Carolina Rustica CEO Spills SEO Secrets

Pay-per-click
Although PPC programs do not technically count as SEO endeavors, they are an important step in bringing potential customers to your site, and work with your SEO efforts to generate Website traffic. Your immediate PPC efforts are directed towards converting those visitors you have paid for into customers. But the secondary effect of PPC is that you are generating interest in your site, whether those visitors buy or not.

We continue to dedicate a large portion of our SEM budget to Google AdWords. This is not only for conversions, but because those paid visitors are bookmarking our site and many are placing orders at a later point in time—or they’re telling a family member or friend about us. PPC can act as a catalyst for viral marketing of your site even if you are not measuring immediate conversions.

On-site search and site champion
We use a third-party Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) provider called SLI Systems for our on-site search. SLI has developed a technology called “Learning Search” that provides the most relevant search results when visitors are looking for specific products on our site.

SLI has another hosted service, Site Champion, which is critical to our SEO efforts. Site Champion creates landing pages of search results for particular keywords on our Website. Those landing pages can be indexed by most search engines and actually appear in the first or second page of search results when customers are searching the Web using those same keywords.

Site Champion generated more than 25,000 leads to our site in the first quarter of 2009, with customers clicking on Google, Yahoo, and MSN search results for keywords such as “shell chandelier” or “countertop brackets.” This approach is much more cost effective than bidding for top placement for those same terms on the search engines, which allows us to allocate our PPC budget to other keywords that don’t rank as well.

What’s more, these search results tend to convert well since the customer is directed to a landing page that is basically an on-site search result—not a generic company page. We continue to rely on Site Champion as our third-most significant vehicle for site referrals.

Paid inclusion
Carolina Rustica also uses paid inclusion, which involves a third party taking our raw product feed and essentially reformatting it for optimal placement on specific search engines. This is a paid service, independent of PPC efforts, and it gives us an acceptable conversion rate for our investment.

Best of all, it involves virtually no effort on our part after we have set up the product feed. We use a company called Booyah for this service.

Analyze and optimize
You can’t improve SEO without understanding the dynamics of your site’s traffic. And you can’t beat Google Analytics for providing an in-depth snapshot of your Website dynamics.

Google Analytics is linked to our AdWords account so we can see how our AdWords spend converts into sales, but just as important, Google Analytics looks at our other sources of paid and non-paid traffic to examine those same dynamics. It’s also a great way to measure and compare your site’s performance over segments of time.

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