TheRussianStore.com

TheRussianStore.com | was one of our first SEO projects. An online store offering a variety of Russia-specific gifts and souvenirs desperately needed some free, organic traffic to become profitable, as PPC and other expenses were swallowing most of the income gained from sales.

Gary and Irene Pearson, the owners of the site, are a married couple living in Arizona, USA. Their adult children live separately and have their own businesses to care about. Being a typical "mom and pop" small business, the Pearsons were looking for an affordable SEO solution, but at the same time they were well informed about the presence of black hat SEOs. The couple recognised the threat presented by employing such a company - it could ruin their online business overnight by negating all the success they had previously achieved.

Their search for an affordable white hat company ended when they found Spider Friendly.

The work

Our involvement didn't need much time - just about three months between October 2004 and January 2005. During this time, we concentrated mostly on copywriting, link building and giving minor advice on structural improvements. The SEO campaign was never completed, as the Pearsons decided to redesign their site before proceeding with further SEO work and then had to postpone the redesign due to circumstances beyond their control. But even the partial campaign resulted in big advancements, as will be shown below.

The "About Products" section of the site looked most promising for SEO purposes, so we rewrote all the content in that part of the site, page by page, and changed the pattern of the <title> tag creation. The rankings started improving immediately. We also suggested adding per-category image rotation to the About Products pages to make them more attractive and improve conversion rates, as the images were linked to the corresponding product pages directly.

Link building included submission of the site to free directories (mostly US-specific and business-related) and a few link exchanges with related sites. We also distributed a press release across about 20 websites.

The results

The site achieved stable top 10 positions in Google and MSN for several good search terms. One of the most remarkable achievements in Google is #3 for "russian hats", which consistently brings many targeted visitors to the site. The daily average traffic almost doubled: for the year 2004 the statistics show 121.74 visits per day; in 2005 this number grew to 212.88; the first months of 2006 (from Jan 1st and until Mar 12th) report a daily average of 224.18 visits. Sales increased proportionally.

If we look at the search engine generated traffic only, the figures are as follows:

2004: 29,874 total visits or 81.6/day
2005: 56,390 visits or 154.5/day
2006 (Jan 1st - Mar 12th): 11,450 visits or 161.3/day.

You can compare the following two diagrams created by the site's Urchin statistics, which we are still allowed to monitor.

The first one features the period from 1 Aug 2004 and until 1 March 2005. The red line denotes the moment when the Spider Friendly team started observing the results of our first SEO steps.

The second diagram represents the same period of time but a year later, that is, 1 Aug 2005 to 1 March 2006, long after we finished working on the site. At first glance, they might look similar, but compare the "Total" and the "Daily Average" figures, and you will see that the full results of the SEO work don't show up at once but time to mature. In this case the red line marks the start of the Jagger Google update.

One important factor for a good SEO campaign is stability. When Google updates like Florida or Jagger strike and destroy the results of many previously successful SEO campaigns, SEO forum communities start moaning and whining, complaining about the cruelty of Google. In many (though not all) cases it means that they came too close to the spam line (or even touched it), and thus triggered one of the new filters that Google engineers usually test during such updates.

Spider Friendly's clients seldom (if ever) notice any significant traffic drops during major Google updates. More often, our clients benefit from them, even long after we have finished working on their sites. As you can see from the second chart, The Russian Store benefited noticeably from Jagger, especially since it partially coincided with the pre-Christmas gift-buying season.

The most important time for any gift shop (including, of course, online shops) is that short period that lasts from the first days of December until just before Christmas Eve, when people in their millions are buying presents. The two diagrams above show this phenomenon very clearly (for 2004 and 2005 respectively). But to help you get the whole picture, they have been brought together on the same scale in the diagram below. The middle part of the diagram was excluded as it is not applicable in this case.

Now you can see the difference good SEO can make.

The results that can't be measured in numbers

Irene Pearson has become our very good friend. We still exchange friendly emails from time to time, and still hope to work together again one day. Back in February 2005 she sent us one of the warmest testimonials we have ever received. Here is an excerpt.

"I have never had to wait on any question, website change or enhancement; they continue to achieve the goals as promised. Their writing abilities are great. They did a lot of research on their own to enhance the descriptions of our products and saturate them with keywords. They also have done a tremendous job with link popularity."

The complete version of Irene's testimonial can be read on the "Testimonials" | page, where Irene thanks us for the work we have done. We would like to thank her too, for her exceptional understanding and friendly, co-operative attitude, which is very important for good SEO campaigns. We would also like to thank David Cordes from APOK Technology, Inc. |, the developer of the site, who was very helpful throughout the project and very prompt in applying our SEO-related suggestions.