Live blogging coverage of SES NY session: "Small Business Case Studies".

Moderator:
Jennifer Evans Laycock - Director of Social Media, Site Logic; Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Guide

Speakers:
John Sherrod, Director of Search, Babybedding.com
Mike Bunnell, Client Services Manager, Where 2 Get It, Inc.
Terese Anthony, Marketing Manager, Furnished Quarters


John Sherrod

Foundational elements of SEO:

• Good site Accessibility
• Clear Site Description
• Quality links both external and internal

Case Study #1 AtlantaYoga.com

Before:
Had a lot of JavaScript content which was unreadable to search engines. Had duplicate title tags for each page. John likened this to having a room full of books that all said "Huckleberry Finn" - this would make you think you had 100 copies of Huckleberry Finn.

After:
Created unique title tags for each page. Signed up with Constant Contact to organize email list and added a newsletter signup box on homepage.

Result:

• Improved rankings from improving accessibility and crawlability of the site content.
• Increased traffic and sales.
• Had a ton of new email signups.

Case Study #2: Toyotech.com

Before:

• Changed domain name - lost trust in Google
• Image content, not text.
• Poor title tags

After:

• Optimized title tags
• Changes content to text
• Signed up with Google Local
• Foxed Broken pages with 301 redirects

Result:

• Improved traffic and huge business growth

Case Study #3: BabyBedding.com

Before:

• Content hidden by JavaScript
• Few pictures and poor content

After:

• Fixed content and accessibility issues
• Internal linking
• High quality pictures
• Optimized title tags

Result

• Google found 10x more pages and ranked them
• Improved long tail searches
• Time on site improved by 33%
• Rankings improved drastically
• Doubled traffic over 1 year period
• Higher conversions

Therese Anthony

Therese was faced with a tough challenge, to improve traffic, rankings and conversions.

Company was targeting keywords that were too broad, and yielded low conversion rates. Likewise paid search ads were very general and did not give specific info that a potential buyer would need to know.

After careful research she changed the targeted keywords to more specific keywords, and changed the paid ads to also be more specific. 

Results: Doubled conversion rate and reduced monthly spend by 60%.

Then she started digging into analytics to help improve ROI. Therese led her team to use these stats to guide their actions in a way that would make their actions more relevant to improving the bottom line.


Mike Bunnell

Case Study: Velux

Velux engaged a test campaign for paid search campaigns to get traffic for their skylight installers.

Their cost per call dropped with higher spend.

He stressed the importance of being aware of your local market.

They learned a great deal from their initial tests and felt ready to move ahead with a larger campaign.

Mike's team did some basic landing page optimization and AdWords campaign optimization.

• Divided campaigns into sub-regional campaigns.
• City bundles
• Custom shapes
• Used search network
• Used the content network
• Setup different campaigns for search and content
• Excluded low performing sites
• Created site-targeted campaigns

Q&A Key Points:

• Content Network in Adwords is not for everyone. It depends on the niche, and then do research for each site to determine value. (John Sherrod, Mike Bunnell)