Case Studies

1. A UK-based Shower Company

A shower company, previously a wholesale only business, set up a site in 2000 to sell new showers and showering spares to retail customers.

As with many companies taking their first step onto the Internet at that time, the expectations were very high. It soon became apparent that having the website available was not enough. Whilst the business was expanding rapidly offline, the website had not resulted in a single sale by October 2001.

We were called in at that point with a remit of generating sales from search engine traffic. Owing to the lack of prior success of the website, our client was reluctant to make any further investment. We therefore agreed to minimise our budget by not spending a single penny on search engine fees (costs levied by the search engines for listings etc).

Results:

• Top 10 rankings achieved in most major search engines for phrases such as Bathroom Showers, Shower Units, Mira Showers;
• Number 1 rankings on Google for a diversity of generic phrases that include the word "Shower";
• Increase in overall site visitor sessions by 6000% to 6500 visitors a month by January 2001 (11000 in May 2002 - search engines remain the only form of advertising for the site);
• Steady stream of sales established and growing.
• Payback achieved within 4 months!

Owing to the success of this campaign, we are now discussing taking out paid listings with those search engines that levy compulsory fees for commercial sites. This will result in considerable improvements to the current statistics.

2. pastures-new.co.uk

This is a UK-based property company set up by the directors of Pasturesnew Search.

Results:

• Top 10 rankings achieved in most major search engines for phrases such as Student Accommodation and Letting Agents.
• 23,000 visitors a month attributed to search engines (a small portion of this comes from pay-per-click (PPC) search engines but the ongoing search engine spend (including PPCs) is only £200/month!)