tickets” – ones that had high volume and low/”beatable” competition.
2. Here’s where we addressed the fundamentals: for all of the pages we wanted to rank in those 10 terms, we rewrote the URLs and meta data using the most valuable keywords.
3. We checked out any pages that were listed as “not found” in Webmaster Tools and redirected to existing pages. This saved them a bunch of wasted link juice.
That’s it. That’s all we did. I’m not saying that took us 5 minutes to do, but it wasn’t like we had to come up with come kind of extravagant plan. We just stuck to the fundamentals.
Here are the traffic numbers so far for December 1-9 (as compared to December 1-9, 2008):
* Traffic is up just over 82%
* Pageviews are up 70%
* Average time spent on the site is up 10%
That’s all great, but what about organic traffic? (what they asked for):
* Traffic coming from Google organic search is up 120%
* Traffic coming from Yahoo organic search is up 24%
The best, and most telling, number might be this one:
* Last year people visited the site as a result of clicking on the search result for just over 2,400 keywords. This year that number is 5,200 keywords! So the net that was cast out in the search engines was twice as big this year than last year. That’s a huge difference.
And finally, traffic from the term “holiday bowl tickets” is up 180% thanks to be ranked #1 in Google.
What’s the big deal? This reinforces what we tell potential clients when we talk about our strategy to help them. You have to get the fundamentals of search engine optimization right first.
We frequently talk to companies who are eager (rightfully so) to change their search profile. They are in a big rush to get aggressive with massive PPC campaigns and the like. That’s great. We can do that for you, we tell them. But often times, as is the case here, we can deliver huge ROI just by making sure the basics are done right. Page titles and URLs are underrated when it comes to SEO, but they make a big difference.
Granted, the Holiday Bowl has the best domain name possible. That’s super valuable for them. That being said, the way the URLs were built didn’t leverage that domain fully. So now what we are seeing is improved performance in the long tail of keywords. And that’s where any website, regardless if they have the perfect domain, can see a serious improvement in traffic.
Thoughts? Comments? Any similar experiences? Share them in the comment section below.