While the TV show “Cheers” has a nice phrase in their theme song, “Where everybody knows your name”, this is not always desirable in website traffic. Often a website only receives brand name visits, visits from customers who already know the name.
Some of these visitors didn’t bookmark the site so they are typing your company name into Google to get the correct site. People searching for the product or service you offer are ending up on other sites as your company is not showing up in broad Google search results. If you have the budget and time for significant branding work you still want to capture the business that flies in under the radar from successful services searches.
This is a story of how we changed that dynamic around for a Rhode Island Fabric Mill…
The Starting Point
Griswold Textile Print is one of the few fabric mills in the US that hand screens fabric. They are located in Rhode Island in an historic building. The fabric is gorgeous, created by talented textile designers, who may sell through high-end NYC showrooms or their own boutiques. Hand printed fabric has a unique look and even digital printing mills will try to replicate the hand printed look.
Here is the historic mill building…
And here is some gorgeous fabric in process…
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Here you can see the impact of expanding your search traffic from company name to service:
Customers looking for GRISWOLD vs Customers looking for both GRISWOLD or HAND SCREENED FABRIC…
Gathering Data
Google Analytics is free software that tracks users to your site. While the data is not always perfect it can give some solid indications as to opportunities. In this case, we could see that Griswold was only receiving traffic from people who already knew their name, or occasionally knew there was a fabric mill in their Rhode Island location. Searches such as “Griswold fabric” or misspellings ”Grisweld” would lead people to the site. However these searchers already know about the company. Were there potential customers that were unaware of Griswold’s services?
For many customers with high end services, a few of the right visitors to your site can be a dramatic increase in business. We often are not talking about bringing in hundreds of people to purchase thousands of purple socks. We’re talking about adding several new clients a month who each bring an appreciable business with them. Local Search can be an important part of this process, although not in this case, here we are looking nationally and possible internationally, for the fabric printing business.
Stop depending on branded Traffic!
Site Optimization and the Value of a Blog
Blogs naturally increase visibility as you use your business search terms fluidly and frequently. Wordpress, and other blogging CMS’s, also allow a business owner to update their own pages. In order to avoid redesigning the entire site and to allow for some experimenting with blogging we over-hauled the old site and added a separate blog. As it eventually turned out, both sites would have such high visibility that together they dominated the search results. And in truth, this is also because there are very few manufacturers of this type, so our SEO efforts were highly and immediately rewarded.
This is Local Search Ecosystem that Feeds into Google…
Search Optimizing means research, determining which keywords work for your market, which keywords are less competitive, and locating listings that show up high in search results. I open a large spreadsheet for each client and we begin searching and tracking. Once we have a clear goal sites are overhauled in many ways: images are tagged, technical issues are addressed, titles and text are modified to incorporate keywords, usability is addressed, blogs are freshened up and filled with content. All this was done on the Griswold site.
Also feeding into Google search results are trusted industry sources. We found there was a listing of US Fabric Resources that was able to pre-filter searches, people would only be on the US Fabric Resource site if they were looking for manufacturing services which made them very valuable traffic for us. We worked made sure that we had an up-to-date listing and watched a small and steady amount of traffic come in.
The Results:
