SEO/SEM Case study: Hanson’s (www.avdm.com)

Project Summary
Hanson’s is a family owned company of over 30 years. Located in the Sierra Foothills town of Sonora. They had long established relationships with both domestic and international manufacturing for POS displays as well as any other kind of display rack and shelving system. They had developed a website in the late nineties that included thousands of images of most of their product solutions. It was a bit of a cluttered site but nonetheless had all the product there for consumers to see. Their desired search terms such as “display racks”, “wire display racks”, “wood display racks”, etc… would return results on Google that were less than desirable for a company that provided probably the most inclusive inventory of said products. Internet portals that could hardly fulfill an order dominated the first 5 pages of the search engines. Hanson’s contracted Freestyle Web Design in 2003 to optimize and market the site so that their Search Engine Ranking would improve.

The Strategy
When tasked with this challenge, the world of SEO was still a bit of a moving target. One thing was for sure. With as many products and images as Hanson’s website included, the site needed to be optimized with keywords and meta data to match the wealth of product provided on the site. Google plays fair. They rank sites based on the value of the resource. Therefore, a site that provides its consumers with every product they could possibly need should be ranked accordingly. The Caveat? You’ve got to let Google know you're there. How do you do that?

1. Properly name your images so that they scream out to Google, “I’m a wood display rack!” or I’m an “acrylic display”. It’s like closed captions for the hearing impaired. Google can’t see what you are. It can only read.
2. If your site provides a quality resource, find out what spaces consumers are talking about where to get that resource and direct them to your site.
3. Stimulate conversations about your product in those spaces and be sure to provide useful, relevant information and assistance.
4. Submit your website to Google to be sure it is properly indexed.
5. Remain consistent in your effort on a month-to-month basis. Search Engine rankings do not improve over night. They actually take quite some time but if done correctly, they will remain as long as your business continues to provide a valuable resource to consumers.
6. Be patient. It will take at least 6 months to get the desired results.

The Execution
About 20 hours of site optimization SEO was followed by a simple and consistent Search Engine Marketing Plan SEM that spanned 6 months. The SEM plan consisted of about 6 hours of marketing work per month following the strategy laid out above. Some months Hanson’s site would jump up to the top 5 pages and then back down to page 12. It was all over the map for a few months but all better than its starting place which was buried on page 28 or 29 when desired searches were performed.

The Results
After exactly 6 months, one day www.avdm.com popped up as the number one result in the natural listings of Google when any variation of display rack was searched. It has remained in that top position for over 6 years. In the 35 years that Hanson’s has been in business, this was the single most effective marketing plan they had ever implemented and to this day their website generates a consistent percentage of there overall sales.

The Hanson’s exercised patience in this program as a family of industrialists in the foothills of California could not be expected to fully understand the seemingly invisible work that went into optimizing and marketing a website. They just had to trust that the work was being done and the results would be as they expected. In the end, they got more than they could have ever asked for.