Aubuchon Hardware had a serious problem. A year ago, the regional hardware retailer was entirely reliant on keyword buys on Overture. The company wanted to drive better-targeted traffic to the site and diversify the ways in which customers found Aubuchon.com.
"With Overture, we had all our eggs in one basket," said Will Aubuchon, who spoke at the Search Engine Strategies 2003 conference in Boston. He hired search optimization firm iProspect to help diversify.
The company wasn’t getting enough notice because "they had bought a billboard in the woods," said Brian Kaminski, client services manager at iProspect. The site had 40,000 products—ranging from plumbing supplies to beef jerky--that were not well-organized for either the e-commerce customer or a search engine crawler. Products were not featured around seasonal needs, like snow shovels in winter. And, not surprisingly, few other sites wanted to link to Aubuchon’s; it had "little credibility" on the Internet, Kaminski said.
To be able to be optimized effectively, iProspect recommended scrapping the site and starting from scratch. Many sites need a thorough re-tooling for search engine optimization to work well, but few agree to do it. This time, though, Aubuchon agreed. "I shed a few tears of joy that day," Kaminski admitted.
IProspect kept all 40,000 products on the site, but organized them into 13 categories. A different schema for each category was developed, so search engine crawlers could locate each product. A seasonality feature was added, along with better descriptions of products. Reviews from customers were sought out and published on the site.
The result? A site that was easy for the customer to navigate and user-friendly to the engines.
The redesign launched in September, but little notice was paid it the first couple of months. After six months, though, 50% of keywords appear in the top 10 rankings of search engines. More than 100 Web sites link to it. And, there are 200,000 search referrals monthly. Best, Aubuchon doubled its online sales.
Aubuchon’s lesson is simple. "If you have an opportunity to rebuild your site with search engines in mind, you should do it," said Aubuchon.
