Case Study - Brad Larsen

Background

Since 1996, Brad Larsen Florals has been serving Pasadena, CA, one the biggest flower markets in the U.S. With its annual New Year’s Day Rose Bowl Parade, Pasadena is one of the single most competitive markets for flowers and roses.            

When this company initially contacted Blackwood Industries, they were very frustrated with their rankings. Their ultimate goal was to beat out their competition through increased rankings, which would translate into increased retail traffic and online orders. BradLarsenFlorals.com also had specific categories which were important to improve rankings including “florist Pasadena,” “flowers Pasadena” and “flower shop Pasadena.”

Initial Rankings:

Goals

Brad Larsen Florals was frustrated because despite all they were doing to get ranked, they just couldn’t make it to the first page for Google results. Reluctantly Blackwood Industries was contacted. The proprietors felt if they couldn’t do it, no one else could. Needless to say, Brad Larsen Florals was skeptical and on guard. Their ultimate goal was to beat out their competition through increased rankings. They believed increased rankings would increase revenues.

A secondary goal was for Brad Larsen Florals to improve their knowledge about SEO best practices and create a workflow for all new content, so that it would be well optimized.

Strategy

The client expressed to us that they had a capable marketing practices but they were not well versed in SEO best practices or strategy. After several conversations, we mutually decided that the fastest way to complete the optimization and provide the client the necessary results would be to implement a very aggressive campaign of user generated content. These marketing services included building “Best Practices” for site content, making recommendations on site architecture and code review of on-page optimization.

Step 1: SEO Inc. completed a targeted keyword analysis for their industry based on results and analysis of the competition. This analysis, along with our competitive analysis, determined that the site would see a dramatic increase in traffic from the search engines through improved rankings on top level category keywords like “Florist Pasadena,” “Florals Pasadena,” “Flower Shop Pasadena,” etc. We also determined that the site would get higher conversions by targeting more specific keywords like “Valentines Flowers,” “Thanksgiving Flowers” and “Mother’s Days flowers.” The strength of the site was the vast amount of content. Our job was to make sure that the spiders indexed the content, that the content on the page was keyword rich and that the code on the page was optimized for those keywords.

Step 2: The most important part of the optimization was to improve the user generated content, so this was the first thing we consulted on with the BradLarsenFlorals.com team. We developed many properties for content to be written building Brad Larsen Florals as the authoritative conversation in their geo-targeted industry. We also worked with them to change the URL structure seen by the search engines so that the dynamic pages would have a flat URL structure. The primary page for the “Florist Pasadena” category previously was located on non-SEO friendly URL. We consulted with them to change this URL structure so that the search engines would see a flat URL, currently http://www.flowersfloristpasadena.com. Our consultation also included several recommendations to improve the navigation by incorporating a search engine friendly use of text links in the navigation and content within the site.

Once the site architecture improvements were made, we provided consulting and built “Best Practices” for the site's code optimization. This included Best Practices for META and robots tags, implementation of accessibility attributes, cross browser compliancy, and other body optimization. SEO Inc. also helped optimize their dynamic site templates and conducted a full review of the implementation of the code optimization.

Accomplishments

The client was ecstatic with the Google places organic results. The number of 1st place rankings increased by almost 2000% within 12 months, including rankings on high value keywords like “Florist Pasadena.”  We were able to beat out two of their main competitors on most high value keywords and achieve high rankings for most of the top florist in Pasadena and related keywords.

BradLarsenFlorals.com's revenue stream has increased tremendously, in return increasing optimization campaign budgets. Below are the results of our initial campaign.

Final Rankings:

Blackwood Industries has years of experience in search engine optimization – the most powerful frontier for local business marketing. And because we’re a small business too – we need to think differently since every dollar spent matters. We understand you need your search marketing to yield maximum ROI, with solid, measureable growth.