SEO Case Study: European Motors

The Problem:

One of our newest clients, European Motors, had a difficult time on the web going through one of those Yellow Book style web hosting packages.  They needed to be on page one of Google and fast.  Thats where MCV came in.

What We Did:

MCV rebuilt the entire site focusing on SEO and elements that would drive acquisition of European Motors beautiful vehicle inventory.  This included on page and off page SEO work as well as a nice graphical update and more content on the site.  In order to save money, we advised them to have their mechanics do true link building via service forums to drive high value off page link building.

The SEO Results:

Amazing.   Within weeks their organic traffic numbers grew.  Within a month, they were on page one of Google.  Not only were they on page one, they were on for an extremely difficult keyphrase, “Jaguar Repair”.  Yes, this local Jaguar sales company was just two places below Jaguar of North America for Jaguar Repair.   Thats the power of SEO and MCV.

I have been researching SEO and Flash/Silverlight for some time now and have found some good tidbits out there. Here is an excerpt from Googles webmaster blog:

Google can:
Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.
Discover links within Flash files.
Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
Index sites scripted with AS1 and AS2, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. Update on June 19, 2009: We index sites with AS3 as well. The ActionScript version isn’t particularly relevant in our Indexing process, so we support older versions of AS in addition to the latest.
So it is critical to know that internal links are indexed, JavaScipt/ActionScript and textual content. As far as I have researched only Flex allows meta tags, not Flash. Here is a good post: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html

As for Silverlight and SEO, there is a little more hope as with Silverlight the XAML files can be indexed in search engines.

I have been searching for well over a year to find the best SEO software and I have found it.

SEO PowerSuite is by far the sweetest SEO software I have ever used. This is why:

1. It tracks keyword performance easily with nice graphs.
2. It creates nice custom reports that I can send out to clients with private label branding.
3. It does a very nice, deep analysis of pages and provides real recommendations that I can actually use.
4. It cuts about 75% of my time in pulling all of this together.

Give it a shot, I used the free trial for a while then decided to go Pro then Enterprise. I didnt need all of the products in the suite so just bought the ones I needed piece by piece.

I deal with this question all the time…what is the real ROI of SEO?

What is nice about SEO and leveraging PPC for marketing campaigns is that you can quantify ROI fairly easily. However, to do this it is critical to start with a strong foundation and a set of good benchmarks that you can map to.

A recent company I was working with had a great deal of analytics around their site however no conversion goals put in place or funnels setup to analyze.

Here was the 4 simple steps to getting them to a metric driven online strategy:

1. The first thing we did was map out the core business goals and how can they translate to true recordable conversions.

2. Next, we setup the goals in the analytics system. Since this was a lead gen campaign, we analyzed the value of each lead and in the analytics system, assigned a monetary value to the conversion.

There are some business goals that are hard to quantify, however I find it is best to start somewhere. Ultimately a good marketer should be able to use some rough analysis to quantify a non-monetary goal (if you need help on this, drop me a line)

3. Establish a benchmark with a good sample size and make sure you note any market variables that may be affecting numbers. Also, although it is a no brainer, make sure you always compare the exact days of the week to your benchmark.

4. Lastly, in analytics, filter out everything but truly organic traffic. No PPC, no link sharing, pure search engines. Now, it wont be perfect filtering because of deviations in how analytics views traffic referrals, but get it close.

This is just a starter, but what you will find is SEO can be quantified and ROI can be assessed if proper marketing planning is used from day one.

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