Web Site Makeover - The Changes we made and Results we received

This article is about a case study performed by DataFlurry Search Optimization in an effort to help others analyze their web site and make changes on their site to help further their online success. This case study was based on a web site and search engine optimization overhaul started in December of 2007 on www.gomeyer.com. The link to this websites statistics is available at the bottom of this article.

Our analysis prior to any changes:

The Pros: Gomeyer is a motor hobby website that had already obtained many high-quality inbound links by themselves and from our past seo work. Another positive is that the web site had a lot of content. The third best thing going for this web site is the fact that it had a long presence on the internet which is valued because in many search engine algorithms (especially in avoiding Google's sandbox theory).

The Cons: The overall utilization of the site was very poor. The average number of visitors was at 756 unique per day; however that number was on a speedy downhill slide.

The site had a home page as well as a large shopping cart system. Unfortunately all the products were on static php pages without any content changing regularly to show the search engines that the page is being constantly updated. Additionally all the pages did not have proper page titles, URL's, keywords as well as content. Many of the items lacked key phrases or words that most consumers would search for that product with. Additionally; most images had no relevant alt text to help meet all the search engines standards.

The overall navigation was not easy to use, and the products descriptions were lacking any basic and/or good content to help get listed properly in search engines. The home page as well lacked rich content that would help to obtain rankings under their desired key search terms.

Every site we work on requires a good title, which flows down to complete meta-tags, and then each page must have correlating content. A large percentage of the pages on this site were lacking one or another.

Our ideas and decision to move forward:
After speaking with the client, we realized that he was not happy with the current web site and layout, so we decided to take the same shopping cart system used before - however implement a fresh cart in to an entirely different web site design. We also decided to add a few new features that would hopefully make a big difference.

We understood that the majority of the content Gomeyer had in their arsenal were the very products in their shopping cart. Therefore we realized that this shopping cart (Oscommerce) needed several modifications to actually succeed in capitalizing on all the web sites content. We needed each product within the shopping cart system to have a page with a custom title and Meta tags. We additionally needed to include product keywords in the URL or web address (of each product) since this has a known positive effect for search engine optimization in Google and other major search engines. For example, we wanted to change the products page names from www.gomeyer.com/product322.php to www.gomeyer.com/product_keywords_here.php.

Our feeling was that each product's individual page had too many different problems (as far as being friendly to search engines), that it would be beneficial to go through each item and re-create the item with new descriptions and product names. In essence we were performing a complete overhaul from the original design. You may ask why we did not just change the current shopping cart in to what we wanted. Our belief was that the time spent to adjust what was previously online and modify it in to what we desired would take the same amount of time; however the end result would be poor.

We also decided to keep the old shopping cart online in the background (where it wouldn't be noticed) as a link at the bottom of the web site for reference. This was done in order to keep any extra traffic from being lost from past links to the old shopping cart. If anyone arrives at the old shopping cart; they will be pointed to the new one when customers arrive on it.

We also created an easier to use on-the-fly navigation that was search engine friendly; because the stock oscommerce shopping cart navigation can be very confusing and hard to navigate. Therefore forcing users to become frustrated and look elsewhere. Easier navigation definitely helped increase sales immediately after we launched the new web site.

Launching of the new site:
We launched the new site on January 6th, 2008 and the major search engines responded better than expected from the moment the new site was implemented. Of course it kept growing over time because of the amount of time it takes search engines to index a large number of pages.

Within 2 weeks traffic had nearly doubled, and has continued on an upward slope ever since. December's average daily visitors were 756; January was 1299; February was 1423; March was 2218; April was 2684; May was 3090. The interesting thing is that December for this type of business is usually the busiest month for visitors because of the holiday purchasing and interest in items that are purchased as gifts. Usually traffic is up around 30% above normal months due to online shopping trends. As of right now the traffic has already quadrupled and we anticipate even further growth if we continue on with link building and implementing new products in to the web site.

Tracking data pulled from https://www.gomeyer.com/webstat