Situation:
Dollar Days International is the premiere, online wholesale distributor and closeout company helping small businesses and entrepreneurs compete against larger enterprises. Dollar Days sells its products by the case, but prices the goods by the truckload, so small retailers can offer merchandise at competitive prices.
At Dollar Days, small business owners can order more than 25,000 high-quality items quickly, easily, and on their own schedule. The website offers customers proprietary technologies to instantly create seasonal departments and marketing materials. Dollar Days helps its customers to select seasonal and everyday items, which sell quickly to promote both a higher inventory turn and better margins.
Critical Issue:
Dollar Days International launched a new site in April 2007. The site was effective in turning site visits into sales, but search engines results were not driving much traffic to the site. Dollar Days came to The JAR Group for help in identifying the source of the problem, designing an SEO strategy and implementing a campaign to improve search engine rankings.
Reasons:
Potential sales were being lost because customers searching online for wholesale suppliers could not find the site or many of the products offered by Dollar Days. Search engine traffic made up only 53 percent of the total traffic to the site. Search engines were not effectively indexing the company’s wide product selection nor many of the pages deep in the site. The bottom line: a loss in potential traffic and sales.
Vision:
Dollar Days International asked The JAR Group to create and implement a comprehensive strategy that would:
- Make its website more visible online
- Raise the site’s ranking in search engine results for wholesale distributors
- Raise rankings for specific product searches
- Increase traffic to the site
- Increase sales
Solution:
To drive traffic to the Dollar Days website, The JAR Group implemented a comprehensive Search Engine Optimization (SEO) process, integrated with a powerful and improved linking strategy.
SEO included optimizing more than 850 pages of the website by changing page titles, keywords, descriptions, and on-page content to allow search engines to understand the content and index the pages correctly. Initially, each page was optimized based on a combination of long tail and generic keywords relevant to Dollar Days. As pages began to be indexed by search engines, The JAR Group further analyzed the ranking of each page and made necessary adjustments to further optimize the page.
Because the Dollar Days website was popular and ranking well for top-level keywords, the strategy employed a top-down approach as to not disturb existing rankings of those keywords.
The JAR Group also developed and implemented an improved linking strategy to drive more traffic to the DollarDays site directly from other websites. The linking strategy included:
- Directory Submission: Submission of the website to over 300 directories
- Individual New Links: The JAR Group contacted website owners and asked them to link to deeper sections of the Dollar Days website.
- Existing Link Revisions: The JAR Group contacted existing link partners of Dollar Days and requested that anchor text tags be revised to include optimized keywords.
- Intra-site Linking: While modifying and revising copy on the Dollar Days site, The JAR Group included links to deeper sections of the site throughout the copy.
- Article Marketing: The JAR Group created content-rich articles submission and syndicated those articles through the article directories, which in turn increased the ability of search engines to find the site.
Results:
- Traffic to the Dollar Days website from organic search engine results increased 104% in just 9 months, from June 2007 to March 2008.
- The number of keywords driving online sales increased 98% in those same 9 months.
- Revenues from sales resulting from traffic driven by search engines results now makes up over 33% of total online revenue.
- Dollar Days has extended it contract with The JAR Group and now includes affiliate marketing.