How keyword research and SEO increased traffic to Spotty Gift Boxes by 228% by Rachelle Money, 8 July 2009

Caroline Blatchford's company SpottyGiftBoxes is barely a year old and yet Caroline is already reaping the rewards of building a search engine friendly site from the get-go. She shares her experience with Wordtracker's Rachelle Money.

Like most online business owners, Caroline has had a number of careers. A one time lawyer, teacher and then fitness club manager, she found herself in a position where she had to stay at home to look after her young family. She soon struck upon the idea of starting up a gift site based on people's hobbies and interests. But she was faced with an SEO challenge – how do you optimize a site when your biggest keyword is also extremely competitive?

Competitive keywords

Caroline says: "Because we wanted to compete well on search engines we didn't target words like 'gifts', because that's terribly competitive - we decided to focus on [keywords that centered around] hobbies and interests so we had 'gifts for cat lovers', 'gifts for gardeners', or gifts related to cooking, and that was done to attract the traffic in."

It worked. Between September 2008 and March 2009 traffic to the site increased by a whopping 228%. Caroline says the combination of creating each page with SEO in mind from the start, along with an increased depth of products has led to this incredible surge in visitors.

While embarking on her first keyword research project she was surprised by the range of keywords she discovered.

"The one that always gets me is that so many searches are for 'kids' rather than 'children's'. That's the reason why I use keyword research as a starting point because my brain is obviously geared towards the kinds of terms I am used to saying, but they don't necessarily match with the terms my customers are using.

"If I have a simple product for which I think the title is pretty obvious, once you start searching around you find people calling things by different names and searching in different ways. Once you get your mind around that you can pick up all the traffic you want to."

Seasonal keywords

As they are just one year old the team is only just learning about the trends and niche markets which they can tap into, as Caroline explains:

"We are still learning about seasonality. We had a fantastic March and sold lots of children's gardening tools but in April because of the school holidays, we saw a downturn in sales. We are keeping our fingers crossed that it will come up again."

Many young sites like Caroline's can find it difficult to compete with larger, richer companies - especially around those key calendar dates such as Mother's Day or Valentine's Day. Has she found a way around this?

"What I will be trying to do is put some seeds in now for the more competitive terms but not realistically expecting them to bear fruit for another year; but I do want to start the process. The only way we can grab traffic through events at the moment is through AdWords or the equivalent."

Link building

As a new site they are also placing foundation bricks on their link building strategy.

On the homepage they recently advertised a coloring-in competition for children, which came as a direct response to the increased traffic for child-related products.

Caroline says she has used the competition to attract parents, who are her key customers, but also schools, to whom she supplies children's cookery utensils and gardening equipment.

"We were also trying to create link bait and give schools a reason to give us a link, and that would allow parents to download the competition themselves," says Caroline.

"We have told them about the competition and even some local authorities have given us a link too."

Links from government sites can be powerful. This might be because Google trusts them more or just that government sites get lots of quality links themselves and therefore have a lot of link power to pass on. Caroline also publishes many entries online, which helps to keep children and parents logging on to see if their work is in the gallery. The prizes are top-selling products along with SpottyGiftBoxes vouchers for their school.

The link bait exercise hasn't come without its problems, however.

"The thing that we did discover, however, is that a lot of these links haven't given us the benefits we had hoped because the links are on password protected sites or intranets. I think we need to do a little more work to assess just how successful this has been, but regardless, it's been a good process to build up contacts with schools and parents."

As her website is product based Caroline says this has meant link building has been the most difficult part of the SEO process.

“It's hard because you have to give people a reason to link to you, and I think it's much easier for an information site than for a site like us. It's been a challenge to get people to link to what is essentially a shop site, and that's why we have been looking at competitions and things that people can interact with, and that our customers will find useful. “We are still in the learning process of knowing how best to do our SEO but it's the one thing I don't think we've done as well as we could have but it's certainly something we aim to get better at in the future. It's easy to find a month has gone by and you haven't done much in the way of link building.”

A lack of SEO clarity

Caroline has also found the commentary which surrounds SEO to be quite confusing as there is “a lot of mythology over absolute truth,” as she explains.

“It's very rare that someone from one of the search engines makes a clear statement. It's all a question of interpretation and then of course you have lots of websites and blogs from people who then apply their own interpretation to SEO. Sometimes you feel as though you aren't really sure that what you are doing is going to benefit your site and it's that level of uncertainty that makes me feel very wary.”

5-step SEO process

Caroline has devised her own 5-step SEO process which she feels gives her confidence in making her site more search engine friendly.

1. I think about my synonyms and I find all the words I possibly can related to my product.

2. I then do keyword research to see how many searches I have and make sure it's on UK only because that's where I'm targeting. I do this for the obvious words and the synonyms.

3. I evaluate the words and then I choose the title tag. Even before I start writing I get the title tag right, and that's done with two keywords. Typically I will make one keyword very specific and 100% relevant to my product, and then the second one will be a little more competitive or it may in some cases be a variation on the first one. For example in the Wine Accessories section I sell wine bottle coolers. For one I used the title tag 'Vacuvin Wine Cooler, Vacu Vin Rapid Ice' to pick up both the generic term for wine cooler and the brand name with and without a space. Brand names are great for optimizing because people who search a brand generally have a high conversion rate.

4. Then I start writing and I aim to get my keywords into first paragraph and in the right order with the strongest ones at the beginning. Even though I don't think people read the whole page they will read the first paragraph so it's really important and takes me a long time to get it right. I put my keywords or a combination of them in my internal links, and tags will have keywords in there too.

5. Then I use the keyword research to choose what I want for any AdWords campaign.

Lastly, Caroline says her top tip to anyone who has started a website and wants to begin keyword research is to use the above process for every product and for every page no matter what.

“It would be so easy for me to throw stuff up on the web and it's tempting, especially when you have a new product in, but if you do that you will never go back and optimize it. Doing it right from the start means your entire site is search engine friendly.”