Background:

Cardstore.com is a website of ink2, Inc., a leading technology and printing company competing in the web to print greeting cards space. Cardstore.com’s technology makes the process easy and intuitive and no software download is required. Cardstore hired ROI.works for a 1-year contract to increase revenue and transactions generated through both paid and organic search on its site.

Challenges:

Cardstore had designed its previous site without any serious SEO considerations, and was missing out on many opportunities to pull traffic to its well-aged domain. In addition, Cardstore had a dearth of deep content, duplicate content issues, and much fewer quality links than competitors.

The site was also not following a number of conversion best practices, so its bounce rate was very high while the conversion rate was low.

Finally, Cardstore had a huge number of SKUs with no content, and writing original copy to describe 5000+ cards was a huge task for the small marketing team.

Process and Strategy:

We broke our work with Cardstore up into 3 phases. Phase 1 saw us conduct extensive keyword research. We also ran a professional paid search campaign to get an idea of what kind of phrases led to visitors that did or did not convert.

Based on the keyword research and paid search results, we were able to focus SEO efforts on a certain number of high-volume, high-conversion phrases we felt Cardstore could compete in.

We also conducted a conversion audit, identifying 20 actionable things Cardstore could fix immediately to improve its conversion rate and decrease the bounce rate.

During Phase 2 we re-did the site’s information architecture, reformatted all URLs, and worked closely with Cardstore’s Product Marketing team to review and improve all aspects of the site to improve conversion and user experience. We also engaged in SEO-PR efforts and white hat linkbuilding.

For Phase 3, we rewrote all the content for 500 of Cardstore’s category and sub-category pages, including title tags, descriptions, and on-page copy.

Phase 4 of our work with Cardstore has focused on adding 4500 pages of SKU-level original content for each card, continuing the linkbuilding program, and integrating SEO into the business processes at Cardstore.

Results:

Overall Results: Sept. ‘08 vs. Mar. 09

• Revenue: 315.19%
• Visits: 137%
• Search Visits: 565%
• Organic Visits: 136%
• Organic Revenue: 569%
• Conversion: +63.7% (Oct. ‘08 vs. Mar. ’09)

Paid Search Results:

• Per visit value has tripled since October
• 200+% increase in conversion rate
• Significant increase in gross transactions