Big Oak

www.bigoakinc.com
Category: Search Engine Optimization

Alyssa Duvall
4600 Cox Road, 4th Floor
Suite 403
Glen Allen, VA 23060
804-741-6776
contact@bigoakinc.com

Clients & Product Categories:

Agee Woodworks	Fireplace Mantels
Bully Sticks	Dog Treats
Conklin Cars	New & Used Cars
Danforth Diamond	Jewelry & Engagement Rings
ExhibitDEAL	Trade Show Displays
SnagAJob	Job Search
Virginia Beach Convention & Visitors Bureau	Tourism
Vogue Flowers	Florist
Wendy's International	High School Heisman Awards

Case Study:

Danforth Diamond

The founders of www.danforthdiamond.com knew that with giants such as Blue Nile, Mondera, De Beers and Helzberg dominating the industry in cyberspace and beyond, they would need an aggressive Internet marketing strategy to give them a competitive edge. Realizing that search engine optimization was a step in the right direction, a referral from an employee led Danforth to team up with Big Oak to help bring the traffic needed to make their online jewelry store a success.

Danforth Diamond’s Goals

The main goal in implementing a SEO campaign was to achieve high search rankings for search terms such as diamond engagement rings, engagement rings and diamond jewelry. While many other terms were targeted, a strategic focus was made for engagement rings as this Danforth's primary sales objective.

Our Challenges

We faced some major challenges when starting with Danforth; they were a new company with a new website and a limited budget. Because the website would be new, and age is factor in how quickly and highly a site gets ranked, we knew we would have to develop an unconventional search engine marketing strategy to get the company ranked in such a competitive market.

Our Strategy

Danforth wanted to rank for competitive terms such as “engagement rings” and “diamond rings” right away – and typically high competition means longer timeframes for search engine rankings – so we suggested another idea to bring traffic to the site sooner. We decided to focus SEO efforts on getting ranked for less competitive search terms related to topics their target audience would search for as they planned for an engagement ring purchase, such as “engagement ideas,” “romantic ways to propose,” and “how to get a man to propose.” This way Danforth would receive site visitors interested in getting engaged while the site's link building efforts increased the rankings of the more competitive terms. Reaching for the lower-hanging fruit from the outset gave Danforth the traffic they needed to start selling and provided a solid base for our link strategy in the future.

Research & Planning - Preliminary research was conducted on more than 100 search terms and the website was analyzed to see which pages would be optimized. Twenty pages were selected initially (with many more to come in the future) to be rewritten with the search terms incorporated into the page content, and each page was given a specific focus. Changes were made to replace data-driven URLs (e.g. www.example.com/page.php?var1=23) with search engine-friendly static URLs (e.g. www.example.com/product.html).

Blogging – A blog is powerful tool – individual blog posts can be found in the search engine results helping a company gain exposure for ancillary terms. An informative jewelry blog was created for Danforth to drive traffic to the main site.

Impressive Results

The optimization strategy and search engine marketing campaign helped the site's pages get indexed by the search engines quickly. In only a few months, Danforth’s new site was ranked by Yahoo and MSN, with Google close behind.

	Google Ranking	Yahoo Ranking	MSN Ranking
Diamond Engagement Rings	5	36	3
Engagement Rings	5	17	7
Palladium Jewelry	1	7	1

Results from November 6, 2007

Increasing Visitor Traffic

“We’re getting higher traffic each month – it has grown significantly since we first started to work with Big Oak,” said Jill Renee, president of Danforth Diamond. In Danforth’s first full month on the web they received 1,000 visitors who viewed 12,000 pages. One year later they averaged 25,000 visitors per month who viewed 181,000 pages – staggering increases of 25 times the traffic and 15 times the page views. “Working with Big Oak has been very beneficial,” Renee said. “I feel that they really care about their clients and they try to make your business as good as it can be – they treat your business as if it were their own.”

Why Big Oak is different

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. We truly believe each engagement is a partnership and that means treating each client’s business as if it were our own. We care about your success because that translates into our success. It is extremely gratifying helping Danforth turn their site rankings from a lump of coal into a sparkling diamond. Contact Big Oak to see how we can help your company rise in the search engine rankings. Our next successful case study could be your site!

Big Oak, Inc is an industry-leading Search Engine Optimization company located in Richmond, Virginia. Their services include Search Engine Marketing, Site Optimization, and SEO Copywriting. Founded in 2003, Big Oak works with a variety of product-based and service-based companies to achieve high ranking in the search engines and drive targeted traffic to websites.